This is the second of two chapters which look at the Professional dimension of EFL, and the last discussion chapter before the book's conclusion.

The foundation of my research has been a Thai university, selected in order to capture some of the distinctive features of teaching English in 'Expanding Circle', Asian, EFL contexts. What I would like to do now is develop many of the observations I have made throughout the book regarding the professional domain of Asian EFL – and I will do so by taking the learner as a focus point. That is to say, if we consider, say, a Thai or Chinese or Korean student of EFL, located in her/his homeland, what do her/his learning conditions have in common with those of an immigrant to the US or Australia who now studies ESL?

To date, there is one area where contextual difference has been richly explored: that of language variety, both within the more traditional World Englishes domain, and recently in debates around the role of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). But as Bruthiaux has pointed out (2010), studies relating to language variety have not been matched by enquiry into the pedagogic needs of learners and their teachers. Indeed, for most teachers in most EFL contexts, notions of whether to choose a standard or Lingua Franca variety of English for teaching purposes would be irrelevant or even invisible (Young & Walsh, 2010). For as noted in the previous chapter, in most EFL classes, the curriculum is the textbook; and EFL teachers' vital concerns usually relate to personal L2 proficiency, cultural understandings, and the challenges of teaching large classes, over long hours, and sometimes with little training.

To describe global contexts in all their complexity would be a huge task (though see V. Cook, 2009); and even to discuss the Asian continent, as I do here, is highly challenging. There are many variations which are impossible to capture; however, I believe that detail may be omitted in order to produce some useful descriptors and generalisations.