The globalisation of English in recent decades has focused scholarly attention on the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) where second language English speakers are the overwhelming majority. This emerging field of research has significant implications for English language teaching (ELT) because it reveals the real-life use of English in international communication. Against this background, this study reports on the first-hand experiences of a wide range of English users in Hong Kong through interviews specifically focused on language use contexts, problems and solutions. The findings suggest that although the daily use of English by the interviewed English speakers tended to be context-specific and perhaps individualised according to its occupational nature, many of those interviewed reported that they had encountered similar problems with international communication, including accent variations, telephoning and cultural differences. It was also found that the participants altered their language use when communicating with English speakers with different language and cultural backgrounds and in different situations. This study highlights some important observations and recommendations based on the challenges and the solutions suggested by the people interviewed, with wider implications for the choice of appropriate ELT goals and approaches for contemporary English language education.Keywords: English as a lingua franca, English language teaching, language use and contexts, problems and solutions, Hong Kong IntroductionOne major consequence of the globalisation of English in recent decades is the increasing number of second language (L2) speakers worldwide, who have become the overwhelming majority of English language users (Graddol, 2006;Seidlhofer, 2011). Over the past two decades, the language use of L2 English speakers in international communication has become the focus of attention in the emerging research paradigm of English as a lingua franca (ELF). Much of the early exploratory work on ELF has been informed by corpus projects such as the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) (Seidlhofer, 2001) and the corpus of English as a lingua franca in academic settings (ELFA) (Mauranen, 2003), which investigated the simultaneous spoken interactions of (mainly L2) English speakers in Europe. More recently, ELF research has been extended to a seemingly comparable multilingual context, i.e., Asia, alongside the establishment of the Asian Corpus of English (ACE) (Kirkpatrick, 2010(Kirkpatrick, , 2016. These corpora, together with other ELF studies, have yielded important descriptive findings regarding how ELF is used by speakers of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, particularly in the areas of phonology (e.g., Jenkins, 2000Jenkins, , 2002, lexis and lexicogrammar (e.g., Cogo & Dewy, 2012;Seidlhofer, 2001) and pragmatics (e.g., Björkman, 2014;House, 2013;Kaur, 2011). Further, many ELF studies have Chan Yee Him, JimThe Journal of Asia TEFL Vol. 15, No. 2, Summer 2018, 257-275 258 centred...