This chapter reports on ethnographic research carried out in an EMI course in an Italian higher education institution. The chapter starts with a brief overview of the recent, contested growth of EMI in Italy and a critical analysis of national policy documents to unveil the ideological underpinnings of EMI in this sociocultural context. This is followed by the presentation and discussion of findings of ethnographic research carried out over three years in a course designed to promote critical language awareness in an EMI context. The study looks at how students’ ideologies of language interact with those identified at the macro and meso levels, first of all by exploring the language portraits and biographies of a class of students at the beginning of their English-Taught Programme. This is followed by a more in-depth analysis of the portraits and biographies of three students who were interviewed one year later. This provides a longitudinal dimension to the research and insights into the changing nature of language ideologies and also linguistic repertoires.

Heather Jane Smith experienced isolation in her early childhood in the United Kingdom because of her Canadian accent. She then decided to work in Zimbabwe, and back in Newcastle, she focused on the negative prejudices that prevailed regarding multiculturalism in education, taking into account British values and national security, and the growing racist nativist discourse in the English media.

This chapter begins with a review of the early literature on William Labov’s 1972 concept of the linguistic lame, its influence on the study of African American English, and its role in shaping linguistic perceptions of middle-class speakers. The chapter then proceeds with a summary of the small, but growing, body of research on the use of AAE by middle-class speakers, including studies of social stratification, intraspeaker variation, performative language practices, and attitudes and perceptions. The chapter ends with an overview of the topics covered in subsequent chapters of the book.

The chapter focuses on psycholinguistic perspectives of temporal evaluations of fluency, based on skill development, usually comparing L2 fluency to smooth, automatic processes used by native speakers in conceptualising, formulating and articulating speech. We aruge this deficit model of L2 speech is limited, and needs to move to a more dynamic bilingual contextualised view of fluency. We evaluate Segalowitz’s multicomponent model of cognitive fluency, utterance fluency and perceptions of fluency, and current analyses of utterance fluency, in terms of speech rate, breakdown and disfluency, noting how speed, silence and repair may be rated as both negative and positive aspects of fluency. We emphasise the interdependence of individual speech processes across both L1 and L2, the relationship between fluency and different linguistic domains (particularly vocabulary and the role of formulaic sequences or multiword expressions). The chapter also discusses individual differences and psycho-social factors, such as working memory, personality traits, willingness to engage in interaction or not. Also noted are more interactional context-based views of fluency, fluency strategies and perceptions of fluency.