ABSTRACT
In East Asia, the importance of English as a global lingua franca is growing. For East Asian people English is a language to access to information, knowledge and people beyond their nations. Communication ability in English is considered crucial for national and personal interests. Nations and regions there have taken various measures of English language teaching (ELT) to raise their peoples’ proficiency. These measures include bringing forward the starting age for learning English in school and changing teaching methods from reading/writing centred to listening/speaking centred (Hu, 2005; Chen and Tsai, 2012; Butler, 2015). Even so, people consider school ELT unsatisfactory to develop communicative competence and seek ‘better’ ELT beyond national curriculum. For example, South Korean mothers take their children to English-speaking countries to learn English (Takeshita, 2010). Such phenomena further increase criticism on school ELT, and English education reform is an urgent task for many governments. Their reforms, as we see in this chapter, are towards developing ability for communication with various English users from different linguacultural backgrounds, or ELF communication. However, native speakers of English (NSs) seem to remain as norm providers in ELT, even though learning from ELF users’ uses of English better serves learners’ present needs for wider communication (e.g. Bowles and Cogo, 2015).
