Fostering awareness of the pedagogical implications of World Englishes and ELF in teacher education in Italy

Abstract

Teacher education represents an essential step to raise awareness of the sociolinguistic changes brought about by the current pluralization of English and by its lingua franca role. Within the pre-service teacher education programs run at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Verona, Italy, part of the English language course focused on issues related to World Englishes (WE) and English as a lingua franca (ELF), aiming at fostering awareness of and active reflection upon their pedagogical implications. After taking into consideration recent developments in WE-and ELF-aware teacher education, we will report on findings from a research study involving trainee teachers attending the aforementioned courses for English in academic years 2012-13 to 2014-15. The main aim of the study has been to investigate whether, how and to what extent trainee teachers' pedagogical knowledge and reasoning about a WE and ELF-informed perspective in teaching practices may undergo a change after attending these courses. Drawing upon different sets of data (questionnaires, reflections in e-learning discussion forums, interviews and final reports), the trainees' increased awareness of and readiness to include a WE-and ELF-informed didactic approach after attending the Paola Vettorel, Sara Corrizzato 488 course will be discussed, together with implications for foreign language teacher education.

Global Englishes and language teaching: A review of pedagogical research

“…Two (Cameron & Galloway, 2019; Galloway & Numajiri, 2020) were conducted with pre- and in-service teachers (mostly pre-service) on a UK-based master's programme and the other two Anglophone studies (Ates, Eslami, & Wright, 2015; Eslami, Moody, & Pashmforoosh, 2019) were conducted in the US, responding to the changing demographics in native English-speaking classrooms as a result of increased migration. The only other contexts included in this group are Italy (Vettorel & Corrizzato, 2016), Indonesia (Zacharias, 2016), Korea (Love, 2013), Thailand (Prabjandee, 2020), and Turkey (Sifakis & Bayyurt, 2015; Biricik Deniz, Özkan, & Bayyurt, 2020). The lack of research in other regions of the globe is significant.…”

“…However, in some studies, small numbers of participants had teaching experience (e.g. Cameron & Galloway, 2019) and in Vettorel and Corrizzato (2016), a quarter of the participants had more than five years of experience. Notably, definitions of pre- and in-service teacher education were not always clear in these studies and length and lack of experience differed greatly.…”

“…Vettorel and Corrizzato's (2016) study in Italy included the design and implementation of a WE- and ELF-aware teacher education module and investigated how it influenced pre-service teachers’ attitudes towards teaching practices. The two-year mixed-methods study involved two cohorts of students and data collected via questionnaires, reflections in e-learning discussion forums, interviews, and final reports.…”

“…In summary, many approaches are being taken to introduce innovations in teacher education in relation to Global Englishes. Only Vettorel and Corrizzato (2016) and Ates et al (2015) utilized pre- and post-course data to examine the influence of the innovation and both used questionnaires to do so. However, data were only robustly reported in Ates et al (2015).…”

“…The studies indicate that participants, albeit often conflicted, are generally supportive of change (Sifakis & Bayyurt, 2015, p. 2018), yet there is no research on what happens when they enter or return to the classroom. In Vettorel and Corrizzato (2016), Cameron and Galloway (2019), and Galloway and Numajiri (2020), barriers to innovation were explored and it is hoped that more research will explore the feasibility of curricular innovation in a range of teaching contexts.…”