Over the past decades, English has become a means of global communication. People from different parts of the world and different linguacultural backgrounds use English to interact in intercultural spaces from private to educational to corporate. For many speaker-learners in the Asia-Pacific or Europe, however, using English is often burdened with feelings of inferiority, dissatisfaction, and anxiety. In ELT, possible solutions are in particular addressed by scholars and practitioners working in the fields of global Englishes language teaching (GELT) or English as a lingua franca (ELF) pedagogy. Key pedagogical concepts and approaches emphasize overcoming the mismatch between what is going on in the ELT classroom and how English is used in the real world. Publications and conference contributions focus on criticising native-speakerism and unequal Englishes, raising teachers’ and students’ awareness of ELF, decolonizing ELT practices, providing spaces for pedagogical translanguaging, or calling for a critical perspective on ELT to ensure social justice. All these discussions, whether in the Asia-Pacific or in Europe, have one thing in common: they pay only little attention to speaker-learners as responsible agents of their own communication and learning. In my talk, I will introduce a socio-psycholinguistic model of intercultural ELF communication that places speaker-learners at the center. The model integrates speaker-learners’ MY English repertoires, their communicative capability, and their own requirements of communicative and communal success as beacons of orientation. With reference to these dimensions and informed by case study observations, I will discuss how a pedagogical lingua franca immersion approach can be implemented through virtual exchange to enable LEARNERS of English to develop their own voice as emancipated SPEAKERS of English.