ELF in the Iranian education system: Exploring teacher trainers' and pre-service/in-service English teachers' attitudes

The present study was aimed at exploring English teacher trainers' and pre-service and in-service English teachers' attitudes toward English as a lingua franca (ELF) in the Iranian education system. To amass the data, 68 pre-service and 118 in-service English teachers and 21 teacher trainers filled out an adapted ELF questionnaire and sat semi-structured interviews. The results of the study revealed that the participants expressed diverse attitudes to different aspects of ELF. However, generally, they showed further inclination toward native speakerism although some traces of flexibility were observed in their attitudes toward the mainstream English language teaching (ELT). Further, the results of one-way ANOVA showed that overall there was no significant difference between the three groups' attitudes toward ELF. Moreover, the results of Kruskal-Wallis Test also demonstrated no significant difference between the three groups' attitudes to each aspect of ELF. The findings of the study imply that the practitioners' fixed mindsets cannot change unless a significant change occurs in the education system of the country in general and teacher training programs in particular.