International English: towards an acceptable, teachable target variety

This paper offers a ‘first‐approximation’ description of International English (IE). This variety, it is claimed, can be differentiated systematically from other varieties in terms of its content, domains of use, communicative functions, discourse and linguistic features and teaching and learning situation. The picture of IE which emerges is impressionistic rather than definitive, but seems coherent and in accordance with the facts, so far as these have been established, and with the intuitions of those who have had experience in the use of English in international contexts. This paper begins with a review of recent literature on the role(s) of English in the modern world. It proceeds to a feature analysis of IE, and concludes with an outline of the components of an IE curriculum. IE as described appears to be capable of meeting the primary communicative needs of a large and growing number of people who use English for international purposes, and to be teachable in situations where any particular intranational variety would be inappropriate as a target, and unteachable or prohibitively costly given the constraints on the IE teaching and learning situations.