Journal Review

Review of English as a Second language in the United Kingdom: Linguistic

 And Educational Contexts

(English Language Teaching Document, 121)

 C. J. Brumfit

The British Council was established in 1934, and one of our main aims has always been to promote the wider knowledge of the English Language. This collection of papers is an attempt to provide an authoritative survey current activity in work of English teaching to British resident who are non-English speaker. This issues of ELT Documents goes to press soon after the publication of the Swann committee’s report  Education for All, HMSO, 1985. Since of considerable amount of space in this report is devoted to language matters, a brief summary of relevant portions of the report (which is more than 800 pages long) is included.

The Teaching of English as a Second Language (TESL) is now seen by most practitioners as part of a much wider and more complex task, and few would defend the autonomy of ESL as an independent and identifiable activity.   The teaching of English as second language differ from the teaching of other school subjects in two important ways. The first is that TESL is a relatively recent addition to the school curriculum, so that there is, as a result, little practical experience to draw upon. The second is that, unlike all other school subject, “its general goal is to put itself out of business as soon as possible” (Donoghue and Kunkle , 1979 , p. 126). These differences are important because they have repercussions for how TESL is practiced.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the Teaching of English as a Second Language (TESL) in school from general policy issues, the education system and the support and teacher education. It has similarities with Teaching Techniques in English as a Second Language by Harlod S. Madsen, Series Editor: Russell N. Cambell and William E. Rutherford. The ESL Teachers sometimes have to answer questions from students and administrators about commercial contexts. The system of education in both of this journal dominance give the subskills of english test for students such as Vocabulary, do not show exactly how well the student uses English, but they can help the teachers diagnose students’ strengths and weakness in oral or written communication. So that, we can conclude the language components involved in communicating include vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. While they are all blended in a skill such as listening, it is possible to test how well each component has been mastered individually as a “subskill” of listening or of speaking.