As eighth-grade students of English in a “periphery” community school in India, we were assigned to discuss and to appreciate a piece of prose, from our textbook, called “On not answering the telephone”; it was a satirical piece demonizing telephones because their existence and use flouted all tenets of British English linguistic etiquette. None of us in that class had a phone in our homes, and none of us had any desire to learn the alien etiquette. We were interested only in learning the language to the extent that it could help us realize our immediate and, perhaps, future goals. This was our tacit response, and resistance, to English linguistic imperialism: awareness of the pragmatic rewards of English-language acquisition and use, but negation and denial of the cultural hegemony of English. This dynamic of ideological imposition and resistance (and appropriation) forms the core of Canagarajah's book, Resisting linguistic imperialism in English teaching.

Evidential records of investigative interviews serve an important institutional purpose within the legal system in England and Wales. Academic scholars have long recognized that little institutional attention is paid to the transformation process that occurs when written records of the spoken are produced, nor to the potential impact this has on later interpretation by users of the records during the investigation of crimes and later in court. We analyse twenty-nine digitally recorded investigative interviews and their corresponding official written ‘Record of Taped/Videoed Interview’ (ROTI/ROVI) transcripts, taking an ethnomethodological, conversation analytic (CA) approach to examine the social actions that are transformed in this activity by comparing the audio record of police interview evidence to the written transcripts. The intended outcome of this work, within the wider project of which this forms a part, is to better understand this process within the legal system, and to incite improvements. (Investigative interview, transcription, entextualisation, conversation analysis)