This chapter discusses global challenges in English language teaching and teacher education and the local responses in the Philippines. It outlines the issues posed by globalization from two perspectives: (1) globalization as an "economic imperative" and (2) "critical resistance" against globalization as marginalizing local economic initiatives. It discusses the government’s responses to these issues, motivated by the need for the Philippines to be globally competitive, especially as part of a community of nations in the ASEAN. This chapter also discusses critical issues arising from the local responses to the challenges of globalization, which impact on English language teaching and teacher education in the Philippines: the competing proposals for the medium of instruction, the mixed attitudes toward English, the changing standards of English, and the expanding role of the English language teacher. Finally, it outlines important insights have been gained from these discussions that may inform policy making and professional practice.

Chapter 10 will present a proposal based on the findings and data discussed earlier for a lingua franca approach to English language teaching for the region. This will extend the proposal made by Kirkpatrick (2014, 2018), in which principles of the lingua franca approach to English language are presented and discussed. The lingua franca approach is proposed as a way of both ensuring that English is successfully learned by Asian multilinguals while, at the same time, ensuring the preservation of local languages as languages of education.

This chapter explores ideas about ‘(non-)native’ speakers of English, with particular reference to the professional context of teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL). The use of ‘(non-)native’ speaker to describe a person’s use of English remains common in a variety of domains, despite much scholarly and professional argument against the term. Given that learners and teachers comprise the educational context of this chapter, I have chosen to focus on the native and non-native speakers themselves, rather than on their (so-called) native and non-native uses of English. In doing so, I hope not to fall into the trap of thinking of people as permanent members of closed categories, but, on the contrary, show how we might raise awareness of the (potentially negative) effects of such thinking on speakers of English, in the TESOL profession.

This chapter aims to engage with wider discussions in this volume regarding ontologies of English and how language can be productively conceptualized by English teachers, learners/users, and other stakeholders. As indicated by the title, the work is intended to make a specific contribution towards uncovering complexity in ontologies of language that do not map cleanly onto dichotomies such as ‘monolithic versus plurilithic’ (Hall, 2013), ‘difference versus deficit’, or ‘standards-based versus intelligibility-based’. As also indicated, these ontological discussions are framed by a study carried out in a lingua franca context of pedagogy and usage, where (1) Japanese voluntary workers use English as a Lingua Franca to communicate with local interlocutors in diverse global locations and (2) an English language course is taken by these volunteers prior to their departure from Japan that is specifically designed to facilitate that communication. Further details on this context are provided in the following section before the focus returns to conceptions of English.

Research into global uses of English, and particularly ELF (English as a Lingua Franca), has highlighted the diversity and fluidity of communicative practices in intercultural and transcultural communication through English. Successful intercultural/transcultural communication involves the ability to make use of and negotiate multilingual/plurilingual linguistic resources, a variety of communicative practices and strategies, and movement between global, national, local, and emergent frames of reference. This is a very different conception of competence to that typically utilised in English language teaching (ELT) with its pre-determined ‘code’ consisting of a restricted range of grammatical, lexical, and phonological forms and minimal concern with the sociocultural dimension of communication. The need for a reconceptualisation of language in applied linguistics and more recently ELT has begun to receive serious scholarly attention. However, this needs to be accompanied by a focus on the wider intercultural and transcultural communicative practices in which language is embedded and enmeshed. This entails recognition of the central place of intercultural competence and the awareness that is necessary to manage such complexity, variation, and fluidity in communication. As such, this chapter addresses Hall and Wicaksono’s (this volume) call to interrogate and be “explicit about what we, as applied linguists, think English is – our ontologies of English – and how these ontologies underpin our educational ideologies and professional practices”, with a particular focus on the intercultural and transcultural dimensions to both English use and education policy and practice.

In our introductory chapter, we argued that applied linguistics must be more explicit about the ways in which English is conceptualised in and for the domains of language learning, teaching, and assessment. Now, after eighteen chapters that uncover, advocate, and contest beliefs about the nature of ‘English’ in a range of contexts and from a range of perspectives, we take stock of the project and consider its uses. We don’t have the space here to reference all the arguments and evidence put forward by the authors of these chapters, but we will emphasise those points that we feel have helped to meet the aims of the book. Naturally, we give particular consideration to Pennycook’s companion commentary in the previous chapter.

This book is about the ways in which English is conceptualised in and for the domains of language learning, teaching, and assessment. Examining and being explicit about what we, as applied linguists, think English is – our ontologies of English – and how these ontologies underpin our educational ideologies and professional practices, should be an essential component of research in the discipline. Yet the nature of the ‘EL’ in ELT does not feature anywhere nearly as much as the ‘T’, and how English is conceptualised in schools tends to be debated more by educationalists than applied linguists. Teachers, learners, policy makers, and other stakeholders do have strong beliefs about what counts as English, who it belongs to, and how it should be taught, learned, and tested. In research we conducted with colleagues at a university in China (Hall et al., 2017), English teachers told us about the ways they conceptualised English as a global language and, more narrowly, as the subject they taught to undergraduate students.