Editorial

As professors and researchers, we are constantly required to ‘change hats’ and deal with teaching, research, and administrative functions, as well as helping young people to find their way in an increasingly complex world. This past November, I was asked to give a plenary talk at an ESP conference in Seoul, Korea, and the clearly delineated theme of the gathering helped to put a framework on many of the pressures we feel today.

The conference concerned how to cope with the current and future situation of curricula of English-related programs at the tertiary level. Some factors I was asked to address included: the drastically decreasing number of prospective college students (due to a decreasing birth rate); the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR); the decline of the humanities at colleges in general; and the ongoing restructuring of colleges and universities.

Despite having an MBA as one of my first graduate degrees, I was not familiar with the 4IR. Investigating this was interesting and productive, and there is a particularly useful diagram by the World Economic Forum (www.weform.org/agenda/2016). The diagram places the 4IR in the center, surrounded by eight trends including Agile Governance, Security and Conflict, Disruption to Jobs and Skills, Ethics and Identity, and Innovation and Productivity. The eight main trends are then circled by 40 other more specific trends.

At my own university, I have seen the number of committees and administrative tasks increase at a staggering rate in recent years, and often thought it was just our own administration getting too bureaucratic; yet this is part of a much wider global phenomenon. We have added a committee on Research Ethics and a committee on Leading Edge Research, individual professor’s research budgets are much more tightly reined in, syllabi need to follow CEFR-like ‘can do’ statements, annual ‘Monitoring Sheets’ have to be produced for every department and function, the life cycle of new faculties being created to fit with the times gets shorter and shorter, the university home-page forms and functions change and grow rapidly, there is a reduction in tenure-track faculty, the university board will now appoint the President and all Deans and department heads, and so forth. It is an era of tight governance and control.

So, as researchers, it is increasingly difficult for us to get the quiet time we need to focus on what we want to investigate, and to read, gather data, and write. Yet I think for contributors to Asian Englishes, these varied phenomena of the 4IR – all of this increased governance and accountability – are the reality for future users of English. Thus, our research needs to be contextualized within this reality, and should help people navigate this reality.