Customer Reviews

English around the World: Sociolinguistic Perspectives

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English Around the World is a collection of short articles about different aspects of World Enlgishes. I bought this for my research on the role of World Englishes in the TESOL classroom. From my perspective, there were a few problems with this text. First of all, there is no overall theme, so the individual articles didn't form a complete whole. They seemed more like a grab-bag of ideas rather than a comprehensive review of the field. Also, there are a lot of articles which feature fairly detailed research without tying into a larger theme. For example, there is an article on the pronunciation of one vowel group in Australian English. This is great if you're writing a paper on Australian pronunciation, but it doesn't really tie into the theme of World English, so you'll probably skip it. There are quite a few articles like this. In short, this book suffers from poor editing.

On the other hand, I was able to find some useful articles. The sections on South Asia and Africa were particularly useful for me. In the end, though, I have to say that this book shouldn't be your first choice. I recommend "The Other Tongue" by Kachru or "English as a Global Language" by Crystal instead. If you have these already, and you would like to get another source, then this might be one to pick up.