I was thinking the other day back to when I came across the term ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) for the first time. It was back in 2013, I think.

And do you know what?

I literally thought it had something to do with, well...

...an ELF!

And Santa Claus and delivering presents.

Honestly, I was completely clueless.

The funny thing was, though, that by that time I already had a BA in English Philology, CELTA, DELTA and about 5 years of teaching experience. And I would consider myself a fairly interested teacher, who would seek professional development opportunities and go to workshops, or read blog posts, for example.

Not every day, but you know what I mean ;)

Yet, ELF had never been even mentioned in any of my teacher training or degrees that I'd done.

I might have been unlucky, but the last time I looked at CELTA syllabus, there was absolutely nothing there on ELF. There is some mention of varieties of English on its curriculum, and while a successful candidate should “understand the main ways that varieties of English differ from one another”; the CELTA trainers I’ve spoken to all confirmed that it’s entirely up to them whether to talk about the lingua franca/international nature of the English language, or not.

I know - it's a very intense 4-week course. But if there's enough room to keep the long debunked learning styles on it, then it's curious there's no space for ELF.

When I started delving deeper into the topic, I discovered that there was a whole thriving research community who had been publishing research on the topic since the early 90s.

Since then, I've given numerous workshops on the topic, and one of the most consistent feedback I get from participants is: Marek, I'd never thought about that before. OR Marek, this is all new to me. OR I never realised that there were so many practical implications of ELF.

This to me shows that there's a huge gap between research and practice as far as ELF is concerned. A gap that I think must be bridged.

A first small step in bridging this gap is this post where I talk about what ELF means. You can read it here.

Looking forward to your comments.

Best,

Marek

Trainer, TEFL Equity Academy

Founder, TEFL Equity Advocates