The concept of self-marginalization and empowerment in applied linguistics can be derived from the so-called critical school, whose sociolinguistic findings pertain to power (Fairclough 1989, 1992) and hegemony (Gramsci, 1971/1991). It offers new pers- pectives for the perception of a second/foreign language acquisition process. Thereby, with reference to the notions of multicompetence (Cook, 1991), plurilingualism and multilingua- lism (Kramsch, 2008), metrolingualism (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010; Pennycook, 2010), the concept of English as a Lingua Franca (Jenkins, 2007), translingual practice (Canagajarah, 2013), and particularly the ecological metaphor in language acquisition (Kramsch, 2002a) and learning (van Lier, 2004), which demystify linguistic normativity, we offer a survey stu- dy into the teacher language awareness pertaining to their self-perception as language users. The article concludes with implications for foreign language teacher education in the era of globalization and autonomization of the language learning process.