English as a Lingua Franca in Asean – A Multilingual Model

Andy Kirkpatrick is Professor and Head, Languages and Linguistics, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. His research interests include the development of regional varieties of English and the history of Chinese rhetoric. He is the author of World Englishes: Implications for International Communication and ELT (2007), and editor of The Handbook of World Englishes (2010).

Much research has been carried out on varieties of English used in Southeast Asia, but how intelligible these varieties are to others and whether a shift towards an international 'standard' variety occurs in interactions between people from the region, has been much less discussed. This volume, which provides a comprehensive account of the roles and functions of English in ASEAN, and gives a linguistic description of the English spoken in the region, followed by an approach to teaching English called the 'multilingual model', is therefore a welcome contribution to studies on English in Asia. -- Azirah Hashim, University of Malaya