Only A couple of decades ago, few could imagine that one of the most powerful countries in the world – the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) – would collapse, and Russian – the most prestigious and predominant language of the Soviet people – would be overtaken by English, the language once considered ‘the language of Western imperialism’ (Dushku, 1998:372). Today, because of both its unique international role and the fall of the Iron Curtain, English has become the most popular foreign language taught in schools and other educational institutions in former Soviet republics. The present paper will focus on the teaching and learning of English in Uzbekistan – a Soviet republic until 1990. In addition, issues related to foreign-language curriculum innovations, to teacher training, and to teaching resources will be discussed.

A further tale of language and education in New York City.

Jesperson (1904:16–17) described phraseology as an ‘indispensable’ dimension of language competence, but in 1965 Chomsky banished idiomaticity to the fringes of linguistics, giving pride of place to syntax. It seems, however, that time has vindicated Jespersen's prioritizing of formulaic language. In recent years, the area of phraseology has evolved from its peripheral Chomskyan status to a fundamental role in language discussion, description, and acquisition that can be said to focus on ‘creative idiomaticity’.

WITH ONLY a few exceptions, such as then and why, English adverbs are categorized as content words that express referential meanings in both the physical and abstract worlds. Like nouns and verbs, they belong to the ‘open’ class of lexemes, in which new words can be created through processes that include compounding, derivation, and borrowing. From compounding come adverbs such as hopefully (formed from the noun hope and the adjective full, plus the suffix -ly), and upstage (from the preposition up and the noun stage). By derivation, adverbs are formed from adjectives by adding -ly (as in economical-ly, sufficient-ly, and final-ly). As for borrowing from other languages, we have for example taken a range of expressions from Latin and used them as adverbs (as with ipso facto, ad nauseam, and ad infinitum).

A report on a survey of seven multinational companies in Germany. Since the 1990s, there has been a dramatic change in the structure of many large European companies. While previously many were ‘particularly solidly established in their countries of origin’ (Truchot 2002:14), they have now become multinational and are less identifiable with a particular country. A case in point is DaimlerChrysler, formed in 1998 through the merger of Daimler-Benz (a German manufacturer of motor vehicles) and the Chrysler Corporation (a US automobile manufacturer). A side effect of the rise of such corporations has been that English has become a key language of international business. This has certainly been true for DaimlerChysler, which has given English official status in the company

Italians' zeal for lacing their language with English words is well-known and on-going. Both everyday conversation and the mass media make widespread use of English terms and expressions, but their unphonetic spelling and pronunciation – full of insidious traps round every syllable – can create misunderstanding, confusion, and much humour, because Italians often tend to pronounce these international imports as they are written, much as they do in their mother tongue: either that, or they over-generalize the rules they they've learnt. A TV programme may be interrupted to announce a news flash that however comes out meatier, as ‘news flesh’. When giving business news, the phrase fiscal drag (whatever that may mean) becomes a truly obfuscating ‘fiscal drug’. And fashion news informs us of an exclusive ‘pullover’ by Missoni, whose stress shift unfortunately turns it into an order (from policeman to motorist): ‘pull over’.

The present form of the English language in Nigeria is the outcome of its contact with the indigenous languages of the region: a confirmation of the truism that languages in contact influence each other. When English was initially introduced through trade, then entrenched through colonialism, it was ‘derobed’ of its British flavour. Paradoxically, such a state of affairs brings to mind a statement by Enoch Powell, a professor of Classics and former Conservative member of the British Parliament, who noted, rather eccentrically: ‘Others may speak and read English – more or less – but it is our language, not theirs. It was made in England by the English and it remains our distinctive property, however widely it is learnt or used’ (as quoted in Kujore 1995:367).

THE DEMOGRAPHICS of the English language are well known, and the following approximations are based on figures, always provisional, projected by Crystal, Graddol, and McArthur. Anglophones (to use a broader term than ‘native’ or ‘mother tongue’ speakers of English – terms which in any case pose problems) make up some 12% of the global population. Speakers of English in the UK constitute about 16% of the 380 or so million Anglophones worldwide. In the UK, some 2% of the population speaks English as a second language, and perhaps only 15% regularly speaks a southern British form of standard English. Only a small minority of these have a form of Received Pronunciation (RP) as their normal accent, even though RP is predicated as the basis of ‘phonics’ in initial literacy, and is assumed to be the default accent in the second-language teaching of British English, in the UK and elsewhere (with however the notable exception of North America).

Number in English is a puzzling phenomenon – not least for foreign learners, and often also for those who have to teach them. Avowedly ‘Standard’ forms of English are in something of an in-between stage. The so-called ‘singular/plural’ distinction is only partly a question of distinguishing one as opposed to more than one, while number agreement in the verb is inconsistent and not always predictable from the apparent number of the subject – as in The team was[?]/were[?] unhappy about losing the game. While some Germanic languages, and some varieies of English, have altogether discarded verbal agreement in number, standard varieties of English redundantly retain traces of it: He was, and they were, happy to hear the news. As Jespersen has put it (1979:216), ‘No distinction is made in verbs between the two numbers except in the present tense and there it is found in the third person only…. [I]n the preterit we have the solitary example was, plural were….’

Is grammar real or it it just a concept? The following is the opening sentence of the abstract of an article in the Journal of Linguistics, of November 2005: ‘This article argues that of English adjective–noun constructions involving associative adjectives (‘associative AdjNs’), some originate in the lexicon and others in the syntax.’ There has been for many years a divide in what is meant by grammar. For the general public (and in most of the ET articles that deal with it), grammar is understood to refer to a set of abstract terms for defining the forms of words and how they are related in sentences. For some people, however, particularly some linguistics professionals in universities, it is something real to be discovered, and grammatical terms are the means of explaining it. The quotation above is an example of the latter use. If you were unfamiliar with this approach, you might initially take the word lexicon here to mean (as the entries in dictionaries indicate) a list of the words in a language, but then might wonder how a phrase can be said, as here, to ‘originate’ in the lexicon (and whether you can really use the phrase ‘the syntax’ like that).

Heart-felt opposition to the status and spread of English in the world at large and most particularly in China today. It can hardly be denied that England has given the world maritime law, contract law, and an international language. However, whether by accident or design, the effect of these ‘gifts’ over time has, we would argue, been the destruction of many ethnic customs, social structures, and other aspects of culture. There appears to be little or no dissent among linguists regarding the proposition that language and culture are inseparable: what affects one affects the other.

This paper discusses how the global spread of English has affected – deleteriously – many languages and cultures, and currently engages too much time and too many resources in China today. Maritime and contract law may have been less problematic.