‘It's everywhere’: experienced teachers’ principled orientation to ELF pragmatics

This paper explores how experienced English language teachers conceptualise and enact pragmatics, with particular attention to English as a lingua franca (ELF) perspective. Drawing on qualitative data from semi-structured interviews and a follow-up focus group with three experienced teachers enrolled on a UK-based MA in Applied Linguistics/TESOL, the study investigates: (1) how teachers understand pragmatics and position its importance within teacher expertise; (2) how pragmatics features in teacher education trajectories; and (3) how pragmatic awareness is enacted in classroom practice. Using reflexive thematic analysis, the findings reveal that teachers display principled orientation towards (ELF) pragmatics: it is widely recognised by teachers as essential for communicative competence, yet its conceptualisation and pedagogical implementation remain uneven. Participants reported limited exposure to pragmatics in initial teacher education and described encountering the concept more substantially only during postgraduate study or exam preparation teaching. In classroom practice, pragmatics tended to emerge through spontaneous interactional moments rather than through systematic lesson planning. While teachers broadly endorsed key ELF principles—such as negotiation of meaning, accommodation and multilingual resource use—they found it difficult to translate these orientations into stable curricular content within institutional contexts shaped by standard language ideology, exam requirements and materials design. The study argues that the marginalisation of pragmatics is less a matter of teacher attitude than of pedagogical infrastructure, and calls for closer integration of ELF pragmatics into teacher education, curriculum design and assessment frameworks.