The global education trend has gained importance in education systems throughout the world. This special issue discusses a number of issues regarding the possibility of incorporating a global perspective into foreign language education, and considering also some of the implications of this for language teacher education. The educational process should lead to educating people with modern, world-conscious minds, and the knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary for playing an active and creative role in our changing society. Global education, therefore, can be seen as a prime educational resource for fostering the transition to a wider world outlook in the process of increasing globalisation.

Being the language teachers, we should enable our students to gain expertise in two areas: the major area – foreign language teaching, and the additional area of language and literature teaching. This combination reflects the current historical necessity for the country as a whole to develop a deeper understanding, on the one hand, of foreign languages and cultures (leading to a global awareness – awareness of world issues) and, on the other, of culture (leading to a greater national awareness and promotion of national identity).

As an English language teacher, I came to feel that bringing a global perspective into foreign language lessons in such a context might help to broaden students’ horizons, while the focus on the native language and culture could encourage them to deal with world issues from a local perspective. This assumption matches the view of Brooks (1971, cited in Stern 1992: 236), who observes that ‘understanding and appreciating the view of life held by another nation’ opens up ‘a deeper insight into our own’. Similar ideas have been voiced by other educators (including Prodromou 1988; Adaskou et. al.29. 1990; Kordes 1990; Hausemann 1994; Kramer 1994; Risager 1998; and Garbey-Savigne 1999).

The research investigated the attitudes of foreign language teachers from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds. We hope to gain a range of ideas from teachers across a range of nationalities which might help in incorporating a global perspective in the teaching context. Therefore, first two research questions concerned how global issues and global values should be selected within foreign language teaching. One of the ways of raising teachers’ and teacher trainees’ awareness of global education could be by distributing questionnaires which ask about their ideas and attitudes to incorporating a global perspective into foreign language teaching, and which also contain some degree of theoretical input. This led to the third research question, namely whether reflection on questions regarding global issues and values by teachers and teacher trainees can raise their awareness of the importance of global education within foreign language teaching.