English as a lingua franca (ELF) is a contact language used for communication between speakers of different mother tongues. The current paper explores the status quo of English teaching in China in the ELF context, with regard to the syllabus, curriculum and textbooks for tertiary-level English learners in five prestigious Chinese universities. Findings show that despite an increasing awareness of the need for expressing diverse identities by means of ELF in a global setting, the Anglo-oriented cultures and values still dominate teaching, with preference for the language and literature of native speakers on the one hand and deficiency in the nativization of English and cross-cultural communication on the other. Thus it is argued that from an ELF perspective a multi-faceted and trans-cultural learning strategy is essential to achieving the goal of openness and adaptability to both internationalized and localized vision.