The following article by Mark Powell is taken from the MacMillan Education on-line teaching resource site.

Extreme makeover

If international business English really looked the part, it would be trim and tanned and sporting a Bluetooth headset. But a glance at what we continue to teach shows it to be overweight and out of date. An extreme makeover is clearly long overdue.

We have a choice of surgical procedures. The first, pioneered by ex-IBM vice president Jean-Paul Nerrière, is known as Globish. According to the website, it's "a dependable language for business or travel anywhere in the world". With a jargon-free vocabulary of just the most common 1,500 words, it sounds ideal. Where do I sign the consent forms?

But read the small print first. Where did Nerrière's word-frequency list come from? "Sex" and "violence" are on it, but "meeting" and "appointment" are not. And since when was jargon a bad idea? It's often the only thing two experts with imperfect English have in common. Worse still, to paraphrase "proposed merger" in Globish you'll have to say "the idea we propose to combine our companies". Looks like the less vocabulary you have, the more grammar you're going to need. Sorry, doctor, I've changed my mind.

How about ELF or English as a lingua franca? The idea here is to fight the flab we call grammar. Passives, tags, gerunds, countability, multi-word verbs, embedded clauses - all native-speaker blubber and a suitable case for liposuction. The only problem is, if you're a non-native, that's probably the English you already speak.

Maybe international English is just a euphemism for intermediate English. And if the language you're using is working, why not just make that your working language?