THE ENGLISH curriculum in China – including the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) – has traditionally been dominated by native-speaker (NS) based pedagogical models. This is a source of many problems, ranging from learning outcome to teaching performance, and from cultural inappropriacy to speaker identity. Research in World Englishes (WE), in English as a lingua franca (ELF) and an international language (EIL), and to a lesser extent in second-language acquisition (SLA) has shown that a curriculum informed by a deficit model (by measuring learner performance using the yardstick of native-speaker-based standards) is by its very nature disempowering, and should be replaced with a model of difference, whereby learners' L1 identities and ownership of English are both respected.