Abstract—The worldwide use of English nowadays has
promoted the development of WE and ELF, which have
brought about certain challenges to traditional concepts of
English education. Although with different interpretations
based on various literature，in WE and ELF, both a variety of
English around the world and effective communication in the
language are thought highly of. In this sense, there are three
measures that need to be taken. First, instead of sticking to
native speaker model which merely values one variety of
English, teachers should assist students achieving intelligibility
among different speakers during interactions, promoting
communicative approach and holding communicative activities
in order to achieve the goal. Second, teaching methods and
contents as well as assessment are supposed to correspond to
needs of students, who probably learn English as a second or
foreign language and use it for specific purpose only. Third,
compared to native monolingual teachers of English, local
bilingual teachers, who could perform better towards the two
measures above due to characteristics such as local cultural
insights, sympathy for students’ learning problems and the
ability to use first language for assistance of teaching, are
probably more suitable for successful English teaching in some
cases. In this essay, after characteristics of WE and ELF are
synthesized, implications on English teaching and learning will
be discussed. In conclusion, the target of intelligibility,
contextualized teaching and the selection of local bilingual
teachers with high proficiency, all of which result from
influence of WE and ELF, should be promoted in English
education.
Index Terms—WE, ELF, English education, intelligibility,
contextualized teaching and learning, local bilingual teachers.
Wei Leyi is with the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong (e-mail:
wlycatherine@126.com).
Cite: Wei Leyi, "World Englishes (WE) and English as Lingua Franca (ELF): Implications for English Teaching and Learning," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 10, no. 5, pp. 389-393, 2020.
Copyright © 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).