The question for EIL teachers still arises as to what exactly should be learnt in terms of bodies of linguistic knowledge for use. Graddol (p.68) suggests there is a growing demand for "authoritative norms of usage" and for teachers, dictionaries and grammars to provide reliable sources of linguistic knowledge. The wish for fixed, codified norms of a standard world English reflects an understandable desire for stability, but is it a desire that can or should ever be fulfilled? The same time that English is being rather vaguely defined as 'international', some progress is being made in providing more reliable descriptions of linguistic knowledge drawing on large samples of actual use. The "Bank of English" is an ever-expanding data-base that draws on "contemporary British, American, and international sources: newspapers, magazines, books, TV, radio, and real conversations - the language as it is written and spoken today ". At first site, corpora, such as "the Bank of English", seem to provide an excellent opportunity to draw up norms of international use based on the codification of the output of educated users of English. However, a closer scrutiny of the sources used indicates a very broad range of sources, but non-British and American sources are not strongly represented. (See Sinclair, 2002, xii - xiv) is difficult to see at this stage how or when an equivalent corpus with a sufficient level of authority could be collected from a wider variety of international sources, although the challenge to do so has already been taken up. One example, the "International Corpus of English" (ICE) is described by Kennedy (1999, p.54) as "the most ambitious project for the comparative study of English worldwide." Compilers of such corpora feel the need to protect the quality of their product by selecting the informants. A full website is available outlining the ICE project. (# "Justify">
CONCLUSION
paper has attempted to raise some of the key issues in relation to competence and the emerging field of EIL as a stimulus for further debate in the pages of this journal. Proposing what to include rather than what to exclude might prove to be the most helpful approach for promoting the potentially invaluable insights that corpora can provide. Otherwise, a notion of competence that emphasizes "less" rather than "more" might filter down into the world's classrooms as a justification that "anything goes" providing that it 'communicates': a position that has frequently been described to misrepresent communicative teaching in the past.spite of concerns about standards that such notions of a reduced "core" might appear to embody, projects that aim at gathering corpora of ELF among expanding circle speakers have an enormous long-term potential for providing invaluable data in several areas. They can enhance our knowledge of intercultural communication by allowing us to examine the operation of intercu...
