"Perfection is unattainable: Learning English as a lingua franca (ELF) involves approaching the language as a tongue shared by non-native speakers around the world rather than as a lingo that must be mastered to native-speaker level. Letting go of the idea of speaking 'perfect English' could do wonders for Japanese students' confidence." The Japan Times: Could the lingua franca approach to learning break Japan’s English curse?
Dumbing down of standards for the unwashed masses. I wonder where they got that idea? And for business purposes? "I speaky gud Engrush" might work for the street hawker, but for professional purposes it would be an embarrassment and worse than using translators. The only saving grace would be that others would be unlikely to switch to Japanese. The northern Euro model of starting early in grade school plus ample exposure to English media seems to work well despite the necessity of generations of non-native English teachers. Why can't they just do that? Three or four paragraphs is all that is necessary to pitch that model instead of that overly long article of justifications. I wonder how important it really is to the Japanese, as in is there a big untapped market waiting for an Assimil-like company to appear.
Sounds a lot like the communicative approach in a different coat. Oversimplistic "solutions" to complex problems never get you anywhere. The idea of lumping non-traditional native English varieties (Philippines, India, Singapore) in with learner english does nothing to legitimise the status of these varieties in themselves, which is a shame as the differences between them and traditional English are generally pretty consistent, hence codifiable, unlike learner errors.
