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The current study aimed at showing whether native, ESL and EFL book review authors differed in terms of types of rhetorical moves the employ in the reviews they write. 60 book reviews (N = 60) from applied linguistics journals were randomly selected from a pool of 87 book reviews published in Asian EFL Journal, ESP, System, and TESOL Quarterly between 2004 and 2010. The reviews were converted into *txt files and submitted to the AntMover software for move analysis. Two human coders used the Motta Roth’s (1995) framework for the analysis of the moves. The intercoder reliability of the study was estimated through a Spearman’s rho at .819 (rho = .819), and the convergent validity of the instruments by another Spearman’s rho at .782 (rho = .782). The data were submitted to a set of Kruskal-Wallis H Test. The results of the study indicated that writers’ linguistic backgrounds have a statistically significant role in their choice of book review moves and move structures. It was also found that book reviews fall into the two categories of ‘informative’ and ‘evaluative’ reviews with the difference between the two lying in the presence or absence of writers’ focused evaluation of the books under review in terms of their advantages and/or disadvantages.

This paper offers a discussion that moves past common debates regarding the imperialistic spread of the English language, and starts from the position that English is en-route to becoming an international language. Questions are asked regarding the standardization of the English language for the purpose of globalization, for example: How do we define Standard English (SE)? Does the English language, and English language teaching continue to sell Western culture to other parts of the world? And, is worldwide mutual intelligibility even necessary? The author offers a review of Peter Trudgill’s article “Standard English: What it isn’t” (Trudgill, 1999), in addition to discussing Sandra Lee McKay’s article “Western Language and Teaching English as a Second Language” (2004), among much discussion of work by Alastair Pennycook (1994, 2001, 2011) and David Crystal (2003). The author also looks to Standard German in the three major German-speaking countries as an example of a successful standardized language system. Critical Applied Linguistics is showcased as an appropriate approach from which to study Standard English for, as the author concludes, further exploration into assumptions surrounding SE is necessary before it can be used and regarded as a positive tool in the process of globalization.

This article is the product of teaching cognitive stylistics in literary discourses for two years at Ibb University, Yemen. My main aim in this article is to explore if teaching cognitive stylistics can be fully implemented in a conservative/Muslim society as that of Yemen which has specific codes of socio-cultural and religious values. Teaching literary stylistics for the first time to undergraduate students provides a useful source of pedagogic activities, yet it gives rise to a set of practical as well as literary difficulties. Initial procedures of a rather balanced remedy to overcome students' negative response when introducing Western literature should be introduced. This is of assistance to minimize cultural stereotypes, to provide many opportunities to expand the students' cultural experiences and to meet the students' expectation when confronted with any literary text, Western or translated Arabic text alike.

This paper examined the non-verbal discourse of student soccer fans of Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, with a view to characterizing the discourse genre. Data for the study comprised six samples of the discourse obtained from two soccer viewing centers on the university campus. The centers were purposively selected with priority given to places that have the greatest turn-out of soccer fans. The participant observation method was employed in gathering data from the two centers. Video recordings of the discourses were done using both the surreptitious and non-surreptitious methods of recording while multimodal semiotic theory was drawn upon in the analysis of the data gathered. Analysis of the data revealed that the subjects of the study deployed jerseys, head warmers, belts, hand bands, and gestures to communicate various meanings including affective ones.

This paper addresses linguistic technical training of members of the community, under a Participatory Action Research approach. We show how it can be a contributing factor to obtain an egalitarian relationship between the speaking community and the external researchers. The paper describes an example of the training component concerning the members of the Mayangna Yulbarangyang Balna and an external researcher, stemming from the need to handle the data collected since the 1990’s. In particular, we describe in detail the process and results of a technical training workshop carried out in Rosita, Nicaragua, in January 2008. The external member of the team provided the technical training for transfer and annotation of the linguistic data collected, which involved the following steps: (a) the use of (video, audio) equipment for (new) data recording, (b) the conversion of the collected data from analog to digital format, (c) the transfer of the linguistic data into ELAN software, and (d) its use for transcription and annotation. The results show how this training increases the self-sufficiency of the indigenous team, and facilitates their role as agents in research, while being an effective element to facilitate the community’s empowerment process and strengthen their agentive role in linguistic research.

In this study, I observed the use of the politeness strategies suggested by Brown and Levinson (1987) in the popular Turkish series “Avrupa Yakası” (“European Side”). I suggested that women and men were employing different politeness strategies in similar situations. I hypothesized that in “Avrupa Yakası” (“European Side”) men were employing more negative politeness strategies in their work-place than women, whereas women were employing more positive politeness strategies than men. Women were using more negative politeness strategies than men, talking to their older relatives, above 50 (fifty) years old, but men were using more positive politeness strategies than women. Mostly, middle-aged men were preferring to use bald-off-record strategies, whereas middle-aged women were preferring to use positive politeness strategies, while talking to their children and the friends and the lovers of their children. I obtained significant results for all the three hypotheses, after Chi-Square analyses had been conducted on the data.

Banci (transvestites) language is used among the transvestite-hairdressers which functions as a secret language to hide personal information and internal salons’ issues from the customers. This research investigates Banci language in the transvestites’ business-oriented course of action as hairdressers in three selected salons in Banda Aceh by analyzing the salient features involved from the three broad types of talks in close-service encounters from McCarthy’s models (2000): 1) transactional, 2) transactional-plus-relational and 3) relational talks. It is discovered that there are similarities between the hairdressers and the customers’ interactions to the three elements of talks, thus the differences are found from the interactions between the hairdressers which are only understood among them. Consequently, this research presents the genre of language encounters managed by the transvestites’ community in their workplace to further comprehend their discourse as a part of the society.