ELT Students’ and Instructors’ Perceptions of the Need for a ‘World Englishes’ Course: A Case Study

One of the effects of the global spread of English is the emerging varieties of English, briefly known as World Englishes. In language teacher education programs where the use of British or American versions of English is dominant, there is a need to make the prospective teachers of English become aware of the changing status of English and develop an understanding and view consistent with the sociolinguistic realities of the spread of English as an international language. Although other courses in the curriculum may provide some awareness, there still seems to be a need for a course for the incorporation of World Englishes into the undergraduate program. The purpose of this present case study is three-fold. First, it aims to investigate the beliefs of students and instructors of the FLE Department towards the changing status of the English and its varieties. Second, the study seeks to find out to what extent the current ELT curriculum fulfills the needs, wants and lacks of the teacher candidates in terms of the changing status of English, i.e. World Englishes. Finally, the study intends to obtain perceptual data on the needs, wants and lacks of pre-service teachers as regards the features of the elective course syllabus to be proposed. The study was conducted at the Department of Foreign Language Education (FLE), Eastern Mediterranean University (EMU), in Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). In the light of the above-mentioned aims, the study involved 80 pre-service teachers from the undergraduate program of ELT, and 7 instructors currently teaching in the ELT program. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were employed in order to obtain data for the study. For this purpose, Likert-scale questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were conducted both with the pre-service teachers and the instructors. The findings revealed that both pre-service teachers’ and instructors’ beliefs towards the changing status of English and its varieties were positive in many ways. Secondly, in participants’ point of view, the current ELT curriculum of FLE Department is not sufficient to provide information about the changing status of English and its varieties, a finding which supports the statement of the problem. Finally, the responses given by the participants to the needs analysis part of the questionnaire and the interviews showed similarity in terms of goals of the course, content and sequencing, format and presentation, and monitoring and assessment. Based on these findings, an elective ‘World Englishes’ course has been proposed with a 14-week syllabus, hoping that it will contribute to the improvement of the pre-service teachers’ awareness and professional knowledge about the changing status of English, i.e. World Englishes.