Journal of Asian Pacific Communication - Volume 24, Issue 1, 2014

The increasing number of the so-called non-native English users has resulted in their views of English to be crucial. This qualitative study of thirty-two Indonesian lecturers, teachers, and students is aimed at revealing perceptions of English in relation to communication, culture, and national as well as religious identities. The findings reveal various perceptions of the language. Some references to Caucasians as potential interlocutors are found even though the participants believe that English has been used among ‘non-native’ speakers and that the relationship between English and the West is diminishing. The participants also view English as either not related or positively related to their national, religious, and ethnic identities. Overall, there is a demand for accentuating English in Indonesia with the local cultures.

There is a shift underway in many areas of Indonesia from local, ethnic languages like Javanese, to the national language, Indonesian. Few studies have explored the complexities faced by radio stations targeting the audiences undergoing this shift. This article explores the attitudes influencing the design of radio language at three local radio stations in East Java. Semi-structured interviews, based on extracts of radio language, are conducted with program directors and announcers at these stations. These data are used to outline how radio stations approach the design of radio talk amidst language shift. This paper explains this shift using two overlapping frames of media and language: audience design and mental scripts. Analysis shows both frames to be useful for understanding the design of radio language in East Java. A concluding discussion shows how a multi-dimensional understanding of radio language can provide important information on speech communities in-flux.

This is a post-mortem on Malaysian TeSME (Teaching of Science and Mathematics in English) program based on its comparison with Canadian immersion programs. Malaysia and Canada have some common sociological aspects such as the size of population, the ratio of indigenous people and immigrants, and multilingual contexts. It also has in common various core elements in the set of criteria proposed by Swain and Johnson (1997) to define a prototypical immersion program. Thus, the lessons Canadians have learned from immersion may be seen as significant guiding light for TeSME and other attempts of content-based instruction programs. Canadian immersion has been different from TeSME at least in terms of three core features: overt support exists for the L1; the teachers are bilingual; and the classroom culture is that of the local L1 community. These differences made four issues more prominent: Learning outcome of TeSME; mainstay of TeSME; judicious use of L1; and function of TeSME. Finally some suggestions are proposed: give higher priority to promoting concept development across languages for now; make English classes more effective; promote bilingualism in TeSME; and extend TeSME’s function to understanding and integrating other cultures and languages.

The issue of e-politeness has been attracting increasing attention in the field of foreign language teaching and learning. This article examines how students of Japanese as a foreign language in Australia negotiated power and solidarity in their email correspondence with ‘facilitators’ in Japan who provided support in essay writing tasks. Their relationships, which were neither completely status-unequal nor status-equal, offer a unique social context for an examination of politeness. The study examines whether and how power and solidarity shifted over the 12 weeks of email exchanges. The results show varying levels of rapport and orientations to politeness developing over time, as well as evidence of students applying implicit input from the facilitators’ email messages. The article also considers the impacts, on the politeness phenomena in the data, of students’ cultural backgrounds and prior exposure to casual Japanese. The findings are discussed in relation to the question of ‘appropriateness’ in fostering foreign language learner ability to negotiate power and solidarity in intercultural communication.

One leading question of this paper is, whether the postulate of true authorship can be generally applied to all learning and research environments in higher education. Experience shows at least that this postulate has no global reach. I am referring to the cultures and traditions in East Asia where other concepts of authorship and intellectual property rights exist. However, Western standards of ethical behaviour in science demand academic integrity everywhere in order to fight the violation of intellectual property and copy rights known as plagiarism and piracy. This generalized claim does not consider the diversity of epistemic traditions which can be also found in Western history. Moreover, it seems to ignore the collaborative background of knowledge construction. This paper aims to contribute to the ethical discussions with another than a moralistic view at the problem. In the first place it has to be asked how the idea of authorship and its protection by intellectual property laws became crucial. It will be necessary to focus on the historical background of intellectual property and how it gained importance in the West and in the East. Findings regarding differences in the adoption of this idea due to diversity in Asian culture and tradition have to be discussed. Experiences in the learning environment of East Asian higher education institutions will be confronted with the general demand for authentic authorship in academia. It has to be asked if the function of protected intellectual property opposes cooperative structures in higher education. The discussion on educational issues leads to the question what role protected authorship plays today in academic research.

This paper presents findings from an exploratory study that investigated the perceptions of a group of Hong Kong university students concerning their identities in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) contexts. Qualitative data were collected primarily via in-depth interviews with a group of second-language speakers of ELF who use English with people from different first-language and cultural backgrounds on a regular basis. The analysis revealed that these participants came to terms with their identities as non-native speakers of English and emphasized the importance of maintaining their cultural identities as Hong Kong or Chinese speakers of ELF. In addition, most of them valued their ‘multicompetence’ in English, Cantonese and Putonghua when speaking English in ELF situations. The inquiry also found that some participants’ identification with other non-native speakers of English within the ELF community was rather selective and that different members within the ELF community were not perceived as equally ideal speakers of ELF. The study offers some valuable insights into the identities of ELF speakers and the wider ELF community within an Asian context.

This paper explores the linguistic and interactional properties of computer-mediated communication in Taiwan. We collected data from messages posted asynchronously on Internet websites. The three primary sources of messages were, in volume order, online Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs), chatrooms, and MSN messenger. We identify innovative uses of English and Mandarin Chinese hybrids, examine their function, and examine the online interlocutors’ ideologies when using them. Because of computer hardware and software, English plays an essential role even in a Mandarin-dominant online discourse by offering English expressions, words, pronunciations, and Roman letters to give loanwords, euphemisms, abbreviations, sentence-final particles, and emoticons in unique ways. The resultant hybrid language forms are easier to type, playful, funny, friendly, and trendy. The writer’s personality and cultural mentality are disclosed in such communication. Many speakers are alarmed about the effects of this language practice — the online interaction between English and Mandarin Chinese — on the development of Chinese in Taiwan.