Theories and Practices in English as an International Language (EIL), World Englishes (WE), English as an Lingua Franca (ELF) Seen in Students Perception Data (1)

This paper addresses the issues of the gap between theoretical stances and inferential data in WE, EIL and ELF, on one hand, and university students’ judgments and perception about theoretical stances and inferential data. We collected students’ responses about these issues. The participants are students who have taken the cyber course called World Englishes or those who have cyber interactions among Asian countries and who have used English as ELF. In this globalized world, most of learners are exposed to English use in their daily life, such as newspapers, TV, music, movies, the Internet and other social networking services. This suggests that our students must have their own judgments about the functions of English. We try to investigate whether their judgments agree with the factual claims made by WE proponents, and ELF proponents. Kirkpatrick (2012) mentions that the goal of English education among the outer circle and expanding circle countries should be set at the level of successful ELF users rather than that of Native Speakers. This suggests the paradigm shift of the traditional model of English Language Education which heavily dependent on native speaker norms to a bilingual or multilingual model. The paper also addresses what images and concepts Asian learners of English have toward the concept of successful bilinguals.