ABSTRACT
Teaching English as an international language (EIL) raises important questions about the kinds of pedagogical methods that might be appropriate in different cultural settings and even about the nature of what is to be taught, since the particular dimensions of English that are relevant or appropriate to one group in one place and time may not be so to another in a different place and time. In this chapter we extend the idea that we are now in a “postmethod” era to propose that we may also be in a “postlinguistic” era in two senses. First, because phonetic, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic dimensions of “the English language” are not absolute, but relative, there is no monolithic, fixed set of core material that all EIL teachers will teach everywhere. Second, because new technologies have introduced new platforms for multimodal expression and communication that rely crucially on nonlinguistic modes of meaning-making (video, music, sound, graphics, etc.), language must now be taught as only part of a larger constellation of semiotic resources.
