Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on Chinese university students’ attitudes towards their own and other accents of English, and proposes a model of pronunciation teaching from a global Englishes perspective called Teaching of Pronunciation for Intercultural Communication. It also proposes some interesting findings that will shed light on English language teaching in the Chinese context and beyond in the 21st century. The book discusses some language ideologies, including standard English, World Englishes (WE), English as a lingua franca (ELF) and translanguaging. It explores the culture-geographic research context of China and discusses debates on the status of China English as a variety of English and the views on English in China within both the WE and ELF frameworks. The book explores the selection of the phenomenology approach and describes the main research setting and the geographic and linguistic backgrounds of the participants.