Language Variation and TESOL

Abstract

The preparation of ESOL teachers should produce in the teacher not only a factual awareness of insight to be drawn from linguistic geography, but also an informed and developed attitude toward regional variation in language. Accurate information about regional varieties of English is needed, not because it is to be passed on as information to the foreign speaker learning English, but because it enlightens the teacher's attitude toward the language and prevents his perpetuating linguistic myth and error through time-wasting classroom drills and exercises on nonsignificant language features. Many textbook drills are intended to develop ability to make distinctions that only a fraction of English speakers can make themselves. Quite recently certain authors have shown some awareness of this problem, but there is only a beginning in the kind of information needed. Somewhere, in his preparation or in-service training, in textbooks or teachers' manuals, somewhere and somehow the ESOL teacher needs to acquire the systematic knowledge about American English that will enable him to deal confidently with the problems of use that inevitably arise in the classroom. Certainly the teaching of English as a second language can profit by the work done in linguistic geography.