The Routledge Handbook of English Language Education in Bangladesh

Research Developments in World Englishes, Alexander Onysko (ed.) (2021)

“…Since WEs became an established paradigm in the 1980s and Bloomsbury even initiated a new series for publication in 2022, it is important to draw attention to the fact that the policies and practices in formal domains across the world are, in effect, monolingual, nationalistic, and chauvinistic, and communities also have monolingual biases, specifically towards powerful languages, such as those declared to be the national language and the official language (Sultana, 2021). For example, as the language of the British colonisers with more than 200 years of history in the Indian subcontinent, English is now the language of globalisation and international communication and, finally, as the language of the neoliberal education system, has also become one of the most powerful languages in South Asia (Sultana, 2014;Bolton and Bacon-Shone, 2020;Sultana and Roshid, 2021;Sultana, at press). To put it simply, while research studies of WEs in South Asia opt for heterogeneity, in reality, South Asian communities seem proactive in promoting homogeneity, and linguicism.…”

Power Dynamics in Business English as a Lingua Franca Discourse

“…As a former British colony, Bangladesh has a long history of using English in education, business, and employment. English is considered instrumental to development in Bangladesh (Ali & Hamid, 2020;Chowdhury & Kabir, 2014;Chowdhury & Erling, 2020;Sultana & Roshid, 2021). It is widely used in the RMG sector as a business lingua franca for international business communication with buyers and suppliers from different linguistic, cultural, and national backgrounds (Roshid, 2021).…”