A multicultural study of stereotyping in English-speaking countries

Citizens of 9 different English-speaking countries (N = 619) evaluated the average, or typical, citizen of 5 English-speaking countries (Great Britain, Canada, Nigeria, United States, Australia) on 9 pairs of bipolar adjectives. Participants were drawn from Australia, Botswana, Canada, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, the United States, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. There were statistically significant similarities in the rankings of the 5 stimulus countries on 8 of the 9 adjective dimensions and a strong convergence of autostereotypes and heterostereotypes on many traits. The results relate to previous stereotyping research and traditional methods of assessing the accuracy of national stereotypes.

Population mobility and indigenous peoples in Australasia and North America

This book draws together relevant research findings to produce the first comprehensive overview of Indigenous peoples' mobility. Chapters draw from a range of disciplinary sources, and from a diversity of regions and nation-states. Within nations, mobility is the key determinant of local population change, with implications for service delivery, needs assessment, and governance. Mobility also provides a key indicator of social and economic transformation. As such, it informs both social theory and policy debate. For much of the twentieth century conventional wisdom anticipated the steady convergence of socio-demographic trends, seeing this as an inevitable concomitant of the development process. However, the patterns and trends in population movement observed in this book suggest otherwise, and provide a forceful manifestation of changing race relations in these new world settings. © 2009 Informa plc

Bringing a German voice to English-speaking readers: Spiegel International

Translation is a regular phenomenon for news production, even if this is not always explicitly indicated. It is quite common that journalists themselves perform translations in their text production processes. Online media have added new possibilties to these processes. This paper looks at the transfer between print and online media texts from the point of view of translation. On the basis of case studies of English translations made available online by Spiegel International, the text production practice and its reflection in the linguistic structure of the translations is illustrated. The declared aim of putting English translations on the Spiegel website is to bring its 'unique voice' to English-speaking readers. This paper argues that this 'unique voice' will not be seen by the readers in the actual linguistic make-up of the texts, but that it is as a result of the text selection process that English-speaking readers can get access to a different point of view.

'I felt that I do live in the UK now':international students' self-reports of their English language speaking experiences on a pre-sessional programme

This article focuses on the English language experiences of a group of pre-sessional students, an under-represented group in the literature on language and education. In particular, it investigates the opportunities that such students have to use English outside the classroom, shown to be a key factor in student satisfaction with their study abroad experience. Drawing on data from questionnaires, interviews and on-line diaries, we show that students have a variety of opportunities to use English; however, these opportunities may require students to engage in complex negotiations right from the beginning of their sojourn in the UK. Micro-analysis of the data shows that agency is a key construct in understanding students' representations of their English encounters as they begin their lives in the UK. The article concludes with some suggestions as to how pre-sessional courses may develop students' linguistic and socio-cultural skills in order that they may interact successfully in English outside the classroom. © 2011 Taylor &Francis.

Speaking and pronunciation

We take as our starting point the notion of spoken language in use, drawing on insights from discourse analysis which makes it clear that language is used to negotiate and achieve meaning in social contexts and so cannot be divorced from those contexts. This perspective tasks us beyond a purely psycholinguistic model of speech where underlying mental processes are highlighted (e.g. Levelt, 1989). The perspective also takes us beyond the focus on the sentence, which has traditionally been the unit of analysis in much grammatical analysis and language teaching.

An Experimental investigation into the reading ability transfer of Chinese speaking learners of english

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