This week I finally made some breakthroughs with my research as far as finding more information on the history of ESL education and how the field has looked for the last several decades in the U.S. However, despite finding many interesting articles this week, I think it has opened up new questions and complexities I will have to deal with down the road.
In “The Formation and Development of TESOL: A Brief History” by Phebe Xu Gray, she notes that the teaching of English has been around since “the founding of this country” but that it was not until the 1960s that Teaching English of Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) became a recognized profession. Gray notes that “[t]he assumption [prior to the 1960s] was that anybody who speaks English could teach English,” and most universities had few teachers who were there to work specifically with foreign students.” This seems apparent from a 1967 article in the inaugural edition of the TESOL Quarterly in which there are a series of job applications posted for ESOL teachers, and nearly all of them require “[l]ittle or no training in linguistics or ESOL methodology” (Light 61). According to Gray, most of the teachers on university campuses who did work with ESL speakers were there to study something else, such as linguistics, literature, journalism, and creative writing. However, with the increasing influx of foreign students, it was clear that qualifications to teach these students were becoming necessary. In 1966, the professional organization Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Language was created, and it was the first time that those who wanted to specifically teach speakers of other languages were permanently brought together.
By 1975, national standard guidelines for Certification and Professional Preparation of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages in the U.S. were ratified. This included preparation including courses in linguistic and grammar, psycho and sociolinguistics, culture, and society. Teachers were recommended to also take pedagogical courses in human growth and development, learning theory, and curriculum development, and understand another language as well as complete a practicum. Gray concludes by stating that TESOL has continued to develop and be “influenced by political and social factors” that will change how the field is taught and students developed.
Paul Kei Matsuda and Tony Silva add nuance to this history in their introduction to the book Landmark Essays on ESL Writing (**note, I used a Google book intro chapter, but I am getting the physical text from the library, and will fill in correct in-text citations when it arrives). They note that since the development of TESOL in the 1960s, the field separated substantially from composition studies, which they label as a major limitation between the “’disciplinary division of labor’” which has “not been easy to reconcile” despite the strong need to do so.
They also develop a brief history of the TESOL field and how it has shifted over time. Before the 1960s, most TESOL involved mastery of applied linguistics, through “pattern drills” with little emphasis on writing. By the late 1960s and early 1970s repetition and correcting grammar was on its way out, while “invention, revision, and formative feedback, ” also known as a process approach, became the new trend, and the field of composition scholarship was dipped into to help this group improve their writing.
By the 1980s, process was still central, but so was a sentence-based approach, in which it was necessary to teach both types of text analysis for comprehensive language growth. Matsuda and Silva note that this decade also saw the development of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural research, such as examining discourse grammar. This was also a decade in which ESL teaching was no longer seen as simply remedial, but also acknowledged the importance of teaching of English for Specific Purposes, and, at the college Teaching for Academic Purposes.
Despite continuing to draw heavily from composition studies in the 1990s, the field also found that some techniques simply weren’t applicable to ESL writers. At this time, the field broke further from composition by acknowledging the “distinct characteristics of second language writing and writers” which couldn’t be helped by L1 composition theory. At this time, the field developed more disciplinary infrastructure, including journals, conferences, and bibliographies, of their own. This disciplinary break from composition still exists.
In addition to what I discovered from the two readings this week, I also had an informal conversation with some of my co-workers in the ESL department. It appears that while some came out of masters for TESOL programs, most who have PhDs came from some sort of linguistics program, whether that be applied, sociolinguistics, or another related field. Therefore, the reading this week and these conversations tell me a few things about the field. First, the reason there may be no set standard curriculum or pedagogical consistency as far as I can discover in their journals is because people are coming into the profession from a variety of teaching and learning fields. As early as fifty years ago, there was little to no training at all for people who wanted to teach ESL – if you could speak it, you could teach it. Coming from that perspective, while many advancements have been made on what should be done, if there is no standard on how it should be done (as in what programs are best to train these practitioners) some ambiguity could remain between these disparate parts.
Additionally, while we see that the field has, at times, drawn heavily from composition theory, and the two fields seem to have taken a similar social turn which focuses on both empowering teachers and learners to acknowledge and work in ways best for them, there still is, as Matsuda and Silva point out, a distinct gap in the field that is placed there because these practitioners recognize that there are different learning needs that cannot be addressed by composition scholarship alone. Some of these overlaps I have noticed when I’ve been doing the reading for previous weeks, but these differences also merit more investigation.
For now, I plan to take a break from writing about ESL and shift my search to composition and discover more about when they started taking about speakers of other languages, as well as what methods and methodologies they used to work with these writers. I expect, now more than ever, to find significant differences that reflect the stark diversion of these two fields.
Works Cited
Gray, Phebe Xu. “The Formation and Development of TESOL: A Brief History.” International Education, vol. 27, 1997, http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.odu.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=2&sid=d561380b-c307-4433-a9e2-e6fa1296b70a%40sessionmgr4010&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=507597464&db=eue. Accessed 1 Mar. 2018.
Light, Richard. “English for Speakers of Other Languages: Program Administration by the U.S. Office of Education.” TESOL Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 1, 1967, pp. 55-61.
Matsuda, Paul Kei, and Tony Silva, ed. “Introduction.” Landmark Essays on ESL Writing, vol. 17, Routeledge, 2001, pp. ____(coming soon).