English as a lingua franca (ELF) is a well-known concept for Englishused as an international contact language among people fromdiverse linguacultural backgrounds. Using a questionnaire, weexplored the attitudes of Spanish and Swedish pre-service primaryschool teachers towards English and its users after their collabora-tion on a virtual platform, during which they were ELF users. Thefindings showed that the ELF user attitudes of the two Europeanstudent cohorts tended to be ambivalent, mixed, and self-contradictory. After discussing factors for participants’ attitudinaltendencies, we conclude that the ambivalence in their overallattitudes seems to mirror the ambivalence of the ‘double’ defini-tions of English in educational policy documents, which may affectthe goals of teaching English in the classroom. We suggest thatuniversity teaching help pre-service teachers develop critical per-spectives towards English and English users, as well as reflecting onwhy they teach English to their future pupils.