Englishization In Asia

This book provides crucial reading for students and researchers of world Englishes. It is an insightful and provocative study of the forms and functions of English in Asia, its acculturation and nativization, and the innovative dimensions of Asian creativity. It contextualizes a variety of theoretical, applied and ideological issues with refreshing interpretations and reevaluations and can be used both as a classroom text and a resource volume.

This book addresses issues of how the cultures in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia have been Englishized in postcolonial and globcalized contexts, not just in terms of language, but also in writers’/people’s subjectivity. Taking a cultural-literary approach to the study of Englishized subjectivity, the book offers a unique study of hybridized literary/language forms by relating them to bilingual thinking and bicultural sensibility. Poets, novelists and playwrights have different strategies to cope with new images and new forms of expression that can capture their sense of hybridized identity, and as a result, hybridity becomes creativity.

This text adopts a wide focus on the range of East Asian languages, in both their pre-modern and modern forms, with sections on dialect studies, contact linguistics, socio-linguistics and syntax/phonology.

The impact of globalization processes on language is an emergent field in sociolinguistics. To date there has not been an in-depth look at this in Asia, although Asia includes the two most populous globalizing economies of the world, India and China. Covering the major themes in the field of globalization and language, this book will take a look at topics such as English emerging as the medium of instruction for subjects like mathematics and science. Another theme is the rise of Mandarin as a potentially 'global' language networking the Chinese diaspora. The cultural contexts of Asia, specifically the Sinic, Hindu and Islamic civililizations give the processes of globalization and language a unique dimension. This book is suitable for researchers and postgraduate students in all fields of sociolinguistic enquiry.

Prior to the era of globalization, education in Southeast Asia was viewed in the context of the national state and it was deployed in the service of state and nation-building and national economic development. States monopolized education, and public-funded centralized education systems were established to teach literacy, transmit national cultures and promote social cohesion, and to produce literate workers. Globalization forces, however, dramatically impacted in varying ways and degrees the national education systems across the region. As states begun to see their citizens as resources to enhance the countries' competitiveness in the global market, it, among other things, led to the increasing demand for highly skilled and qualified human capital. The accompanying neoliberal ideology led to varying degrees of decentralization, privatization and internationalization of education, especially of higher education, in Southeast Asia. The chapters in this volume focus on a number of issues and challenges confronting the education sector in Southeast Asia, including: (i) the contrasting language in education policy in Singapore and Malaysia; (ii) the introduction of an English-medium private education sector in Malaysia; (iii) the internationalization of Thai higher education; (iv) access and quality issues in the massification of Malaysian higher education; (v) secondary school quality and higher education participation in Indonesia; (vi) equity, access and retention in primary school education in Malaysia; and (vii) reforms in the primary and secondary education in Myanmar.

Noting ASEAN's adoption of English as its sole workng language, this book analyzes the language education policies of Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, Sri Lanka and China, and traces the influence of globalization on English language education in Asia.

This volume provides a first systematic, comprehensive account of English in Southeast Asia (SEA) based on current research by leading scholars in the field. The volume first provides a systematic account of the linguistic features across all sub-varieties found within each country. It also has a section dedicated to the historical context and language planning policies to provide a background to understanding the development of the linguistic features covered in Part I and, finally, the vibrancy of the sociolinguistic and pragmatic realities that govern actual language in use in a wide variety of domains such as the law, education, popular culture, electronic media and actual pragmatic encounters are also given due coverage. This volume also includes an extensive bibliography of works on English in SEA, thus providing a useful and valuable resource for language researchers, linguists, classroom educators, policy makers and anyone interested in the topic of English in SEA or World Englishes as a whole.