Abstract
English is now regarded as the world's principal international language, and there are now more exchanges between non-native speakers of English than between non-native speakers and native speakers. As a result, the traditional idea of a native-speaker accent as a model or norm has come to be questioned. This paper first surveys the change in the attitude towards non-native English pronunciation in the seven versions of Gimson's Pronunciation of English (first published as An Introduction to English Pronunciation in 1962), the seventh of which was published in 2008, and then examines several models of English pronunciation with simplified phonological systems which have been devised for international communication. After comparing those models with the Lingua Franca Core proposed by Jenkins, which is a small set of pronunciation points found crucial to intelligibility in spoken interactions between non-native speakers of English with different first languages, the writer works out a tentative guideline for teaching Japanese learners of English to achieve minimal intelligibility in international communication, making as much use as possible of the sounds as we have in Japanese.
