RESEARCH PAPERS 28 ENGLISH LEARNERS' ATTITUDES TOWARD ENGLISH AS AN INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE: A QUALITATIVE INQUIRY By ABSTRACT This article reports on a qualitative study that investigated English learners' attitudes toward English as an International Language (EIL). Four major findings were identified in the current study. First, majority of the participants thought that English belongs to all its users, regardless of being its native speakers or not. Second, lack of knowledge of Outer Circle varieties led the students to stick to the two major Inner Circle varieties of English—American and British Englishes as standard norms. Third, majority of participants embraced localisation of English and considered it as a manifestation of local cultures. Furthermore, the learners admitted that their local government has attached great value to learning English, but they were concerned about the utilitarian view of education, since majority of the learners focus merely on obtaining high scores on English exams. Fourth, the learners expressed their dissatisfaction with the imbalanced contemporary English teaching and stated that developing communication competence should be the main goal of English instruction. Therefore, the authors suggest that effective measures be taken at policy making, materials development and pedagogy levels to promote the legitimacy of all varieties of English and meet the needs of today's English learners. Keywords: Attitudes, EIL, English Learners' Attitudes, Standard English, World Englishes. * School of Foreign Languages, Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences), Jinan, China. ** Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran. MUHAMMAD RAHIMI * MARYAM PAKZADIAN ** Date Received: 24/05/2019 Date Revised: 13/06/2019 Date Accepted: 14/10/2019 INTRODUCTION In the era of globalisation, the ongoing spread of English is an indubitable reality, but the reactions to the expansion of English vary. Some scholars consider the spread of English as the indication of English imperialism on the side of the United Kingdom and the United States (Pennycook, 1998; Phillipson, 1992; Canagarajah & Said, 2011), whereas others support the development of World Englishes (Jenkins, 2006; Kachru, 1985) and English as an International Language (EIL) (McKay, 2002). With regard to learners' reaction to EIL, previous research shows that majority of language learners think that Native Speakers (NSs) are the owners of English language, although interactions in international contexts usually occur between Non-Native Speakers (NNSs) (Matsuda, 2003). To date, studies investigating the attitudes of learners toward EIL have yielded contradictory findings as a result of particularities of the local settings. However, a common feature of in EFL contexts was that learners showed preference for native varieties of English over local variants. Learners' attitudes toward different variants of English have been associated with the degree of intelligibility of those varieties (Kachi, 2004). According to Kachru (1981), the negative attitudes toward nonnative accented varieties of English may not be due to linguistic factors, but to stereotyped belief systems. There have been a growing number of valuable studies on the legitimacy of varieties of English other than American and British English (Jenkins, 2012, 2015; Kirkpatrick, 2011, 2015; Matsuda, 2017; McKay & Brown, 2016; Parmegiani, 2014). The majority of these earlier studies used techniques such as Verbal Guise Technique (VGT) or Matched Guise Technique (MGT) to investigate attitudes toward pronunciation (Bayard, Weatherall, Gallois, & Pittam, 2001; Dailey, Giles, & Jansma, 2005; Tokumoto & Shibata, 2011; Zhang, 2013) and relatively a few of them focused on exploring attitudes of learners toward varieties of English and nonnative teachers using questionnaires (Lai, 2008; Lee & Hsieh, 2018; Liou, 2010; Tanaka, 2010). Also, a few i-manager’s Journal on l l English Language Teaching, Vol. 9 No. 4 October - December 2019