Although research on Global Englishes (GE) has demonstrated the potential for a new perspective of ELT, studies of GE in an Asian ELT context are relatively rare. As current mainstream ELT practice in China still largely emphasizes ‘native English’, university courses related to GE are scarce. This paper aims to unpack the influence of a course on English as a World Language in Chinese university students’ awareness of their own English and GE. Data were collected from students taking the optional course at a university in southeast China. After reporting the findings, the paper further discusses the pedagogical implications of integrating GE into English learning and teaching. It also argues for raising students’ GE awareness and applying critical pedagogy in ELT for GE-oriented instruction.

The present study longitudinally investigates the cognitive processes of advanced L2 learners engaged in a multimedia task that elicited status-equal and status-unequal refusals in English during their study abroad. Data were collected three times by retrospective verbal report from 20 Chinese learners who were studying abroad over the course of one academic year. The results revealed that the learners reported paying increasingly more attention to sociopragmatics in context when they responded to each situation of the task. Furthermore, the study showed the effect of study abroad on the learners’ perceptions of the factors affecting their pragmatic productions across the three phases. These effects were reflected by the decrease in pragmatic difficulties and the increase in pragmatic knowledge reported by the learners. This article demonstrates that using the retrospective verbal report at different points during learners’ study abroad allows the examination of the changes in the cognitive processes involved in L2 pragmatic production.

This study investigates the effects of instruction on second language (L2) pragmatic competence and the factors that moderate the effectiveness of pragmatics instruction. A comprehensive literature search yielded 29 primary studies that involved 1,898 L2 learners, generating 54 effect sizes for between-group contrasts. Aggregated results showed that pragmatics instruction had a large, positive effect on the development of pragmatic competence, g =1.656 (95% CI: 1.387–1.924). Subsequent moderator analyses demonstrated that explicit instruction yielded larger effects than implicit instruction, but the difference was not significant; pragmatics instruction was more effective in foreign language settings than in second language settings; longer treatments yielded larger effect sizes than medium and short treatments; and teaching pragmatics at the high-school level produced the largest mean effect size among all institutional levels. In addition, the outcomes measured by written discourse completion task generated the largest effects, followed by oral production tasks, while ­multiple-choice tasks yielded the smallest effect sizes. We discuss the results by consulting ­previous meta-analytic studies and the methodological characteristics of the synthesized studies.