The Financial Times on EFL in Brighton
Reasonably good read, but as little as I know about ESL/ ESOL in the UK, this sounds like complete crap to me:
‘One is “English as a Foreign Language” (EFL), aimed at people who need a modicum of knowledge to skim specialist journals, trade successfully, chat up foreign women or run successful anti-western marches in Damascus. The other is the more ambitious “English as a Second Language” (ESL), aimed at migrants who need to adapt to a new host country. The difference, one specialist told me, is that if a student persistently kept making elementary errors like “He think this” or “He say that”, an ESL teacher would be alarmed; an EFL teacher could afford to be more relaxed’
This prejudice against sounding like a complete Boer was new to me:
‘There is, he says, a pecking order of accents, with South African at the bottom and British at the top’
(maybe if they stay in the UK long enough they can pick up the dislike of Brummie)
I also think they’ll find that most texting in Japan is done in Japanese, and that the distinction between a real variety of English and a way of speaking English as a foreign language (Singlish against Chinglish) is very real. In fact, what did I like about that article the first time I read it??
Whoops, forgot to give the actual link when I first posted this. It wasn’t that bad! Here it is:
