Beyond the native speaker fallacy

A billion and a half people speak English worldwide but only 375 million are native speakers, which means about 75 percent are non-native speakers. ¹ Most of them use “English as a Lingua Franca” (ELF), defined as “use of English among speakers of different first languages for whom English is the communicative medium of choice.” ² Who then taught them English? About 80 percent of the English teachers in the world are non-native English speaking teachers (NNETs). ³