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Doing justice to ELF in ELT: comments on Toh (2016)

Toh’s (2016) Topic & Comment article Doing justice to an English as a lingua franca paradigm in this journal provides a sceptical appraisal of a couple of years following the launch of the Center for English as a Lingua Franca (CELF) programme within Tamagawa University, Tokyo, Japan. Having been established in 2013, CELF offers English education to all university departments across the humanities and sciences in 2019, and now may be a good time to reflect on what Toh (2016) has to say. This is all the more so because many readers of this journal would be interested in developing their own ELF-oriented ELT programmes in other parts of the world. The present paper starts by addressing Toh’s (2016) concerns about latent effects of “Western TESOL” on the CELF programme: essentialism, reductionism, and exclusion. Specifically, he problematises one-size-fits-all approaches, behaviourist epistemologies, and hegemonies of native-speakerism. We discuss these issues in relation to former and current practices at CELF, and in relation to ELF theories. We then introduce CELF teacher-led projects for programme development, and conclude by identifying some immanent issues to be tackled in the future. The first author of this response article is a newcomer to CELF, and the second author has an extensive experience in language teaching at the institution, including CELF.