Exploring ELT practices, teachers’ professional profile and beliefs: Analysing data from the PRIN survey and envisaging pedagogical projections

Abstract

This paper presents selected findings emerging from the survey related to the PRIN Prot. 2015REZ4EZ questionnaire, created and administered by the Unit 3 of the same PRIN project. This tool of investigation was specially devised in order to research and acquire the main values and beliefs ascribable to a volunteer group of teachers, operating in the Italian territory and catering for different levels of education in the national system. From the authentic data collected, it is possible to draw an overall profile of those professionals engaged in the diversified educational contexts above referred to. Even though still connected to and partially influenced by a SE and native-speaker’s model authority, there is evidence of the presence of an active ELF-aware perspective emerging from the respondents; the qualifying questions where this aspect specifically occurs are analyzed in details, particularly in relation to which sociolinguistic model of English are those teachers inspired by in their teaching. Furthermore, those values and beliefs, in connection to the pedagogical approach of choice, are interpreted from a prospective point of view, envisioning their potential developments in the future, also projecting them into the frame of reference provided by a social constructivist model as designed by Kurt Kohn in MY English (2018) and further developments (forthcoming 2020). The emancipation of the ELF users and their adaptive appropriation of the lingual capabilities inherent in the ELF-aware approach, together with the acknowledgement of the ELF-users’ expressive means affordable according to that perspective, are highilighted, also in terms of individual and collective creativity, from the side of both teachers and learners, in the variegated educational contexts.