The institutional curriculum requires an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) module, which is essential for graduation and aims to enhance international research collaboration. A group of students refuses to engage actively, citing the perspective that English represents ‘linguistic imperialism’ and that participation validates cultural and economic imposition (Linguicism). You, as the person responsible for Internationalization, must develop a strategy to address this resistance.
Based on the critical perspective that you must go beyond methodology to consider political issues, analyze the following proposed actions and choose the correct alternative.
I. Initiate a mandatory, analytical seminar where students collectively debate how English is used in their field’s research, emphasizing that active engagement is key to preventing selfexclusion from global knowledge. II. Remove the EAP module from the curriculum, respecting the students’ resistance as a political decision to reject linguistic imperialism. III. Focus on improving students' grammar and vocabulary to native standards, dismissing their political arguments as irrelevant to communicative skills. IV. Promote a discussion where the EAP course is reframed to focus on English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), highlighting its use by non-native speakers to publish and circulate Global South research. V. Transfer the course to the History department, arguing that the political issues related to English are not the responsibility of the Internationalization Office.

In the field of Applied Linguistics and Internationalization of Higher Education, the essential shift from traditional native-speaker models to the English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) model requires a professional to redefine Communicative Competence based on which core theoretical principle?