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.

This book maps out the pedagogical implications of the global spread and diversification of pluricentric languages for language education and showcases new approaches that can take account of linguistic diversity. Moving the discussion of contemporary norms, aims, and approaches to pluricentric languages in language education beyond English, this book provides a multilingual, comparative perspective through case study examples of Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Dutch, and Vietnamese. The chapters document, compare, and evaluate existing practices in the teaching of pluricentric languages, and highlights different pedagogical approaches that embrace their variability and diversity. Presenting approaches to overcome barriers to innovation in language education, the book will be of great interest to academics, researchers, doctoral students in the field of language education, as well as socio- and applied linguists. Practitioners interested in linguistic diversity more broadly will also find this book engaging. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-4.0 license.

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.