English as a lingua franca and Intercultural Language Teaching in EFL Contexts

Abstract

English as a lingua franca has many pedagogical implications for the field of foreign language teaching and teaching English as a foreign language, especially the deemphasize on the native-speaking cultural model. As a better alternative to the NS model, the present paper aims to discuss three key issues, the integration of non-native cultures into the EFL classroom to enrich EFL students’ cultural knowledge and to consider non-native speaking countries as a model, highlight the importance of the non-essentialist understanding of culture as a concept in such an integration, and, to consider a “glocal” cultural model as a second better alternative. Resources were gathered from previous literature and Byram’s model was considered while analyzing the resources gathered. The study makes propositions based on the findings of this study. Keywords: EFL; English; foreign language; glocal cultural model, intercultural language teaching; lingua franca.