This paper discusses the significance of fostering ethical awareness among practitioners in the field of English Language Teaching (ELT) and explores how pedagogical interventions within teacher training programs can effectively achieve this goal. Historically, ELT has prioritised the mastery of English as spoken by native speakers in particular countries like the US and the UK, thus neglecting the diverse population of English language users. This tradition has led to a limited perspective among students, despite the majority being non-native English speakers. While there is growing awareness of these issues, particularly in countries in East Asia, where English may not be prevalent in daily life, native speakerism continues to influence ELT practices. English teacher candidates who have been educated in such environments often bring rigid notions of English language proficiency into their teacher training programs, perpetuating an emphasis on achieving native-like English.

To break this cycle, it is imperative to raise awareness among teacher candidates regarding the challenges inherent in current ELT practices during their training. This paper introduces an intervention initiated by the author at a university in Tokyo, consisting of a series of four lectures covering topics such as native speakerism, the diversity of English, and intercultural communication. Written reactions to these lectures were collected from approximately one hundred teacher candidates and qualitatively analysed. The collected data reveals the complexity of fostering ethical awareness among teacher candidates. While the intervention successfully enhanced their appreciation for the diverse users of English, it also exposed the difficulty in prompting a critical analysis of prevailing ELT practices.

These findings underline the need for a more interactive and collaborative approach to addressing these issues. A workshop-style intervention, encouraging deeper engagement and collaborative exploration of ethical concerns within ELT, emerges as a potentially more effective method for nurturing ethical awareness among teacher candidates.