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Revisiting language teacher education in an ELF aware perspective: responses to innovations

  • Lucilla Lopriore ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: January 12, 2024
Journal of English as a Lingua Franca
From the journal Journal of English as a Lingua Franca Volume 12 Issue 2

Abstract

Teachers’ and teacher educators’ individual theories, attitudes and beliefs underlying their daily practice, are often challenged by sociolinguistic changes, curricular innovations, or new language policies that may often trigger teachers’ resistance to change, particularly when they are required to adapt and revisit their teaching practices. In many European countries recent migration flows have modified the countries language landscapes; their school population is now growingly plurilingual and with different learning and language needs. In their out-of-school experiences, learners are more and more exposed to English through social media and to non-native speakers’ English (ELF), aspects not integrated yet in local language policies, nor in teacher education programs. It is thus important to design pre- and in-service teacher education programs aimed at sensitizing language and subject teachers to these new scenarios, using reflective practice approaches in multilingual contexts. These contexts require English language teachers, and teachers who use English in different fields such as Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) or English Medium of Instruction (EMI), to reconsider their personal assumptions and beliefs, and to develop new competences that would incorporate the powerful reflective framework provided by ELF-awareness. The ELF-aware perspective had been adopted in recent courses for English teachers carried out in Italy, as the ENRICH CPD course, and in the CLIL courses for content teachers. The aim of this contribution is to present and discuss findings of two research studies carried out within the above-mentioned courses that were meant to make teachers aware of new instantiations of English through a reflective practice approach such as the ELF-aware approach, and to sustain their professional development as well as their agency. This paper is mostly related to the lessons learnt from the findings from teachers’ responses to course innovations and their agency development during these courses.

Abstract

Le teorie, gli atteggiamenti e le convinzioni individuali degli insegnanti e dei formatori di insegnanti alla base della loro pratica quotidiana sono spesso messe in discussione da cambiamenti sociolinguistici, dalle innovazioni curricolari o dalle nuove politiche linguistiche, che possono spesso innescare la resistenza degli insegnanti al cambiamento, in particolare quando viene loro richiesto di adattare e rivedere le loro pratiche di insegnamento. In molti paesi europei i recenti flussi migratori hanno modificato i paesaggi linguistici dei Paesi; la popolazione scolastica è ora sempre più plurilingue e con esigenze linguistiche e di apprendimento diverse. Nelle loro esperienze extrascolastiche, gli studenti sono sempre più esposti all’inglese attraverso i social media e all’inglese lingua franca (ELF), aspetti non ancora integrati nelle politiche linguistiche locali, né nei programmi di formazione degli insegnanti. È quindi importante progettare programmi di formazione degli insegnanti in servizio e pre-servizio volti a sensibilizzare gli insegnanti di lingua e di materie a questi nuovi scenari, utilizzando approcci di pratica riflessiva in contesti multilingui. Questi contesti richiedono agli insegnanti di lingua inglese e agli insegnanti che utilizzano l’inglese in ambiti diversi, come l’apprendimento integrato di lingua e contenuto (CLIL) o l’English Medium Instruction (EMI), di riconsiderare i loro assunti e le loro convinzioni personali e di sviluppare nuove competenze che incorporino la potenzialità della ELF-awareness. La prospettiva ELF-awareness è stata adottata in recenti corsi per insegnanti di inglese realizzati in Italia, come il corso ENRICH, e nei corsi CLIL per insegnanti disciplinari. L’obiettivo di questo contributo è quello di presentare e discutere i risultati di due ricerche condotte nell’ambito dei suddetti corsi, che avevano lo scopo di rendere gli insegnanti consapevoli delle nuove istanze dell’inglese attraverso un approccio di pratica riflessiva come quello dell’ ELF-awareness, e di sostenere il loro sviluppo professionale e la loro agentività. Il presente documento si riferisce principalmente alle lezioni apprese dalle risposte degli insegnanti alle innovazioni dei corsi e allo sviluppo della loro agentività durante questi corsi.

Keywords: agency; ELF-awareness; innovations; reflective approach; teacher education
Parole chiave: agentività; consapevolezza dell’inglese lingua franca; innovazioni; approccio riflessivo; formazione docenti
Corresponding author: Lucilla Lopriore, Roma Tre University, Via Ostiense, 234, 00146 Rome, Italy, E-mail:

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Published Online: 2024-01-12
Published in Print: 2023-09-26

© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Articles
  3. Higher education students’ attitudes towards English as a lingua franca in virtual exchange settings
  4. Self-presentation as an ELF user in social media: an analysis of Japanese young adults’ online language practices
  5. English as the Academic Lingua Franca (ELFA) for research publication purposes: voices from Iraq and Turkey
  6. Preparing university students for multilingual EMI contexts in Türkiye
  7. Revisiting language teacher education in an ELF aware perspective: responses to innovations
  8. Book Reviews
  9. Piccardo, Enrica, Geoff Lawrence, Aline Germain-Rutherford & Angelica Galante: Activating Linguistic and Cultural Diversity in the Language Classroom
  10. Pineda, Inmaculada & Rino Bosso: Virtual English as a Lingua Franca
  11. Kuteeva, Maria: Tension-Filled English at the Multilingual University: A Bakhtinian Perspective (Multilingual Matters 175)
  12. Rubdy, Tupas & Mario Saraceni: Bloomsbury World Englishes Volume 2: Ideologies
https://doi.org/10.1515/jelf-2023-2008
Keywords for this article
agency; ELF-awareness; innovations; reflective approach; teacher education

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Articles
  3. Higher education students’ attitudes towards English as a lingua franca in virtual exchange settings
  4. Self-presentation as an ELF user in social media: an analysis of Japanese young adults’ online language practices
  5. English as the Academic Lingua Franca (ELFA) for research publication purposes: voices from Iraq and Turkey
  6. Preparing university students for multilingual EMI contexts in Türkiye
  7. Revisiting language teacher education in an ELF aware perspective: responses to innovations
  8. Book Reviews
  9. Piccardo, Enrica, Geoff Lawrence, Aline Germain-Rutherford & Angelica Galante: Activating Linguistic and Cultural Diversity in the Language Classroom
  10. Pineda, Inmaculada & Rino Bosso: Virtual English as a Lingua Franca
  11. Kuteeva, Maria: Tension-Filled English at the Multilingual University: A Bakhtinian Perspective (Multilingual Matters 175)
  12. Rubdy, Tupas & Mario Saraceni: Bloomsbury World Englishes Volume 2: Ideologies
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