English as an international language and Japan＇s English language teaching

Abstract

1. Introduction English now is said to be an intemational language or a global language. When we say this, do we really understand what it means?This is an important question we have to ask ourselves in Japan now when the nation' s 24,000 public primary schools are preparing to introduce English language teaching (ELT) to their third grade pupils in 2002 (For information, see Honna and Takeshita 1998, 2000 ).Actually, it seems extremely difficult to comprehend various sorts of logical deductions stemming from the current state of the English language.