BACKGROUND Assessment of consulting skills using simulated patients is widespread in medical education. Most research into such assessment is sited in a statistical paradigm that focuses on psychometric properties or replicability of such tests. Equally important, but less researched, is the question of how far consultations with simulated patients reflect real clinical encounters--for which so...

This article surveys current approaches to world Englishes (WE), provides a review of recent critiques of the world Englishes paradigm, and considers the ways in which the theorisation of world Englishes faces new challenges related to the effects of globalisation, as well as possible responses to such changes. This it does specifically by examining the sociolinguistic backgrounds and experienc...

Social connection is a fundamental human need. As such, people's brains are sensitized to social cues, such as those carried by language, and to promoting social communication. The neural mechanisms of certain key building blocks in this process, such as receptivity to and reproduction of social language, however, are not known. We combined quantitative linguistic analysis and neuroimaging to c...

The elaboration of the theoretical notion of communicative competence reflects a growing awareness of the importance of pragmatic knowledge in achieving mastery of a second language. Such awareness includes the recognition that teaching language effectively includes teaching culture in the most fundamental sense. Using the framework of interactional sociolinguistics to link theoretical work on ...

Within the Asian region, Singapore has long been seen as a leader within the field of higher education, with an unmatched record of success in implementing English-medium instruction (EMI) at all levels of education, including colleges and universities. This present study reports on a large-scale survey carried out at one of Singapore’s major universities on the use of English as a teaching med...

Language change results from the differential propagation of linguistic variants distributed among the linguistic repertoires of communicatively interacting individuals in a given community. From this it follows that language change is socially-mediated in two important ways. First, since language change is a social-epidemiological process that takes place by propagating some aspect of communic...

Most computational sociolinguistics studies have focused on phonological and lexical variation. We present the first large-scale study of syntactic variation among demographic groups (age and gender) across several languages. We harvest data from online user-review sites and parse it with universal dependencies. We show that several age and gender-specific variations hold across languages, for ...

Linguistic geography and sociolinguistics have been widely employed among dialectologists in postwar Japan. Over the last ten years, computer-processing of field survey data has become more and more common. The author originally developed the GLAPS processor to produce linguistic atlases by computer. GLAPS has since been modified to ,produce glottograms and crosstables and to handle sociolingui...