The worldwide spread, diversification, and globalization of the English language in the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has significant implications for English Language Teaching and teacher education.
We are currently witnessing a paradigm shift towards Teaching English as an International Language (TEIL) that aims to promote multilingualism and awareness of the diversity of Englishes, increase exposure to this diversity, embrace multiculturalism, and foster cross-cultural awareness. Numerous initiatives that embrace TEIL can be observed around the world, but ELT and teacher education in Germany (and other European countries) appear to be largely unaffected by this development, with standard British and American English and the monolingual native speaker (including the corresponding cultural norms) still being very much at the center of attention. The present volume addresses this gap and is the first of its kind to showcase recent initiatives that aim at introducing TEIL into ELT and teacher education in Germany, but which have applicability and impact for other countries with comparable education systems and ‘traditional’ ELT practices in the Expanding Circle. The chapters in this book provide a balanced mix of conceptual, empirical, and practical studies and offer the perspectives of the many stakeholders involved in various settings of English language education whose voices have not often been heard, i.e., students, university lecturers, trainee teachers, teacher educators, and in-service teachers.
It therefore adds significantly to the limited amount of previous work on TEIL in Germany and bridges the gap between theory and practice that will not only be relevant for researchers, educators, and practitioners in English language education in Germany but other educational settings that are still unaffected by the shift towards TEIL.
Marcus Callies is full professor and Chair of English Linguistics at the University of Bremen. His main research interests are corpus linguistics with a focus on lexico-grammatical variation and innovation in advanced learner varieties of English and World Englishes, Learner Corpus Research, teacher education, conceptual metaphor, and the language of sports.
Stefanie Hehner received her first teaching degree (equivalent to M.Ed.) in 2016 from the University of Gießen, Germany. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Bremen, Germany, working in the teaching and research project "Varieties of English in Foreign Language teacher education". Her research interests include Global Englishes, teacher cognitions, and the interface between linguistics and English language pedagogy.
Philipp Meer is a PhD student and research assistant at the Chair of Variation Linguistics at the University of Münster, Germany, where he has worked since 2016. He is co-affiliated with the Speech Prosody Studies Group at the University of Campinas, Brazil. His research interests include World Englishes, sociophonetics & sociolinguistics, acoustic phonetics, speech prosody, language attitudes, and applied linguistics.
Michael Westphal is a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Variation Linguistics at the University of Münster, Germany, where he also received his PhD in English linguistics in 2016 for his work on language variation on Jamaican Radio (published with John Benjamins in 2017). His research interests include World Englishes, language attitudes, variational pragmatics, and language in the media.
