No more double decker buses

Participants at the ELTAF conference on Saturday were treated to thought provoking keynote speech by Penny Ur. With over a third of the world's population speaking English, mainly as a foreign or second language, English has become a "lingua franca" detatched from the cultural roots of mother toungue countries and used primarily as a tool for international communication.
The implications are huge: Penny told us about the developing world standard English that is neither British nor American and forces us to rethink our ideas about what is "correct". In future we have to concentrate on a culturally neutral model of English with an emphasis on comprehensibility in grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation.