Public Lecture by Gabriela Zapletalová
The English Department is proud to invite you to
a public lecture
by
Mgr. Gabriela Zapletalová, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of English and American Studies
University of Ostrava
Czech Pre-Service English Teachers' Perceptions of English as an International Language (EIL): From ELF Awareness to Global English Classroom Practice
Monday, November 23, 2026, 8.50 am, P007
In recent years the teaching of English to pre-service teachers has witnessed an innovative approach which explores how English as a global lingua franca can be integrated into teacher education. Traditional ELT paradigms, which centered on prescriptive accuracy and monolithic standard models, are increasingly challenged by the sociolinguistic reality of Global Englishes, where concepts of mutual intelligibility, accommodation, and intercultural communicative strategies take precedence over prescriptive perfection. Adopting English as an international language (EIL) perspective as one of models of language teacher education along the lines of intercultural communication may help re-evaluate language learning targets in pre-service teacher education. At the core of this lecture are the empirical findings from an ongoing research project exploring Czech pre-service teachers’ perceptions of the evolving role of English, conducted with first-year MA pre-service teachers. The findings reveal a complex attitudinal landscape: while students strongly endorse EIL as a desirable pedagogical model for the classroom (62.7%), traditional language standards continue to exert a powerful symbolic influence — 76.1% of trainees still personally strive for standardized proficiency and 46.3% equate strict formal native-speaker command with professional legitimacy. The lecture aims to explore this cognitive-affective dissonance and seeks to discuss how to integrate EIL and ELF awareness into teacher training practice as well as to the teaching of future teachers.
Gabriela Zapletalová is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Ostrava, Czech Republic. Her research interests include a critical analysis of the methodology of using corpora for contrastive linguistic research, discourse analysis of new media communication, and non-native pre-service teachers, ELF, EIL, language attitudes, and internationalization of teacher education.
