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Issues in ELF-aware teacher education

What transpires from research is that most teachers have knowledge and personal experience of what is happening in and to English outside their classrooms but their awareness and disposition towards ELF vary considerably (Illés and Szatzker 2013; Jenkins 2007; Schekulin and Dorn 2013). Practitioners’ thinking is often fraught with conflicting views, uncertainties and ambiguities, which might have different reasons and explanations. When making decisions about targets and norms, for example, teachers may be constrained by their specific teaching contexts, especially by ones with strong exam-orientedness (Ranta 2010). According to a study carried out in Switzerland, even when teachers acknowledge the primacy of intelligibility over accuracy in principle, they are reluctant to make changes in their approach to teaching English (Murray 2003). This finding corroborates the general observation that “teachers tend to be unsettled by innovations in the curriculum and all aspects of pedagogic change” (Dewey 2012: 165). In addition, factors such as practitioners’ proficiency (Llurda and Huguet 2003) and the type of institution where they work can also influence their attitude towards ELF (Decke-Cornill 2003). Despite clear arguments as to why this cannot be so (Seidlhofer 2011: Ch. 4), the outdated view of ELF as a new variety of English which should be described, codified and then taught still holds strong. In a recent study conducted in Hungary (Magnuczné Godó 2014), participating teachers perceived ELF as a variety which may replace or threaten Standard English. Medgyes (2014: 183) seems to support a similar conception of ELF in his action plan for teacher education where he suggests that a “grammar of ELF” should be delineated. Overall, it seems that even though teachers of English are aware of the major developments that have taken place in the use of English, they are unsure about how they are to be understood, or how they are to be related to their own teaching practice. They appear to be in a limbo where “they have already pulled native speakers off their pedestal but are not confident