The news of the arrest of Ambikesh Mohapatra, professor of physical chemistry and kinetics at Jadavpur University (West Bengal, India) spread like wildfire across the nation over the last week. People rallied together, on the streets and on social networking sites, to protest what has been popularly called a “fascist” […]

As I began to write last time, waiting for my connecting flight back to California from the February 22-24 4th International Workshop on Linguistic Landscape, I had departed for this gathering in Addis Ababa with two conceptual questions and one applied question in mind. First, for the linguistic landscape workshop participants–a […]

My mind is awash with thoughts from last week’s linguistic landscape workshop in Ethiopia’s capital city—thoughts from the last two days of informal visits to the campus of Addis Ababa University, from a group excursion 300km through the countryside to the Debre Libanos Monastery and the Blue Nile Gorge, […]

My father recently recounted an anecdote from his post-graduate years at the University of Moscow in the mid-1960s. He and his friend-we’ll call him Dr. Ramanna-were chatting amongst themselves on a cold, wintry day, surrounded by a slew of Russian colleagues. One Russian gentleman seated nearby inquired: What languages were […]

In a recent post, I wrote about a circular from the Department of Official Language, part of the Indian Home Ministry, encouraging the use of popular English words in place of difficult Hindi terms in official Hindi communications. The Wall Street Journal‘s India blog carries the same news posted a few hours ago, […]

A new circular from the Department of Official Language, part of the Indian Home Ministry, encourages the use of popular English words in place of difficult Hindi terms in official Hindi communications. The circular states that Hindi words such as “misil” (for “file”), “pratyabhuti” (for “guarantee”), “kunjipatal” (for “keyboard”), and “sanganak” (for “computer”) […]

The late afternoons-when my husband and I play badminton in a park in a Delhi suburb-are a 100-and-something degree Fahrenheit here, extremely hot and dry. All day, we wait anxiously for the mercury to dip just a little so we can go out and play. The park is fun not just because it’s a lush […]

During data collection earlier this year for my dissertation, exploring language and literacy socialization among a group of young boys at an orphanage in the suburbs of New Delhi, India, I headed over to National Council Of Educational Research And Training, or, as it is widely known, the N.C.E.R.T. I grew up […]

Mr. Manu Joseph, writing “India Faces a Linguistic Truth: English Spoken Here” in a “Letter From India” in the New York Times, makes some incredible claims about the status of English in India, with random bits of “evidence” that wouldn’t pass muster with, I’d wager, most Indians familiar with its linguistic […]

Recently, exchanging pleasantries with a doctor in a suburb of Delhi, I responded, upon being asked where I was from, “I am from Delhi only” (feeling no little pride at my flawless command of Indian English). She shook her head and said, “No, your accent? You are not from here…” I sheepishly sputtered, “I live […]

As Hergé‘s iconic Tintin series turns 80, having been translated into 58 languages and sold 230 million copies across the globe, it will be available for the first time in the world’s fourth largest language, Hindi. In India, the series has been available only in English and Bengali till […]

Ever been inconsolably distraught that no single word in English describes the condition of “being without eyebrows”? Say, when you were preparing to make an argument about whether your dog has them (i.e., eyebrows) or not, for a major televised debate? How happy would you have been to learn that there actually exists such […]

My husband and I traveled to Montréal in July, an island city in the majority-francophone Province of Québec, Canada. The linguistic experience of the trip, as my husband quickly pointed out, could be summed up in the two words of this post’s title: “Bonjour/Hello,” the ubiquitous greeting we heard everywhere. The beauty of the greeting […]

In doing literature review for language socialization research in the Indian context, I found a provocative chapter written by Mohanty (2006) via the good folks at Google Scholar. This paragraph stood out:

In India, presence of many languages is natural and unmarked in all forms of social and individual communicative acts. Quite early […]

The Research Digest blog highlights a recent study, where:

“researchers say we’ve adopted a number of habits of convenience that reflect the frequent use of positive words in our language (in turn reflecting the greater frequency of positivity in the world). For example, positive words tend to be ‘unmarked’ – that is, the positive is […]

A recent piece in the Wall Street Journal caught my eye, summarized in these unsettling lines:

The Arizona Department of Education recently began telling school districts that teachers whose spoken English it deems to be heavily accented or ungrammatical must be removed from classes for students still learning English.

It is […]

A recent article in the Times of India discusses the state of English education in India, a language which is one of the focal points in discourses around “development.” Progress, one hears often, depends on our English skills-the nation’s very future depends on how well we speak/read/write the language.  So much so, that […]

The shivering saxophonist played an unrecognizable tune, the melody in competition with the out-of-sync car horns blaring ever so often at the intersection of Center and Shattuck in Downtown Berkeley. I heard snippets of this language and that, foreign to my ears, and then the familiar “American English” sounds-which to me still does not seem […]

Back in Paris again, I had the opportunity recently to meet with French teachers and researchers of English, German and French as a foreign language. They couldn’t wait to leave on vacation and were venting their frustrations that the “bac” or high school graduating examination lets 80-85% of students through these days and thus lowers […]

From flyer:

CW 121: Issues in Teaching English Internationally
CCN: 16576 ; Units: 3
Time/Place: Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3:30-5:00pm in 203 Wheeler
Instructor: Melinda Erickson (erickson@berkeley.edu)

Learn about principles that contribute to effective English language teaching and become acquainted with teaching opportunities abroad. CW 121 also satisfies one of the electives for the new minor in Applied Linguistics Studies.