Tom McArthur reflects on the life and indefatigable work of the English-language materials writer L.G. Alexander, who died on June 17th this year at the age of 70, after a long and patient struggle with leukemia.

A report on the impact of English on media advertising in France.

English (in all of its creative manifestations) and images associated with English are extremely popular advertising strategies in France. In order to explore the stereotypical images that French consumers commonly associate with different varieties of English and the reasons for such perceptions, this study compares television data collected in France during the summer of 2000 with data featured in an earlier study (Martin 1998).

A review of the challenges faced by professional translators both in Asia Pacific and worldwide. Translating is a key service in the knowledge economy, an enabler that uses and relies on the new technology of information and communication. But we know that translation and interpreting are processes that can often be by-passed by those who are bi- or multilingually competent. Indeed, if translation and interpreting were always needed, and always used, the sheer cost of global communication in money and time would act as a serious brake on growth.

How such words are–and might be–handled

The author argues that, with the development of English as a world language and the burgeoning of new varieties of English (‘New Englishes’, or NE's), and with the inclusion of more and more NE words in international English dictionaries, there is a need for systematic and principled solutions to the proper phonetic representation of these words, instead of arbitrarily imposing the same transcription conventions on them as for ‘Old’ varieties of English (‘Old Englishes’, or OE's).

A dissertation on the essentially easy nature of the English language and in praise of learning tougher tongues.

THROUGHOUT my now rather long life I have frequently heard said, seen written, and even myself somewhat seriously contended, that English is the world's most difficult language. Let me now go on record as saying quite the opposite: English is the world's easiest known [major] language.

Some aspects of a corpus of personal correspondence.

English as used in business letters, job applications and different types of bureaucratic communication in India has become more or less standardized and is not much different from the language of similar letters written elsewhere in the English-speaking world. But this is not the case with private letters, which are intimate, informal and often lax. Since a personal letter is written to a friend, spouse or relative, the writer comes out with his/her ‘real self’ in the use of language. It may therefore be taken as an authentic indication of the extent to which one is proficient in English and also the extent to which nativised features of English in this specific genre are attributable to native socio-cultural factors.

A survey of English as the universalizing language of chemistry.

In recent decades the use of English has extended greatly in various fields, including both science and engineering, where it is now more widely used than in any other scientific fields. However, only a few papers have been published (cf. Sano, 1986) to demonstrate the trend in a quantitative manner. In order to discuss this trend here, a bibliometric approach has been adopted in order to retrieve the relevant information from a large scientific database.

A discussion of the impact of parental demand on the terms of employment of imported native-speaking and local non-native-speaking teachers in private language schools.

As more and more parents realize the importance of learning the language at an early stage, the teaching of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) to young learners has become a lucrative adventure for Taiwanese entrepreneurs. Taiwanese students and parents alike represent a stable and growing market, at least for now. The demand for both Native Speaking (NS) and Non-Native Speaking (NNS) teachers is also on the rise and can certainly be attributed to the flourishing EFL industry in Taiwan. However, there is a distinctively huge difference in the pay and reward policies and practices for the two kinds of teacher. This article touches on relatively sensitive issues concerning NS/NNS as EFL teachers and as members of staff.

Amid all the publicity surrounding the release of the film of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, it has occasionally been mentioned that Tolkien was an English professor. What is rather less well known is that in 1919 and 1920, at the very start of his career, Tolkien worked on the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary; he later said of this time that he ‘learned more in those two years than in any other equal period of my life’.

How rapidly our vocabulary can change, and how yesterday's expressions can vanish without trace. Even words which were used by people the age of the author's children just a few years ago have vanished without trace: untold had a brief flourishing in Wellington as a term of approval, but has vanished completely; grouse, a rather older term, still survives but again not among the young. If old words go, new words come. In a recent survey of the language of primary school children in New Zealand, a word was discovered that all the children knew and virtually none of the teachers knew. To understand the expression, one has to understand something about the games played by children in English-speaking countries.

A review of Appropriating English: Innovation in the Global Business of English Language Teaching, by Michael Singh, Peter Kell, and Ambigapathy Pandian.