English or ELFish? A teaching dilemma of the 21st century

Abstract

Contrary to the predictions of Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1908), English has become the international auxiliary language worldwide. Not artificial Esperanto, but natural English. Globalization of a natural language, however, inevitably has consequences for the language itself. How English is International English, we may ask. For linguists, this is a question of language change. For teachers, this is a matter of choice between a full-fledged native version of the language vs. the so-called ELF (English as a Lingua Franca, cf. the discussion in Dziubalska-Kołaczyk and Przedlacka 2008). The aim of this paper will be to arrive at a moderate recipe” for teachers and learners.