Asian Languages Research Articles

English as a Lingua Franca: intercultural interaction in the context of Asian ‘third space’

ABSTRACT Many studies on English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) primarily focus on English for communication among speakers without English as their first language and recently emphasized intercultural communication within interactions. Nevertheless, the predominant emphasis remains primarily linguistic, concentrating on, for example, grammar or lexis. We complement this research, presenting vignettes arguing for shifting how ELF is understood, approached, and taught; advocating its recognition primarily as intercultural interaction, yet retaining linguistic aspects. Vignettes from ELF interactions in a Thai University English Conversation Club illustrate diverse and complex language practices. We show, through ELF interactions in this ‘Third Space’, how speakers of different Asian languages prioritize intercultural communication whilst retaining focus on English language accuracy. We discuss the advantages, possibilities, and implications of reorienting our perception of ELF interactions in this manner for students, instructors and researchers of Asian Englishes and Englishes worldwide.

English Language Learning and Acquisition Theories

Introduction: Language is a powerful tool and means of communication and to communicate with others we also use other ways such as Body manners, gestures, signals and facial expressions which is also called as a non-verbal communication. English is a tool, like basic arithmetic, or literacy, or computer skills. An ability they need to master in order to function effectively in today’s world. The L1 remains the learners primary language and the only they identify with what teachers aiming for is functional English-knowing bilingualism. Socio-political status: With the European trade patterns, most of the known European-based Creole languages were existed in the coastal regions of the Americas, Western Africa, Goa and along with the west coast of India. Indian Ocean Creole languages are based on European languages with elements from Malagasy and possibly other Asian languages. Learning Language Through Culture: Learning other language is to understand the nature of the relationship between language and culture, learners need to engage with the ways in which context affects what is communicated and how. Standard English is the variety of English that is generally acknowledged as the model for the speech and writing of educated speakers in UK. It is also associated with Received Pronunciation or accent. Intuitive acquisition: We learn anther language the same way as we learnt our first language or mother tongue. Intuitive acquisition through lots of exposure to the language in authentic communicative situations. Habit-formation: Language is a set of habits: we mimic and memorize and drill the patterns of the language until we learn to produce the correct forms automatically. Cognitive Process: Language involves the understanding of underlying rules: if we master these rules, we will be able to apply them in different contexts. That may be at school, home, with community or with others. Skill-learning: Language is a skill. We learn it in school just as we learn other skills: someone explains rules or words to us, we understand and practice them until we master them and use them fluently and skillfully.

Renaming (and Reshaping) The University of Edinburgh’s “Oriental” Manuscript Collection

The University of Edinburgh holds a substantial collection of manuscripts in Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and South Asian languages, formerly known as the “Oriental Manuscript Collection”. This article reports recent steps taken to make this collection, which consists largely of manuscripts collected by Scottish East India Company officials between the late 18th and mid 19th centuries C.E, relevant to the present day global audience, and to widen access to it. This includes its renaming as "Manuscripts of the Islamicate World and South Asia", and the creation of a digitally searchable catalogue on the ArchivesSpace platform, largely through the use of “legacy data” from a 1925 printed catalogue, yet with a focus on making provenance information readily available. We discuss the challenges involved in renaming, and indeed reinterpreting, a historical collection whilst adhering to the principles of archival and library science. We share the methodology used to create our digitally searchable catalogue, a relatively simple model that may well prove useful for those curating similar collections.

Audiovisual speech perception of multilingual learners of Japanese

ABSTRACT Due to the complex nature of languages and the way they are used, it is often difficult to research multilinguals because of the considerable variation in the ways their spoken languages may impact their perceptions. For this reason, foreign language education research has largely been focused on English L2 speakers, overlooking how different languages might impact perception in multilingual speakers. Focusing on Japanese as a Second Language (JSL) learners, this research investigated how multilinguals responded to audiovisual cues in Japanese and English. Utilising web-based eye-tracking technology facilitated by WebGazer.js. Participants were asked to complete a novel phonetic distinction task while their gaze behaviour was measured. Contrary to initial theoretical expectations, the findings did not reveal significant mediation by gaze behaviour on the relationship between multilingualism and task performance. However, the study found that when looking at the duration of fixation on the mouth, there's a significant difference between native English speakers and native speakers of Asian languages when listening to English or Japanese. These findings indicate that further research that explores the nuances of gaze behaviour among multilingual learners of non-English languages (such as Japanese) is necessary.

From LIKE/LOVE to habitual: the case of Mainland East and Southeast Asian languages

From LIKE/LOVE to habitual: the case of Mainland East and Southeast Asian languages

Perceptual Benefits of Linguistic Diversity and Language Background: Evidence from Auditory Free Classification of English Dialect Accents and Asian-Accented English

Non-linguistic factors leave a distinct thumbprint on our speech production that is perceptible to listeners. A steadily growing line of research demonstrates that listeners can perceive a contrast between native and non-native (L2) speakers based on accents and further classify these speakers according to dialectal variation, even when they are not native speakers of a language. Most of these studies have focused on dialectal variation within US English speakers, a combination of US and International English dialects, or L2 speakers representing a wide range of languages. Most have also featured listeners who are monolingual native speakers of the target language coming from a homogenous background, or a contrast between these and a targeted set of L2 speakers. We therefore lack knowledge of how exposure to, or familiarity with, diverse accents and languages, or specific native language competence of the native language of L2 speakers, can guide listeners’ accent perception and categorization. In this research, we employed a free classification task, presenting listeners with speech samples of native speakers with accents representing multiple English dialects, and L2 speakers of nine Asian languages across three geographic regions speaking Asian-accented English. There were six groups of listeners: monolingual US English listeners in a diverse linguistic context, monolingual US English listeners in a homogeneous linguistic context, native speakers of a non-Asian language and English (bilinguals), and native speakers of each of the three target Asian language groups who are L2 speakers of English. The results reveal that nearly all listeners are sensitive to accents capturing native/L2 contrasts and dialectal variation in English. While regular exposure to a diversity of accents results in increased classification accuracy, classification of Asian L2-accented English speakers is best performed when there is alignment of similar language family and geographic area, as demonstrated by South Asian listeners.

A Detailed Study on Anaphora Resolution System for Asian Languages

A Detailed Study on Anaphora Resolution System for Asian Languages

Principal agency 50 years after the Lau decision: Building and sustaining bilingual education programs for Asian languages

Principal agency 50 years after the Lau decision: Building and sustaining bilingual education programs for Asian languages

Repair as a practice and action in East Asian languages

The papers collected in this special issue explore ways in which repair/correction is organised in three East Asian languages, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, from the perspective of conversation analysis (CA).

Digital Communication in Japanese Companies: The Corporate Blog. Current Trends, Challenges, and Future Perspectives

The present article examines the digital communication patterns exerted by domestic Japanese companies through Japanese-language blogging practices: main characteristics, current trends, challenges, and future tendencies at the intersection of Japanese corporate culture, communication, and the digital realm. After a concise literature review of Japanese corporate identity and predominant cultural features of Japanese management, we will conduct a qualitative content analysis on a selected corpus of Japanese language corporate blogs to investigate the digital corporate discourse (content, types of public, communication strategies, and techniques) on a national level and to inquire into the extent of the impact exerted by the digital evolution of media platforms and the emergence of new AI tools. The implications of the present research are twofold. First, the database we manually compiled contains only Japanese language sources, thus surpassing the linguistic barrier many Western academics confront when researching Asian countries and media content in Asian languages. Examining the Japanese language digital discourse of domestic companies in a post-pandemic globalized context bridges the unceasing gap between the West and the East, thus decentring the focal point from the Western companies and shifting the attention from English-language digital communication. Second, connecting the Japanese-language business discourse with domestic blogging platforms represents another aspect of particular importance neglected by previous research.

Improving Kui digit recognition through machine learning and data augmentation techniques

Speech digit recognition research is growing decisively, and a bulk of digit recognition algorithms are used in European and a few Asian languages. Kui is a low-resourced tribal language locally used in several states of India. Despite its significance, there is not much research on Kui's speech. This research aims to present an in-depth analysis of novel Kui digit recognition using predefined machine learning (ML) techniques. For this purpose, we first gathered spoken numbers i.e. from 0 to 9 of eight different speakers containing a total of 200 words. Secondly, we choose the numbers: ଶୂନ (zero), ଏକ (one), ଦୁଇ (two), ତିନି(three), ସାରି(four), ପାସ (five), ସଅ (six), ସାତ (seven), ଆଟ (eight), ନଅ (nine). Meanwhile, we build nine different ML models to recognize Kui digits that take the Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) method to extract the relevant features for model predictions. Finally, we compared the performance of ML models for both augmented and non-augmented Kui data. The result shows that the SVM+Augmentation method for Kui digit recognition combined obtained the highest accuracy of 83% than other methods. Moreover, the difficulties and potential prospects for Kui digit recognition are also highlighted in this work.

Bilingual families and the home literacy environment: An examination of English and ethnic language activities and outcomes

BackgroundAccumulating evidence shows that the home literacy environment (HLE) has a potent and early influence on children's language and literacy development. However, there is a more limited understanding of HLE and its contribution to children's outcomes for simultaneous bilingual children exposed to two languages at home, particularly in the Asian context.MethodsIn this study with 801 six‐year‐old bilingual learners, HLE and language and literacy outcomes were examined in two languages. Children were assessed in their receptive vocabulary, reading and spelling abilities for English plus their ethnic Asian language (Mandarin Chinese, Malay or Tamil) for a subsample of 374 children.ResultsResults from factor analyses suggest that HLE for each language within families had a different latent structure, with three to four factors for English (parent involvement, parent habit, child exploration and shared reading) and three factors for the Asian language (parent involvement, parent habit and child interest). Further path analyses show that shared reading had a negative contribution to English outcomes but a positive influence on Asian language outcomes.ConclusionsFindings extend existing understanding of HLE structure for bilingual language learners from bilingual families. HLE components contributed differently to bilingual language outcomes, with positive contributions of child exploration to English outcomes and of parent habits including shared reading to Asian language outcomes. Negative relationships for shared reading to English outcomes are also evident and suggest that further research on the long‐term effects of HLE is needed.

Missing Ethnicity and Language Information in Healthcare Records of Patients from the Asian Diaspora.

The electronic health record (EHR) should contain information to support culturally responsive care and research; however, the widely used default "Asian" demographic variable in most US social systems (including EHRs) lacks information to describe the diverse experience within the Asian diaspora (e.g., ethnicities, languages). This has a downstream effect on research, identifying disparities, and addressing health equity. We were particularly interested in EHRs of autistic patients from the Asian diaspora, since the presence of a developmental diagnosis might call for culturally responsive care around understanding causes, treatments, and services to support good outcomes. The aim of this study is to determine the degree to which information about Asian ethnicity, languages, and culture is documented and accessible in the EHR, and whether it is differentially available for patients with or without autism. Using electronic and manual medical chart review, all autistic and "Asian" children (group 1; n = 52) were compared to a randomly selected comparison sample of non-autistic and "Asian" children (group 2; n = 50). Across both groups, manual chart review identified more specific approximations of racial/ethnic backgrounds in 54.5% of patients, 56% for languages spoken, and that interpretation service use was underestimated by 13 percentage points. Our preliminary results highlight that culturally responsive information was inconsistent, missing, or located in progress notes rather than a central location where it could be accessed by providers. Recommendations about the inclusion of Asian ethnicity and language data are provided to potentially enhance cultural responsiveness and support better outcomes for families with an autistic child.

Translating in and out of East Asian cultures: focus on Chinese and Korean

ABSTRACT This introductory article aims to present an overview of the contribution that East Asian scholars have made to Translation Studies as a field of enquiry. Apart from some contributions from countries such as Thailand and Vietnam, most of the publications of the last four decades involve Chinese, Korean, and Japanese themes and are authored by scholars from these areas or focused on the languages and cultures of China, Korea and Japan. The article considers the publications on audiovisual as well as literary and news translation, highlighting articles, book chapters and monographs that have delved into translations involving East Asian languages, notably Chinese, Korean and Japanese. The final section introduces the selection of papers that conform this thematic issue.

Who are we missing? Language exclusivity of patient-reported outcomes in atrial fibrillation clinical trials.

Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) are increasingly used to evaluate quality of life (QoL) in Atrial Fibrillation (AF) patients, providing crucial insights in clinical trials. This study examines the frequency of PRO use in AF trials and the linguistic accessibility of AF-specific PROs. As the United States becomes more multilingual, ensuring PROs are available in various languages is vital. The number of people speaking a language other than English at home has tripled from 23.1 million in 1980 to 67.8 million in 2019. This diversity necessitates the availability of PROs in multiple languages for inclusive clinical assessments. We queried ClinicalTrials.gov for all US interventional AF trials up to November 28, 2023, reviewing each for PRO usage as primary or secondary outcomes. We identified the five most common AF-specific and generic PROs, extracting their available translations and original languages from published sources. Of 233 identified trials, 191 had associated publications, with 180 (94.2%) conducted solely in English. Only one trial (0.4%) used an AF-specific PRO as a primary outcome, compared to four (1.7%) with a generic PRO. Ten trials (4.3%) used AF-specific PROs as secondary endpoints, versus 22 (9.4%) using generic PROs. AF-specific PROs had significantly fewer translations than generic PROs (11.2 vs. 148.8; p < .001). The AF Effect on Quality-of-Life (AFEQT) was available in 24 languages, with limited translations in commonly spoken US languages like Arabic and Asian languages. The limited availability of AF-specific PRO translations highlights a barrier to inclusive AF clinical trials. Expanding translations for AF-specific PROs is crucial for equitable QoL assessments.

Interdisciplinary Digital Skills Development for Educational Communication: Emergency and Ai-Enhanced Digitization

The wartime emergency induced amplified digitalization measures in the higher education sphere, informed by the need to take quick comprehensive action in order to achieve the overarching result to transform educational scenarios into interdisciplinary digital, blended, and hybrid frameworks. Taking into account the context of the erupted military intervention on Ukraine in February 2022, and the ensuing information warfare in various digital environments (social media, news coverage, digital communications), the specific value of the learning outcomes and outputs is allocated to the digitally enhanced foreign languages education as a tool of the internationally broadcast strife of Ukraine for freedom and sovereignty. The study results disclose the comprehensive review of dynamics of the metadigital skills development and application to construe interdisciplinary competencies of students of European (English, Spanish, French, Italian, German) and Asian (Mandarin Chinese, Japanese) Languages major programs in Ukraine through the span of educational activities in the time-frame of wartime emergency digitization measures of 2022-2023.

The heavy implications of racial and socioeconomic factors affecting cachexia incidence at gastrointestinal malignancy diagnosis: A single-institution study.

e13694 Background: Cachexia, a complicated metabolic syndrome often related to cancer, is associated with anorexia, decreased quality of life, and increased mortality in advanced disease. The overall prevalence of cachexia ranges from 40% at cancer diagnosis to 70% in advanced disease. Our team aimed to determine whether racial and socioeconomic factors are associated with incidence of cachexia or being underweight at diagnosis (UAD) in patients with gastrointestinal (GI) tract cancer in a diverse, multiethnic urban medical center with high Asian-American representation. Methods: Using ICD-10 codes, adult (age ≥18) patients with diagnosis of primary GI carcinoma between 1/1/2013 to 12/31/2022 were identified. Those with secondary GI involvement from non-GI malignancies were excluded. Patient height, weight at time of diagnosis (weight measured within 4-week window from pathologic diagnosis date), and highest weight within 6 months preceding diagnosis date were recorded. Demographic data included: race, primary language, tumor origin, cancer stage and social deprivation index (SDI). Cachexia was defined as weight loss within a 6-month period of &gt;5% of initial body weight, or weight loss &gt;2% if body mass index (BMI) was &lt;20kg/m2. UAD was defined as BMI &lt;18.5kg/m2 at the time of diagnosis. Results: Of 718 patients with newly diagnosed GI cancer, 366 were analyzable for weight change. 61.2% were male. Race distributions were: 62.0% White, 23.8% Asian, 11.5% Black, and 2.7% Other. The primary languages spoken were: 76.5% English, 19.4% Asian-language, and 4.1% Other. The tumor originated from the following areas: 63.7% lower GI tract, 27.0% upper GI tract, and 8.5% hepato-pancreaticobiliary. 8.5% were UAD and 26.4% met criteria for cachexia at the time of diagnosis. Race and UAD had a significant association; Asians (p=.002) and those speaking Asian languages (p&lt;.001) were more likely to present UAD. However, no significant relationship existed between race (p=.780) or language group (p=.656) on cachexia incidence. Tumor origin groups trended towards differences in cachexia incidence (p=.061). Mean SDI was significantly higher in those who were UAD (p=.026). The SDI was slightly higher among those who had cachexia, but this was not statistically significant (p=.244). Conclusions: GI cancer patients of Asian race, who primarily speak an Asian language, and those with higher SDI are more likely to present UAD, but these same factors are not associated with incidence of cachexia at diagnosis. Additional research is needed to determine if being UAD is associated with development of cachexia later in the illness trajectory or affects clinical outcomes for patient with GI cancer.

Prioritized but declining: an analysis of student participation in Asian languages courses in secondary school 2001–2021

AbstractThe need for proficiency in Asian languages has been identified as vital for Australia’s regional prosperity, but in the absence of a national language policy and national data collection, languages study has continued to deteriorate at alarming levels. This article analyses recent data for trends in participation in ‘priority’ Asian languages, Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian, and Korean NSW High School Certificate (HSC) courses from 2001–2021. In 1994, these languages were first identified by the government as “priority” Asian languages and of considerable importance for Australia’s future prosperity. This study analyses disaggregated HSC data to examine trends in individual languages and courses. The overall finding in this study is that despite the considerable funding, there has been no significant improvement in Beginner, Continuers, In-context, or Literature courses: 2001 had 4.25% of HSC students studying one of the priority Asian languages, but in 2021 this figure dropped to 3.43%. This detailed analysis reveals possible reasons for this and explores the role of community language schools (CLS) in supporting the study of priority Asian languages. This study finds that disaggregated state-level and local data analysis is essential to inform national policy evaluation and future policy planning. Without consistent data collection, policy evaluation, and the development of evidence-based approaches to language education, Australian language education will continue to flounder.

Enacting teacher emotion, agency, and professional identity: A netnography of a novice Chinese language teacher’s crisis teaching

This netnography explores how teacher agency, emotion regulation, and professional identity were enacted by a novice Chinese language teacher in response to emergency remote teaching (ERT) in Australia amid the global pandemic. Ecologically sound, netnography creates uncoerced spaces to allow participants to have their voices heard, thus enabling researchers to discover nuanced patterns linked to the social-emotional state and wellbeing of the community members, regarding fears, tensions, and resilience triggered by ERT. Multiple data sources were triangulated from the teacher’s reflection journal, digital teaching artifacts, debriefing sessions, interviews, and online questionnaire responses. Thematic analysis reveals teacher identity was re-envisioned through crisis teaching pedagogy and the regulation of negative emotions to facilitate agency, which reciprocally bolstered teacher identity. The findings also indicate teacher identity development is challenged and shaped by negotiating a new role in remote teaching, thus impacting pre-ERT identity. Hence, the emotion regulation trajectory of ERT can stimulate and encourage technology-enhanced professional learning as teacher agency and resilience reinforce a new identity reimagined as a capable online teacher. By situating novice teacher agency, emotion regulation, and emerging identity in crisis teaching, this netnographic research conceptualises how ERT presents not only challenges for novice teachers’ identity development and emotion, but also the sustainability and empowerment of online teaching and professional growth of impacted teachers of Asian languages.

Multiracial Multilinguals: How Language Influences Multiracials’ Interpersonal Relationships

Lovers in interracial couples are more likely to have different heritage languages and first languages than same-race couples, and Multiracials are the offspring of interracial couples. As such, Multiracials&amp;rsquo; linguistic socialization likely differs from that of monoracials. Our study examined the influence of ethnoracial socialization on monoracials&amp;rsquo; and Multiracials&amp;rsquo; linguistic knowledge and the influence of language and ethnoracial identity on individuals&amp;rsquo; interpersonal relationships. We hypothesized that monoracials would be more likely to know their heritage language than Multiracials, that linguistic knowledge would differ between interminority Multiracial groups and half-White Multiracial groups, and that linguistic knowledge would be associated with the formation of both friendships and romantic relationships. Our sample included nearly a thousand students from a university in California. We found that monoracial minorities were more likely to be multilingual than both interminority Multiracials and half-White Multiracials. East Asian participants who spoke an East Asian language had a higher proportion of East Asian friends. Among Multiracials, Wasians and Latinasians who spoke an East Asian language primarily dated someone East Asian, Latinasians who spoke a Latin American language primarily dated someone Hispanic, and monolinguals of both groups were the ones most likely to date someone White. These findings suggest that linguistic knowledge plays a significant role in a community&amp;#39;s social dynamics, affecting monoracials&amp;#39; and (especially) Multiracials&amp;#39; interpersonal relationships.