ABSTRACT
Since 2019, Taiwan's government has implemented a new curriculum, which emphasizes that in addition to developing students' linguistic knowledge, English education should aim at establishing students' global competency. This encompasses the understanding of cultural diversity and global sustainable development through learning the English language. The competency-driven curriculum that cultivates students' knowledge and ability to solve current and future challenges resonates with 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) proposed by the United Nations. In this chapter, we first review the current trends of global competence and its education from various perspectives. We then demonstrate how we integrate the SDGs and OECD PISA's framework of global competence into a primary-level pre-service teacher training course of English language. By doing so, we hope to equip our pre-service English teachers with global competency and later to be able to design global competence informed courses in response to the newly-launched education policies in Taiwan: the 12-Year Basic Education Curriculum and the International Education Project 2.0. This chapter aims to provide insights for similar English learning contexts like Taiwan of how to develop pre-service teachers' global competency in nurturing their future students into change agents, problem solvers and transition managers.
