Global English and ELT: a new perspective in teaching English

Globalisation has brought with it an enormous expansion of English as the language of international communication, to the point that now English is the indisputable global lingua franca. This situation has created an enormous need to learn the language in every corner of the world, but at the same time it has forced practitioners to look at the language from a new perspective. From teaching and learning a foreign language that used to have its centre in the UK and the US, teachers need now to incorporate a global English perspective that eliminates the centre vs. periphery dichotomy and focuses on the international dimension of the language. When we consider English as a global lingua franca, the ultimate target of all English learning and teaching activities is the interaction in which the learner is or may eventually be involved. In other words, the goals of learning the language are based on the development of communication skills in a diversity of contexts and situations rather than on imitating native speaker models. A global English perspective has implications for language teachers and for the actual practise of teaching the language. First, traditional ways of teaching the language and traditional contents will need to be reconsidered. Next, language teachers’ identity is also affected by the global spread of English. Both native and non-native teachers used to be (and to a great extent still are) conditioned by the implicit goal of having to pursue native models in language teaching. Breaking with the limitations imposed by a narrow perspective based on the native speaker model will bring native and non-native teachers together in the common goal of helping learners become proficient users of English as a lingua franca, and will free non-native teachers in particular from the burden of teaching the language with a native-speaker orientation.