ELT Students’ Attitudes Toward the Pedagogical Practice of English as a Lingua Franca

Abstract

The continuous increase in the number of non-native speakers who use English as a lingua franca (ELF) would entail a revision in the objectives of ELT programs. The new programs are expected to shift their emphasis from promoting native speaker norms to enhancing comprehensibility and communication effectiveness. This study investigates whether undergraduate ELT programs in Turkey are successful in achieving this objective. Two hundred and three freshman, sophomore, and senior students majoring in the ELT programs of three universities completed an ELF-awareness questionnaire. The results showed that while students generally supported ELF-aware perspectives in domains like introducing native-speaker English varieties and cultures, communicative effectiveness, and local authorship, they opposed them in domains like learning/teaching pronunciation, non-native teachers’ status, mother tongue support, and the use of non-native accents in listening assessment. Results also showed that the freshmen, compared to the other students, had less favorable attitudes toward an ELF-aware pedagogy.