English Language Teachers’ Awareness of English as a Lingua Franca in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts

Abstract

Today English has become the Lingua Franca or common language of many people, regardless of theirbeing native or nonnative speaker of English all over the world. Therefore, it has become necessary toeducate pre-/in-service teachers with an awareness towards the significance of the involvement of an“English as a lingua franca” (ELF) perspective in their language teaching practice inmultilingual/multicultural contexts. In a rapidly changing world, many English language teachers andteacher trainers are cognizant of the impact of migration in their teaching contexts. However, it is stillnot very clear to what extent and in what context they are integrating ELF related issues in theirlanguage teaching practice. In this study, we make an attempt to unveil in-service teachers’ beliefs aboutELF in pedagogical practice in three different countries – Poland, Portugal and Turkey. In order to dothat we have adopted a questionnaire from an earlier study investigating the involvement of culture inELT in expanding circle contexts. The findings of the study revealed that although teachers in thesecontexts are aware of the significance of the inclusion of an ELF-aware perspective in ELT, they are stillhesitant about its applicability in their own teaching context. This study has implications for raisingEnglish language teachers’ awareness in conceptualizing how an ELF-aware pedagogical approach canbe implemented in a multilingual/multicultural context.© 2019 EJAL & the Authors. Published by Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics (EJAL). This is an open-accessarticle distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY-NC-ND)(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).