Recent work in the field of English as a Lingua Franca (henceforth ELF) has been focused on defining, delineating, and clarifying the nature of ELF. While some work has addressed issues of teacher education and training (see below for a review), we have yet to see a comprehensive proposal that aims both to educate English as a Foreign Language (henceforth EFL) or English as a Second Language (henceforth ESL) teachers about ELF and to engage them in developing, teaching, and evaluating ELF-aware lessons in their own teaching context.

The paper describes a framework for the education of ESOL teachers that is inspired by principles grounded in research on English as a lingua franca (ELF) and world Englishes (WE). The essential feature of such a framework is that it involves interested teachers in a critical reorientation of their beliefs toward English language teaching, learning and communication. This transformative framework informs what we call the ‘ELF-aware’ teacher education component. We then present a framework for a transformative perspective for ELF-aware and WE-aware teachers and describe the phases of a teacher education project that attempted to put this framework into practice.