The paper presents the background, design, implementation and impact of the Continuous Professional Development (CPD) programme of the EU-funded ENRICH Project, which ran from 2018 to 2021. The programme, which has been freely available online since January 2022 (http://enrichproject.eu), aims at implementing the principles and processes of ELF awareness in empowering English language teachers to integrate the role of English as a Lingua Franca in their multilingual classrooms. We begin by justifying the development of the ENRICH Project with reference to the policies of the European Union supporting multilingualism and go on to discuss the principles of ELF awareness that informed the ENRICH CPD programme. We also present the priorities, target groups, key objectives and innovative practices of the ENRICH CPD programme. The paper is rounded up with a sample of participants’ responses to certain CPD activities and with an appreciation of the impact of the programme on participant teachers and their learners.

The paper presents four premises and two principles guiding the ENRICH Project, an EU-funded (Erasmus+) project that ran from 2018 to 2021 and developed an innovative online continuous professional development programme aimed at educating teachers of English as a foreign language in raising their own and their learners’ ELF awareness. I further discuss my own observations from the extensive training programme with regard to implications of ELF aware teacher education and pedagogy and present the essential ingredients of what I call the “ELF state of mind”.