European Journal of English Studies 

About: European Journal of English Studies is an academic journal published by Taylor & Francis. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): English studies & Politics. It has an ISSN identifier of 1382-5577. Over the lifetime, 589 publications have been published receiving 4557 citations. The journal is also known as: EJES & Journal of the European Society for the Study of English.

English, a cuckoo in the European higher education nest of languages?

Abstract: This article addresses the issue as to whether the advance of English in higher education in continental Europe represents a threat to other languages. In the context of moves by the European Union to create a single European ‘education and research area’, in which the integration of higher education through the Bologna process plays a key role, international commodification pressures challenge the status of education as a public good. The study looks at a variety of key aspects of this situation, including the role of university evaluation and planning for internationalisation. It analyses both discourses promoting English, and language policy statements from several countries aiming at a balance between English and other languages. It also deals with the issue of diglossic domain loss as a result of the forces propelling English forward and dispossessing other languages. It concludes that fluidity in European language policies and the many obstacles to coordinated Europe-wide policy formation confirm th...

Communicative styles in English and German

Abstract: In this paper cultural differences in communicative styles preferred by speakers of German and English are presented, and their impact on intercultural misunderstandings and the ascription of politeness or impoliteness is discussed. Concretely, five dimensions along which these cultural differences (as outcomes of extensive contrastive-pragmatic work can be placed) are introduced and exemplified. Further, the value and the explanatory power these dimensions might have for culture clashes and for the perception of misunderstanding and (im)politeness are discussed.

English as a language always in translation

Abstract: The global enterprise of English language teaching (ELT) ought to present the possibility of bringing millions of people into the global traffic of meaning. Yet it does not do so because global ELT is paradoxically viewed as a monolingual enterprise. Both the pedagogy that underpins much of this spread and the ways in which the global spread of English has been described and resisted emphasize English as a language that operates only in its own presence. Overlooked are the ways in which English always needs to be seen in the context of other languages, as a language always in translation. Yet if we wish to take global diversity seriously, we would do well to focus on semiodiversity (the diversity of meanings) as much as glossodiversity (the diversity of languages), and to do so by taking up a project of translingual activism as part of ELT. If students are to enter the global traffic of meaning, translation needs to become central to what we do.

Changing Conventions of Writing: The Dynamics of Genres, Text Types, and Text Traditions

Abstract: (2001). Changing Conventions of Writing: The Dynamics of Genres, Text Types, and Text Traditions. European Journal of English Studies: Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 139-150.

Literature and the production of cultural memory: Introduction

Abstract: Over the last decade, ‘cultural memory’ has emerged as a useful umbrella term to describe the complex ways in which societies remember their past using a variety of media. Where earlier discussions of collective memory had a thematic focus and were concerned above all with identifying the ‘sites of memory’ that act as placeholders for the memories of particular groups, attention has been shifting in recent years to the cultural processes by which memories become shared in the first place. It has become increasingly apparent that the memories that are shared within generations and across different generations are the product of public acts of remembrance using a variety of media. Stories, both oral and written, images, museums, monuments: these all work together in creating and sustaining ‘sites of memory’. Thus everyone reading this issue of EJES will have some ‘recollection’ of the First World War, but since most readers were not alive in 1914, these ‘recollections’ are vicarious ones, the product of acc...