Abstract This article examines three critical issues relating to the role of culture in teaching English as an international language (EIL): Firstly, the way in which top-down processes of globalisation, accompanied by the widespread desire for English in many former colonial countries, have in general fostered the negative effects of dominance, divisiveness and difference in world social relations, resulting in the suppression and devaluation of local forms of knowledge and practice. Secondly, the way in which shifts of ownership and authority to non-native speakers and their varieties of English in combination more recently with global cultural flows, have created the need for reconceiving English as a pluralised global language, informed by local norms, functions and practices, reflecting a fluid and multiple cultural base. Lastly, it explores the way in which an ecological approach to English language teaching, which is oriented to ‘globalisation from below’ (Appadurai, 2000; Canagarajah, 2005), and which opens up a dialogical relationship between the global and the local, might help speakers in ex-colonial settings to reclaim their local identity and voice and thus realise the potential of globalisation to construct more inclusive, democratic relationships. Cet article examine trois problèmes cruciaux relatifs au rôle de la culture dans l'apprentissage de l'anglais en tant que langue internationale. Premièrement, il examine comment le processus ‘top-down’ de mondialisation, accompagné du désir répandu pour l'anglais dans plusieurs anciennes colonies a, en general, encouragé les effets négatifs de dominance, de dissension et de différence dans les rapports sociaux dans le monde. Le résultat en est la suppression et la dévalorisation des formes et des pratiques locales. Deuxièmement, il examine comment les déplacements de propriété et d'autorité qui désormais incombent les interlocuteurs non-natifs et leurs variétés d'anglais, depuis peu en cumul avec le flux culturel mondial, ont crée le besoin de reconceptualiser l'anglais comme une langue mondiale plurale alimentée en des normes, fonctions et pratiques locales reflétant une base culturelle multiple et fluide. Dernièrement, il explore comment une approche écologique à l'apprentissage de la langue anglaise, orientée vers la mondialisation par en-dessous (Appadurai, 2000; Canagarajah, 2005), et qui ouvre un rapport dialogique entre le mondial et le local, pourrait aider les interlocuteurs qui se trouvent dans les situations ex-coloniaux, à récuperer leurs identité et voix locales et ainsi à réaliser le potentiel de mondialisation afin d’établlir des rapports plus inclusifs et démocratiques. Keywords: English as an international language (EIL)globalisationlocal forms of knowledge and practiceculturehybridity Acknowledgements The author thanks Nirupama Rastogi for her translation of the abstract. Notes 1. I am aware that Phillipson's (1992) proposition that the spread of English is the result of a deliberate imperialist policy has been challenged by scholars who disagree with this argument. In Brutt-Griffler's (Citation2002), p. ix) view, English ‘owes its existence as a world language in large part to the struggle against imperialism, and not to imperialism alone’. Fishman (Citation1996, p. 640) maintains that the current spread of English is more linked to countries’ engagement in the modern world economy ‘than to any efforts derived from their former colonial masters’. Bhatia and Ritchie (Citation2004, p. 513) even hypothesise that, ‘The economic forces of globalization together with the rise of global media have set the stage for a dramatic, exponential rise in global bilingualism’. While arguments, both for and against linguistic imperialism, have their measure of validity, my concern here is far more with the (negative) consequences of the spread of English than its causes, and the conditions for redressing them. 2. Standards of English have remained a continuing concern at the highest levels of decision making in Singapore with Lee Kwan Yew, the former Prime Minister, and currently Minister Mentor, taking a keen, personal interest in these matters. 3. While it is true that the banning of local languages and literatures was part of the imperialist dominance practice of subjugation, Macaulay's (1952) now infamous Minute of the passing of the English Education Act in 1835 in colonial India, with which the then official languages, Persian and Arabic, were replaced by English, was brazenly justified on the ground that ‘a single shelf of European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’. Macaulay (Citation1952) declared that the native languages were neither moral nor scientific and thus were useless, much in the same way in which ‘foreign’ minority cultures and their ‘lack of civilisation’ were negatively constructed to justify colonisation. 4. Ngugi's (1986) recounting of one of the most humiliating experiences in a colonial school system where children caught speaking the local language were given the cane and forced to wear a placard round their necks with the inscription that read ‘I am a donkey’ or ‘I am stupid’ is painfully reminiscent of such elitism. 5. That is, although when used by ELF speakers English becomes a culture-free code (i.e. free of native-speaker culture), equally ELF is flexible enough to allow speakers to express their individual cultural identity – or ‘original voice’ (Kramsch, Citation1999) – by ‘exporting’ their L1 into the ELF and at the same time stimulate them to co-create a new inter-culture together with their co-participants. When Polzl notes that native-speaker English is ‘voice resistant’ he is referring to its intolerance of these dynamic aspects of the cultural, spatial and/or historical independence (no common ethnic origin) that characterise such interculture(s). 6. Scholars such as Kachru (Citation1992), Moag (Citation1992) and Schneider (Citation2003,Citation2007) agree in general terms that the new varieties of English pass through a series of evolutionary stages, starting with a reliance on exonormative varieties and a prejudice against the local variety through to the stage where the local variety receives local acceptance and becomes the classroom model. Schneider (Citation2003,Citation2007) identifies five phases: (1) the foundation phase when English first arrives; (2) the phase of exonormative stabilisation, characterised by the variety spoken by the settlers; (3) the nativisation phase when the variety of English takes on local lexical and cultural features; (4) the phase when the newly formed indigenous variety becomes accepted as the (endonormative) standard and (5) the final phase of differentiation signalling the emergence of different local varieties that mark ethnicity, identity and so on.