Inspiring Pre-service English Language Teachers to Become ELF-aware

Abstract

As English as a lingua franca (ELF) continues its global expansion, the need to deal with related pedagogical questions becomes more urgent. Although there have been some studies on ELF-aware students, there is also a need for inspiring ELF-aware teachers, especially at the pre-service stage so that they begin their professional lives with an ELF-aware mindset. The study reported here aimed to explore the views of a group of pre-service teachers (N = 24) after exposure to a variety of awareness-raising tasks. Data gathered by interviews and a questionnaire suggested that good ELF-aware teachers have seven main characteristics: they give less value to error correction and more to intelligibility, they respect linguistic and cultural identity, and they are open-minded, tolerant, willing to allow choice, and realistic about language use in the real world. These characteristics are exemplified and discussed, and recommendations are made for on-going development of the ELF-aware teacher.