Organizing EIL Studies: Toward a Paradigm

Abstract

English as an International Language (EIL) has been a popular field of linguistic and cultural studies since the 1970’s. Its significance for the promotion of international communication and cross-cultural understanding is becoming even clearer in the world today. However, with the ever-increasing interest in EIL studies on one hand, we also seem to be somewhat lost in the abundance of research on the other hand. It is time a holistic approach should be helpful. In this paper, an attempt will be made to systematically organize major areas of EIL studies, with a view to a possibility of ultimately constructing a research paradigm. For example, studies in the background of the teaching of EIL are conceptualized in terms of five categories, that is, historical, anthropological, macro-sociolinguistic, linguistic and micro-sociolinguistic, and communicative aspects of EIL. The communicative aspects, for instance, are further divided into three issues, which are “dilemma between identity and communication,” “intelligibility, comprehensibility, and interpretability,” and “language attitudes toward varieties of English.” It is hoped that this article will provide present and prospective EIL researchers with some useful directions for their voyages.