Our aim in this study was to address the research
gap between recent academic debates about
suitable target varieties of English for learners, and
the ‘Englishes’ that are actually taught and learned
worldwide. There has been an increasing advocacy
in some quarters (e.g. Jenkins, 2007a) for English as
a lingua franca (ELF), which has been characterised
as a flexible mode of communication between nonnative
English speakers. World English alternatives
such as local varieties like Indian English are also
being advocated by some as models which are
comprehensible by, and accessible to, local learners
and which are grounded in the real-life usage of
people in everyday discourse across a range of
domains. Such advocacies are at least partly a
reaction to previously prevailing ‘native speaker-ist’
(Holliday, 2006) models. Such models, it has been
argued, have a tendency to idealise ‘native’ English
speakers’ usages, and disempower non-native
English speaker teachers and learners, and so
contribute to the perpetuation of a sociopolitical and
economic hegemony of ‘core’ English-speaking
countries such as the UK, the USA and Australia
(Jenkins, 2007b).