Towards an Integrative Approach to EFL and ESL: Comparing English in Cyprus and Greece

As has repeatedly been pointed out in recent years, the categories ESL/Outer Circle and EFL/Expanding Circle should not be considered as clear-cut as traditionally assumed. Consequently, recent research has made first attempts for an integrative approach to Englishes traditionally ascribed to one of these categories. The paper at hand introduces the Extra- and Intra-territorial Forces Model (EIF Model) as a successful attempt to bridge the traditional gap between the two categories and shows how the model works in practice by implementation to the cases of Greece and Cyprus. These two countries are particularly interesting for the application of this framework since their linguistic ecologies, with Greek and English in contact, are essentially similar. From a historical perspective, however, they are fundamentally different; Cyprus is a former colony of the British Empire, whereas Greece has never experienced British colonization. Therefore, the two countries offer the perfect basis for putting the traditional categories of EFL and ESL to the test and for illustrating how more recent models of World Englishes, such as the EIF Model, might offer more flexible theoretical alternatives to earlier, often more rigid theoretical approaches.