ABSTRACT
The phenomenon of ELF has been subjected to extensive enquiry over recent years with its own annual conferences, its own Journal, its own Handbook and the resulting papers and articles can be seen as impressive testimony to the rethinking about established ideas that it has inspired. They also reveal, however, that there is no general agreement about how ELF is to be conceptualised as language use or about what implications it has for the pedagogy of English language teaching. There are many engaged both in the descriptive study of English and in its teaching who are dismissive of the very idea that ELF is a phenomenon that warrants any serious study at all. And those who do recognise that ELF raises theoretical, descriptive and pedagogic issues of considerable significance have different views about just what these issues are. This chapter gives critical consideration to the diverse attitudes and perspectives, speculates on what might account for the diversity and proposes a perspective of its own that brings ELF research more closely in line with current thinking about language and the concerns of applied linguistics.
