How Students Perceive the Learning of English as an International Language: A Theoretical and Practical Approach

Abstract

English is no longer the language belonging to about 375 million native English speakers. It is also an international language spoken by more than a billion of second and foreign language users. The models used to teach English as a second or foreign language have traditionally been mainly native speaker models. However, in the last few years, a large number of researchers have suggested integrating a model of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) into the English classroom because it has several benefits for international communication, since international intelligibility is now the main goal. In this work, a research study has been carried out to analyze how Spanish students of English (B2 level) value some of the main tenets of the ELF model, such as the importance of confidence, intelligibility and the dichotomy native vs. non-native accent while speaking the foreign language.