The presenter examined culturally embedded values inhibiting pedagogical change, some of which are rhetorical (Turner, 2011), and some of which stem from Western TESOL (Toh, 2016; Holliday, 2005), sharing examples of writing and speaking tasks designed to resist essentializing influences in education, and counter discrete and bounded views of language and culture, by employing videos of ELF communication. In a Japanese university setting, learners searched online for TV advertisements in international contexts, writing about the cultural and linguistic content, and thinking critically about the explicit and implicit messages. They also searched for videos of ELF communication from which speaking tasks were later derived. The presenter contends that teachers thinking about the implications of ELF research can lead to learners experiencing activities which help counter deficit notions of pedagogy, reduce epistemological reductionism, and increase linguistic awareness.