The chapter explores complex ascriptions of linguistic prestige in Belize’s multilingual and postcolonial context. The observations made challenge traditional binary models of overt and covert prestige. English, the former colonizer’s language, holds formal prestige linked to its global status, economic utility, and educational norms. However, this prestige coexists with linguistic insecurity, as many Belizeans combine local and exogenous norms. Conversely, Kriol carries polycentric prestige rooted in national identity, creativity, and resistance to colonial hegemony. It indexes reputation rather than respectability, aligning with Afro-European traditions and anti-standard ideologies. Despite its rise in public and formal domains, Kriol remains ideologically linked to informality, creativity, and resistance. The chapter also highlights the emic construction of ‘code-switching’, valued as the ability to distinguish English from Kriol, reflecting education and social status. This linguistic liquidity – marked by overlapping functions, fluid boundaries, and contradictory discourses – reflects the complex interaction of different forms of prestige in Belize.

This chapter investigates how belonging is constructed through language in Belize. Inspecting linguistic landscapes, interviews, and ethnographic observations, the study reveals the sometimes paradoxical ways languages are ideologically positioned within local, national and transnational contexts. Kriol is central to constructing national belonging and serves as a unifying symbol of a diverse population. It is also tied to racial and transnational belonging, connecting to Afro-Caribbean cultural spaces. Conversely, Spanish is associated with immigration and Guatemala, despite its historical presence and ongoing use. This tension results in contradictory discourses, where Spanish is simultaneously seen as ‘foreign’ and as a home language. English occupies a dual role as both a foreign and national language. While it indexes Belize’s colonial ties and distinguishes Belizeans from their Hispanic neighbours, it is also regarded as essential for education and economic mobility. The chapter concludes that language ideologies and practices do not always align, reflecting the coexistence of diverse historical, social, and political discourses in shaping linguistic belonging in Belize.

The fourteenth-century poet John Gower was a prodigiously Ovidian author, especially throughout his Latin Vox clamantis and English Confessio amantis. It is in the Vox clamantis, and its first book the Visio Anglie, where Gower fully engaged with Ovid in exile, and where he became the Ovidian exile in the ways theorised in Chapter 4. While Gower did not experience exile or marginalisation in real life, in the Visio he inhabits Ovidian exile to respond to the 1381 Uprising. Menmuir firstly speculates how Gower might have read Ovid’s exile poetry. She also considers different theoretical approaches to Gower’s use of Ovid, including cento. Thereafter, the chapter progresses sequentially through the Visio, charting Gower’s range of approaches to the exilic Ovid. At the opening of the Visio, Gower compresses prevailing themes of the exile poetry. Chapter 16 of the Visio is the height of Gower’s Ovidian exilic inhabitation, where Gower shifts to speaking in a first-person voice. The storm at sea in the Visio is drawn from Ovid in exile. Finally, a voice from Heaven speaks to the Gowerian narrator but is in fact a mouthpiece for Ovid in exile.

Our goal in writing this book was to address a notable gap in the availability of essential resources dedicated to this critical content area. Despite its foundational importance, no existing text offers a focused, in-depth exploration of language and literacy knowledge tailored for pre-service and in-service teachers working in Foundation to Year 10. The 2008 Bradley Review highlighted a deficiency in teachers’ language and literacy awareness and proficiency, a concern that was addressed by the introduction of the Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education Students (LANTITE) in 2016. Consequently, initial teacher education programs have initiated courses and support services in English language and literacy to bolster teachers’ personal knowledge and skills, enabling them to pass the LANTITE’s literacy component.

Chapter 6 explores Geoffrey Chaucer’s Ovidian exilic voice. Scholarly thought has long held that Chaucer did not read or even know Ovid’s exile poetry, a contention which this chapter refutes. While Gower relied on explicit linguistic borrowing to inhabit Ovid in exile, Chaucer instead took an indirect approach, embedding Ovidian refrains, themes and concerns across his corpus. Menmuir discusses Chaucer’s linguistic references to Ovid’s exile poetry, which are our most direct pieces of evidence demonstrating that he was aware of the exilic works and knew how they could be effectively deployed. Direct quotations of Ovid, however, do not constitute Chaucer inhabiting an exilic voice. The latter half of the chapter argues that Chaucer became the Ovidian exile in the figures of Troilus and the narrator in Troilus and Criseyde; the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, where the narrator is an Ovidian exile responding to an irascible ruler; and in Chaucer’s ‘Retraction’, which closes The Canterbury Tales by appealing to Ovidian exilic ambiguity. These works show the extent to which Chaucer understood the fundamental concerns of Ovid in exile, adopting them for his own work and times, his own tense imperial relations and his own desire for poetic immortality.

This chapter highlights the knowledge required to work with diverse students who communicate using the different varieties of English that exist in Australia. In line with the ‘Language variation and change’ sub-strand of the Australian Curriculum: English, we discuss linguistic and cultural diversity through the concept of plurilingualism, and the transcultural and sociolinguistic competence and knowledge required by teachers working with culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) learners. We highlight the challenges and rewards associated with instructing students from varying linguistic and cultural backgrounds. We also stress the crucial role teachers play in nurturing learners of English as an additional language or dialect (EAL/D) students.

It is perhaps one of the most prominent assumptions of rhetorical guidebooks and trainers that abdominal breathing leads to better, e.g., more charismatic and persuasive speech performances. However, recent phonetic evidence was not consistent with this assumption: trained speakers (males more than females) primarily intensified chest breathing when they switched from a matter-of-fact to a charismatic presentation style – and this disproportionate intensification of chest breathing also came with a more charismatic voice acoustics. The present perception experiment builds on these recorded speeches and their acoustic results. We test whether significant correlations would emerge between the acoustic and respiratory measures on the one hand and listener ratings on the other. Twenty-one listeners rated all recorded speeches in individually randomized orders along two 6-point Likert scales: resonance of the voice and charisma of the speaker. Results show significant positive correlations of perceived speaker charisma with f0 variability, f0 range, f0 maximum, and spectral emphasis. Moreover, resonant-voice ratings were positively correlated with both abdominal and chest breathing amplitudes. By contrast, perceived speaker charisma only correlated positively with chest but not with abdominal breathing amplitudes. We discuss the implications of our results for public-speaking training and outline perspectives for future research.

This chapter examines some of the most important poetic influences on Shelley’s writing from the tradition of poetry in English published before his birth in 1792. In particular, it focuses on Shelley’s inheritance of works by Spenser, Milton, and Shakespeare while acknowledging the breadth of his reading and its influence on his own poetic practice (the chapter also acknowledges that Shelley’s inheritance from English poetry must be considered in the context of his inheritance of work in Greek, Latin, and a range of modern European languages, which is discussed elsewhere in this volume). The chapter attempts to tease out some of the ambivalences in Shelley’s relation to his poetic forebears, taking Spenser – royalist and imperial apologist, which Shelley emphatically was not – as a crucial example here.

The use of the English language in many countries around the world greatly facilitates international communication. However, linguists have long pointed out that differences between established and emerging dialects of English may lead to miscommunication, especially because many users of the language may not be aware of many of these differences. Such issues may be particularly acute in high-stakes communicative endeavours such as persuading others to change their opinion or engage in a certain action. Psychologists have previously explored this construct mainly in experimental settings, whereas the present chapter uses a large database (‘corpus’) of natural language. The chapter thus provides an empirical, corpus-based analysis of the linguistic expression of persuasion across 21 international dialects (‘varieties’) of English from countries where English is widely used as a first or second language. Results indicate that there are substantial differences in the degree of overt expression of persuasion, with South Asian varieties of English indicating the lowest levels and (West) African varieties that greatest level of overt persuasion. The chapter concludes by discussing possible explanations of these patterns, implications for international communication as well as avenues for more detailed analyses of particular linguistic features involved in persuasion.

In Chapter 3 we discuss the pitfall of following an ethnocentric view in the study of politically relevant data. We argue that it is not fruitful either to associate a particular positive or negative value with a particular country or area, or to attribute a political notion or an actor with a positive or negative value. Here we critically consider the universal validity of notions such as ‘egalitarianism’ and ‘nationalism’, which may appear at first as clearly positive or negative and as such non-controversial from a Western viewpoint. We will refer to cases in which members of non-Western linguacultures conventionally interpret these notions differently from how they are conventionally seen in the West and how they are often used in academic inquiries in a seemingly ‘neutral’ way. We argue that it is ethnocentric to dismiss linguaculturally embedded standard interpretations of such notions as ‘undemocratic’, ‘unenlightened’ and ‘autocratic’ because through such a dismissive attitude one is led to automatically associating a particular positive or negative value with a particular country or area.