A case study on elf-aware pre-service language teacher education model: Theory into practice

This dissertation aims to shed light on the need for a pre-service language teacher education which sensitizes teachers about the lingua franca status of English and its implications on language pedagogy. Based on a qualitative research design with a constructivist/interpretivist research paradigm, this study constitutes an example of a case study which investigates the implementation of an ELF-aware pre-service teacher education model. The significance of the study lies in its broad spectrum combining two phases which are theoretical training and practicum applications. The theoretical training phase conducted with 26 pre-service teachers aimed at raising participants' awareness of ELF as a construct and ELF-aware language pedagogy through intensive engagement in ELF research and continuous critical reflection. The practicum application phase conducted with 10 pre-service teachers explores how the participants build bridges between theory and practice so as to generate ideas to implement ELF-aware language pedagogy in the complexity of real teaching situations at practicum. The data mainly gathered through interviews, open-ended questionnaires, classroom observations, reflection reports and field-notes were analyzed by thematic analysis method. The findings indicate that the ELF-aware pre-service teacher education model had a remarkable effect on the participants' perceptions and practices with regard to their roles as ELF-aware practitioners. Participating in this reflective and transformative journey in which they critically questioned their assimilated assumptions about the sanctioned language teaching principles and practices substantially changed their mindsets from an established EFL perspective to an ELF-aware perspective. As for the findings of practicum applications, the participants' suggestions and attempts to incorporate ELF into language pedagogy comprise micro-level implications and macro-level implications. The entire process has been reported to have several challenges for the participants as well as a plenty of contributions to their professional development. Keywords: ELF, ELF-aware language pedagogy, ELF-aware language teacher education model, Transformative learning theory