English across the four nations: A ‘home international’ comparison of secondary English curricula in the UK

English today is a conglomerate of a vast array of different varieties of English. This linguistic diversity, captured most prominently in the World Englishes paradigm (Kachru, 1985), poses a challenge to English language teaching (ELT) in countries where English does not have an official status (i.e. there is no codified local norm) and is learned as a foreign language, such as Armenia or Germany. Learners of English in these countries are norm-dependent on ‘standard’ Englishes spoken as a native language (Kachru, 1985) as the models of teaching (Galloway & Rose, 2015: 196–198; Matsuda and Friedrich, 2012: 21–22). These ‘Standard Englishes’ are abstract and idealized concepts as they are never fully realized by speakers in their ‘clearly delimited, perfectly uniform, and perfectly stable’ (Milroy, 2001: 543) form. However, they are powerful ideas in the minds of speakers – and learners in particular – as the models of language teaching. Standard British (StBE) and Standard American English (StAmE) and their associated prestige accents Received Pronunciation and General American traditionally serve as the models of language teaching for learners (Kirkpatrick, 2007: 184–189; Phillipson, 1992: 136–172). StBE has long been considered the global prestige accent variety but Bayard et al. (2001: 41–43) hypothesize that it is gradually replaced by StAmE due to the global availability of the US media.

This is the first review of the evidence, based on longitudinal studies in the United Kingdom, on the association of ill health at any life stage and later social and economic outcomes. The review included a wide range of physical and mental health exposures, both self-reported and objectively measured, as well as social (e.g. life satisfaction) and economic (e.g. employment) outcomes. We searched the Web of Science, key longitudinal datasets based in the UK, major economic journals, Google Scholar and reference lists of relevant publications. The review includes 80 studies. There was strong evidence for the association between early mental health, mainly attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and lifetime educational, occupational and various social outcomes. Also, both poor physical and mental health in early and middle adulthood, tended to be associated with unemployment and lower socioeconomic status. Among older adults, the evidence quite consistently indicated an association between mental health, chronic conditions, disability/functional limitations, self-rated general health and quality of life, life satisfaction and early retirement. Overall, mental health was consistently found to be associated with a range of social and economic outcomes throughout the lifespan. The evidence for the association between physical health and later outcomes is more inconsistent. A number of methodological challenges need to be addressed, particularly related to causal inference, to produce robust evidence with potential to inform public health policy.

Language is dynamic; it is unique, creative, complex and modifiable. It grows through permutation and combination of political, social, economic, and environmental factors. Hence, we see a lot of differences in the form of dialects and idiolects. At the same time, if we cast a glance over the international scenario we can find variations from standard British English and American English. It’ll be a herculean task to identify and suggest one standard variety among all the varieties of English being used in the world today; as such there can be nothing that we call ‘Standard English’. Hence by keeping in view the scientific study of Indian English Language, we want to focus our study on errors in a variety of Indian English spoken by the native speakers of Bangla. The contention is that infrequent occurrence of certain linguistic constructions (in this case relative clauses) in one’s native language (NL) leads to errors in the target language (TL).

Purpose While studies about business-to-business (B2B) relationships have mainly addressed buyer–supplier long-term exchanges, focusing on social outcomes such as trust, commitment and cooperation, there is little research that explores the social outcomes which stem from short-term B2B transactions. The purpose of this paper is to explain buyers’ intention to renew a contract after discrete and time-delimited transactions by suggesting a model that complements social exchange theory with theories of fairness. In detail, this study aims to determine how evaluations of economic and social outcomes are complemented by both procedural fairness and distributive fairness. Design/methodology/approach The hypotheses are tested in the social couponing industry with a survey of a sample of 199 firms purchasing advertising services from daily deal websites. Data are analyzed using covariance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM). Findings The findings reveal direct effects of procedural fairness on social outcomes (satisfaction) and distributive fairness on the intention to renew a contract, negative moderating effect of procedural fairness on the relationship between economic outcomes (campaign effectiveness) and social outcomes (satisfaction). Research limitations/implications In discrete, time-delimited transactions, high levels of procedural fairness may partially compensate for low levels of economic outcomes and prevent a reduction in social outcomes. Hence, when economic outcomes are influenced largely by external, uncontrollable conditions, the buyer seems to appreciate the supplier’s efforts to behave fairly. Practical implications Social outcomes matter even in discrete transactions and considerations of fairness should be integrated in the management of discrete transactions. Sharing economic outcomes fairly is not sufficient to secure the buyer’s intention to renew the contract. Originality/value This study proposes and tests a model that complements social exchange theory with theories of fairness and explains contract renewal in discrete, time-delimited transactions, encompassing both economic outcomes and social outcomes.

Education and literacy have long been associated with a range of economic and social outcomes in industrialized societies. Recent research based on large-scale national and international surveys has examined effects of education and literacy on individuals’ social and economic outcomes. This paper takes a further step in understanding the importance of literacy for individuals’ economic and social outcomes by disentangling the effects of two different aspects of literacy, literacy proficiency as measured by standardized tests and reading engagement as measured by self-reports of everyday reading activities. Using recent nationally representative survey data from New Zealand, multivariate regression models estimate the effects of reading engagement on earnings, health, social trust, political efficacy and civic engagement. Reading engagement has statistical and substantial positive effects on each of these outcomes with the effects of literacy proficiency, education and other important variables held constant. Although these results do not imply a causal relationship between reading engagement and the outcomes, they have important implications for policy and practice in adult education as well as for future research about the role of reading engagement in wellbeing more generally.

To date, few tools assist policy makers and practitioners in understanding and conveying the implementation costs, potential impacts, and value of policy and environmental changes to address healthy eating, active living, and childhood obesity. For the Evaluation of Healthy Kids, Healthy Communities (HKHC), evaluators considered inputs (resources and investments) that generate costs and savings as well as benefits and harms related to social, economic, environmental, and health-related outcomes in their assessment of 49 HKHC community partnerships funded from 2009 to 2014. Using data collected through individual and group interviews and an online performance monitoring system, evaluators created a socioecological framework to assess investments, resources, costs, savings, benefits, and harms at the individual, organizational, community, and societal levels. Evaluators customized frameworks for 6 focal strategies: active transportation, parks and play spaces, child care physical activity standards, corner stores, farmers' markets, and child care nutrition standards. To illustrate the Value Frameworks, this brief highlights the 38 HKHC communities implementing at least 1 active transportation strategy. Evaluators populated this conceptual Value Framework with themes from the strategy-specific inputs and outputs. The range of factors corresponding to the implementation and impact of the HKHC community partnerships are highlighted along with the inputs and outputs. The Value Frameworks helped evaluators identify gaps in current analysis models (ie, benefit-cost analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis) as well as paint a more complete picture of value for potential obesity prevention strategies. These frameworks provide a comprehensive understanding of investments needed, proposed costs and savings, and potential benefits and harms associated with economic, social, environmental, and health outcomes. This framing also allowed evaluators to demonstrate the interdependence of each socioecological level on the others in these multicomponent interventions. This model can be used by practitioners and community leaders to assess realistic and sustainable strategies to combat childhood obesity.

Understanding the contribution of marketing to economic and social outcomes is fundamental to broadening the focus of marketing. The authors develop a comprehensive model that integrates the impact of service quality and service satisfaction on both economic and societal outcomes. The model is validated using two random samples involving intensive health services. The results indicate that service quality and service satisfaction significantly enhance quality of life and behavioral intentions, highlighting that customer service has social as well as economic outcomes. This is an important finding given the movement toward recognizing social and environmental outcomes, such as emphasized through triple bottom-line reporting. The findings have important implications for managing service processes, for improving the quality of life of customers, and for enhancing customers' behavioral intentions toward the organization.

The Ripples of Adolescent Motherhood: Social, Educational, and Medical Outcomes for Children of Teen and Prior Teen Mothers

How Cultural Factors Shape Economic Outcomes: Introducing the Issue Melissa S. Kearney (bio) and Ron Haskins (bio) Children’s economic and social outcomes, both during their childhood and in their adult years, largely depend on the circumstances into which they are born and raised. Such circumstances are the product of children’s families, schools, and neighborhoods; the peers and adults with whom they spend time; the media images that shape their perceptions of themselves and their place in the world; and other factors—both internal and external to the individual child. Many would say that culture plays a large role in shaping a child’s life experiences and outcomes. But culture is hard to define and quantify, and controversial to talk about, especially as an ill-defined concept. Furthermore, the question of what—if anything—policy makers and practitioners can do about culture is hard to grapple with, unlike more readily measured and studied concepts like income or educational attainment. This issue of the Future of Children aims to identify and measure elements of culture that predict children’s economic and social outcomes, and to present the best evidence to date about how these factors shape children’s economic outcomes. When we use the word culture here, we don’t purport to work either within or outside a precise definition of culture that comes from any particular academic body of thought. Rather, we consider particular elements of the social institutions, customs, and attitudes in US society that a layperson might reasonably consider to be culture. The eight articles we’ve assembled here were written by highly regarded economists and psychologists. Each article considers a specific societal factor that research has shown to be important to economic and social outcomes: religious institutions; parenting practices; family structure; role models, mentors and media influences; peer and family effects; social capital and networks; beliefs about opportunity and mobility; and discrimination. All the authors have written through the lens of objectivity, with a deep and expansive knowledge of the relevant research. Most people would probably place some of the topics covered here at the top of their list of what they consider cultural elements—for example, the role of religion or family [End Page 3] structure. But other topics may seem less obviously “cultural.” For instance, economists often talk about labor market networks without explicitly referring to networks as part of a society’s culture. Nor do most economic considerations of discrimination explicitly consider that practice as a cultural construct. As co-editors, we view each article in this issue as exploring a critical element of the US cultural context shaping children’s lives, though the individual authors don’t necessarily define or discuss the factors they’re writing about explicitly in terms of culture. Cultural Factors and Social Mobility Our nation is in the grip of widening inequality and social fragmentation. The past four decades have seen massive increases in income for those at the top of the income distribution but only small to modest increases for those near the bottom. People who lack high levels of skills and education have seen their wages stagnate or fall and their economic insecurity rise. It’s harder today for children to achieve higher levels of income than their parents had, which suggests that the fabled American Dream is under threat.1 Many of us worry that the promise of opportunity and upward mobility is eroding. The issue of social mobility is front and center in academic research and domestic policy discussions. Rates of social mobility vary widely from place to place, and many key correlates of upward mobility have to do with the elements of a place’s culture. Groundbreaking research from the Opportunity Insights project—a social science research lab at Harvard University, led by economists Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Nathaniel Hendren, which makes use of confidential access to millions of US tax records—has provided a rich description of social mobility across localities in the United States.2 This data-driven work reveals vast differences across the country in rates of upward mobility for children from low-income homes. Strikingly, the research shows that many of the factors that predict upward mobility...

Standard dialects are frequently thought of as fixed and stable entities which possess clear boundaries and a set of criteria that allow us to recognise easily which texts or utterances are standard and which are not. This view, as has been proved by sociolinguists, is an oversimplification and idealisation since real-world standard dialects are best viewed both as fuzzy categories and as members of a large category centred around a prototype. The paper attempts to present a view of standard dialects inspired by the prototype theory and present-day sociolinguistics and exemplify this view by means of Standard British English. The analysis presents the notion of category in Standard English at three levels. Firstly, particular fragments of texts and utterances cannot be shown to be doubtlessly standard or non-standard, this issue being further complicated by the frequent confusion of typically spoken and typically written norms. Secondly, Standard English cannot be treated as a fixed entity because of its optional variability, its diversity in terms of style and register and the considerable number of local standard varieties of English throughout the English-speaking world. Finally, considering Standard English as possessing a long history of continued development towards minimal variation in form and maximal variation in function is also an idealisation of what has actually been a more complex process, in particular because, as linguists agree, language standardisation is not a fact but a process. All this leads to the conclusion that standard dialects can be analysed in terms of cognitive categorisation and prototypicality.

A broader perspective on social outcomes in transport

The English Language, being an international language, is spoken all over the world with many variations. These variations occur primarily due to environmental, cultural and social differences. The main reasons for these variations are intermingling of different races and strata in a society. In this regard prominent differences can be observed at phonological levels. These phonological variations produce different kinds of English, like British and American English. In these two there are differences in intonation, stress pattern, and pronunciation. Although South-Eastern British R.P. is known as Standard English but one cannot deny the existence and value of American English. The study attempts to highlight the vowel variation between British English and American English at phonological level.

The current research was designed to examine the effects of emotional intelligence on both economic and social outcomes, as well as to explore the extent to which rapport, bargaining strategy, and judgment accuracy would mediate relationships between emotional intelligence and negotiation outcomes. Upper-level business students (284 individuals, 142 dyads) were pre-tested on emotional intelligence using the 33-item measure from Schutte et al. (Personal Individ Differ 25:167–177, 1998). They were then recruited to participate in a job contract negotiation in which one party played the role of personnel manager and the other played the role of a new employee. Emotional intelligence had a significant, positive effect on the three social negotiation outcomes of trust, satisfaction, and desire to work together again in the future. Moreover, rapport and negotiation strategy either fully or partially mediated each of these relationships. In contrast, emotional intelligence had no significant effects on economic outcomes.

Recent research and development efforts to achieve sustainable rice production in Vietnam have incorporated agroecological principles and practices. These efforts have come as a result of increasing pressure on food systems to achieve global food security. Growing food demand, rising population, climate change, and natural resources degradation, make it necessary to transform the current production systems towards more sustainable models. Agroecology is being promoted as one of the pathways to transition toward sustainable food production, with broad adoption requiring incentives for farmers. Using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews guidelines, we conducted a scoping review of 120 articles to understand the incentives applied for promoting agroecological practices, whether and how the incentives promote the adoption of agroecological practices, and their relationship with economic, environmental, and social outcomes among rice farmers in Vietnam. Such in-depth reviews of the role of incentives in the agroecological transition are scarce. Results show that in about 60% of the articles, incentives led to adoption, outcomes (e.g., yield and income gains), or both, suggesting the importance and common use of incentives among rice farmers in Vietnam. Four types of incentives used were market, non-market, regulatory, and cross-compliance. These incentives directly or indirectly influenced outcomes through the adoption of agroecological practices. Market incentives (33%) were relatively more important for directly influencing outcomes, while non-market incentives (50%) were more important for indirectly influencing outcomes. Market, non-market, and regulatory incentives were more associated with the adoption of new agronomic practices, such as farm diversification, improved varieties, and organic agriculture than with other practices, while cross-compliance incentives were more highly associated with adoption of agroforestry. Generally, the incentives used were more associated with economic outcomes (56%), than with environmental (31%), and social (13%) outcomes. Overall, the results show that incentives influence outcomes differently, and a combination of different incentives is required to achieve holistic outcomes.

PurposeThis research explores the standard language ideology in Chinese foreign language education policies. The most substantial in relation to language policy and management in regard to language ideology are beliefs associated with the values on the named language and its varieties (Spolsky, 2009). In the standard language ideology, the standard is treated as being valuable linguistic capital and possessing prestige as well as authority. Mandarin is the most well-accepted standard Chinese, and similarly, UK English or US English is the most popular and Standard English (SE) in China.Design/methodology/approachThe theoretical framework in this research is critical discourse analysis (CDA) and discourse-historical approach (DHA) to guide the data collection and data analysis. This research will review recent and seminal literature obtained from the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) on language policy in China in relation to standard language ideology. The literature also investigates Chinese state's English language ideologies using official language education policies (FLEPs).FindingsThe results show that standard language ideology is a common mindset found within official state policies in regard to SE. The authors argue that the Chinese trust on the ideology of standard language appears to not be aligned to recent worldwide trends such as globalization and multilingualism.Originality/valueThis research can provide insights into future language planning and language policy in China and shows that the future research could do more on language planning in China.