Description
AbstractAttitudes towards Englishes provide important insights into the lived experiences of people using English in different contexts, and provide knowledge about the status of the spread of English in specific settings. From a world Englishes perspective, for instance, attitudes of users of English in an expanding circle context that demonstrate the desire to perform identity functions in the language could be viewed as an indicator that English has spread even more widely and deeply in that context.
In this study, students’ attitudes towards English are studied via language portraits gathered in a traditional outer and expanding circle context (South Africa and the Netherlands). Language portraits were used previously to study language attitudes (Coetzee-Van Rooy, 2021; Peters and Coetzee-Van Rooy, 2020; Coetzee-Van Rooy and Peters, 2021; Coetzee-Van Rooy, 2025). This study will complement studies about language attitudes in South Africa and the Netherlands (Edwards, 2018; Edwards and Fuchs, 2018) by providing knowledge gained from language portrait data analysed via Atlas.ti. The main research questions that are explored in this study are: in these two settings, (a) what are the attitudes towards English; (b) what are the roles and functions of English; and (c) what inferences could be made from the findings about the status of the spread of English?
References
Coetzee‐Van Rooy, Susan. (2021). "Being English in multilingual South Africa." World Englishes 40(1), 98-120.
Coetzee-Van Rooy, Susan & Peters, Arne. (2021). A Portrait-Corpus Study of Language Attitudes towards Afrikaans and English. Language Matters, 52(2), 3-28.
Coetzee-Van Rooy, Susan. (2025). Attitudes Towards Learning in English: A Language Portrait View from South African Students. In: David Lasagabaster, Alberto Fernández-Costales and Flor de Lis González-Mujico. (Eds). 2025. The Affective Dimension in English-Medium Instruction in Higher Education, Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters, pp. 24-48.
Edwards, A. (2018). I’m an Anglophile, but…. A corpus-assisted discourse study of language ideologies in the Netherlands. In: Deshors, S. (Ed). 2018. Modeling World Englishes: Assessing the Interplay of Emancipation and Globalization of ESL Varieties, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 163-186.
Edwards, A., & Fuchs, R. (2018). A cluster analysis of attitudes to English in Germany and the Netherlands. World Englishes, 37(4), 653-667.
Peters, Arne & Coetzee-Van Rooy, Susan. (2020). Exploring the interplay of language and body in South African youth: A portrait-corpus study. Cognitive Linguistics, 31(4), 579-608.
| Period | 26 Jul 2025 |
|---|---|
| Event title | World Englishes |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Giessen , GermanyShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |