I’ve recently learned that my social circle is a lot smaller than I thought it was. You see, I’ve been teaching English in South Korea for three years, and for some reason along the way I thought that everyone knew what TESOL was. Not everyone knows the difference between EFL and ESL – and that’s fair. Maybe it’s jargon. “ESOL-babble.” Since January, when I started my MAT-TESOL@USC, I’ve kind of taken it for granted that people know what I mean when I say I’m studying TESOL. But, as it turns out, I’ve gotten a lot of questions about what that means –from people who are not teachers and from people who are. So, over the next couple of blog posts that I do, I am going to try and demystify the world of TESOL.
Today, I’ll start with the original question that I often get: What is TESOL?
The fact is that TESOL is a newer field. It’s not all nice and neatly packed into a discipline that one can master. Not to say that any discipline can be packed away and completely mastered. Maybe Latin – but that’s due for a revival, right? Anyway, TESOL is arguably more ripe for scholarship when compared with some other disciplines that have a long history of scholarship and less heated political debates associated with it. Okay, I am biased – but when I read current research in the field of TESOL, particularly debates centered on whether language learning is a mental process or a social process, I see that it’s a field in transition.
From a strict standpoint, TESOL means the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. This name implies that the students are learning English as a “second language” – that is, in addition to their first language, from within an ESL environment – meaning that they are learning English in an environment in which the students’ first language is a language other than English, but in which they spend most of their time outside of the classroom surrounded by and using English.
This is in contrast to EFL, which means an environment in which students are learning English as a “foreign language” – meaning that a student is learning English in addition to their first language, but outside of the classroom, the student is surrounded by and using a language other than English, which is perhaps but not necessarily their first language. If you took a foreign language in high school, think about it in this way: You learned some of the foreign language while you were in third period French, but outside of school you rarely used that language unless you later studied abroad in a country that spoke that language.
That said, when students are studying for a TESOL certificate or a Masters in TESOL, they often learn pedagogical methods for teaching EFL and ESL. Also, to further confuse things, sometimes students who may be considered to be in an EFL environment may use English at home frequently enough that they could be considered to be learning in an ESL environment. The opposite may be true for other students, who are learning English in a primarily English-speaking (ESL) environment, but who spend most of their time using their first language. Either way, there are unique ways that teachers can adapt their curriculum to meet the needs of these students, and that’s where TESOL comes in.
Something that I find particularly interesting about the field of TESOL is that it has very broad applications. TESOL has applicability for teaching abroad or in the United States, for teaching children or adults, for teaching people born in countries other than the United States or for people born in the United States.
In my opinion, a perfect world would have a TESOL specialist in every school and a TESOL curriculum coordinator in every school district. Now let’s get into why I think that is. Because more people in the United States are becoming bilingual, TESOL is gaining increasing need. I’ll take for example something I recently read in the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, written by Aída Walqui (2006):
- “The linguistic landscape of American schools is changing rapidly. In the decade between 1992 and 2002, the [enrollment] of English Language Learners (ELLs) grew by 84% while the total K-12 population grew by only 10%. ELLs are no longer exclusively new immigrants to the USA. In middle and high schools, 57% of them represent the second or third generation of immigrants to the USA (Batalova & Fix, 2005).” (p. 159)
In this way, studying TESOL has applications for teachers of English and teachers whose students’ first language is a language other than English. However, TESOL also has applications for teachers in every field and for teachers whose students are learning English at the same time as they are learning another language. Like any other discipline, it has its own scholarship and its own specialties, too. A TESOL teacher might be in an EFL classroom in another country or a credentialed teacher in a classroom in the United States, a specialist at a school or in a district, an English educator at an international company or an instructor at a university. There are many places for TESOL, and the field continues to be developed today through scholarship.
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Walqui, A. (2006). Scaffolding instruction for English language learners: A conceptual framework. The International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 9(2), 159-180.
