ABSTRACT
This study combines two areas of study, namely project-based learning in English language pre-service teacher education and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) awareness. Project-based learning involves creating meaningful, real-life-based outputs by engaging in research, critical and creative thinking, and interaction with the actual stakeholders. ELF-awareness in our context refers to being conscious of the meaning of ELF and how it can be incorporated into language-learning environments. In its simplest form, ELF can be defined as the discourse produced by non-native speakers of English, typically characterized with possible deviations from the linguistic, pragmatic, and cultural norms of Standard English. Also ELF can be taken as a paradigm that acknowledges non-native speaker use and users of English in their own right rather than assess them on the basis of a native speaker benchmark. In this study, the pre-service teachers were exposed to a project-based and ELF-aware teacher education program and researched and defined ELF in their own terms, devised ELF-related lesson projects for English classes, shared them with their supervisors and colleagues, applied them in the form of peer teaching and practicum and critically reflected on the process. This chapter focuses on how this project-based ELF-aware teacher education model was applied, how the teachers integrated ELF into English lessons, and what they thought about their ELF-aware projects and the project-based program. The data were collected by classroom observations and interviews with the teachers and analyzed thematically. Highlighting different aspects of non-native speaker reality and multicultural diversity, the sample lessons are expected to contribute to the limited literature of ELF pedagogy with creative and humanistic touches. The study has also revealed the fact that the Standard English-bound attitudes and expectations of some schools and parents put great pressure on pre-service teachers willing to emphasize the multilingual and multicultural diversity in their practicum classes. Yet, this challenge has paved the way for innovative practices of ELF pedagogy, applied mostly in implicit ways. At the end of this multifaceted educational process, a great majority of participants were found to be satisfied with this project-based model aiming to raise ELF-awareness through hands-on practice comprising discovery, creativity, interaction, and multilingual and multicultural diversity.
