Teacher Discussion Forums

I remember a European survey from 1993 which showed how pupils who'd learnt English almost without exception wanted to go to an English-speaking country.

I'm not aware of any other survey since, though I have conducted my own here in China, informally. I've asked literally hundreds of persons randomly, and it would seem that well over 90% want ot go to either the US, Canada, Britian or Australia, of all the world's countries to choose from!

This week I'd started looking through textbooks, grammars, vocabulary lists, etc., in bookshops, and have found that in those resources I've examined more closely (including elementary school, high school, and university-level resources), the US, Canada and Britain alone will appear at a rate of at least 60%, and that's in the less anglo-centric books! In one book, it was at 100% for the US.

Then looking at the universities, without exception, English-medium universities are presented in those countries, with not a mention that there might be other countires and universities out there. It would seem that EFL is the best marketing and advertising they could possibly have dreamed up; no wonder the Canadian federal government's CIDA gives money to Lingo Media to develop EFL textbooks for the Chinese market, and the British Council gets so much funding, or should I say investment money, from the British government! I'd looked at Lingo Media's books too, and surprise surprise, the focus is more on Canada (the dog knows the hand that feeds it), at a rate of 90%, with the US and Britain appearing too.

Does anyone know of EFL resources that focus explicitly on language awreness and training pupils to have a more critical view of their language resources and how these resources do in fact affect them?

Any reccomendations would be much appreciated, since I haven't come across one yet for EFL. But I want to teach English, not do marketting.

Man, marketing genious!

It's natural that some students would want to be become familiar with not just the English language but also its culture(s), and I don't know if I could honestly recommend non-immersion for those in e.g. Japan wanting to become e.g. English teachers (if the average product of Japanese universities and teacher training is anything to go by!); as for textbooks, most are invariably crap (I shudder to think of them becoming more sociopolitical than sociolinguistic), and the serious student would be advised to look more to grammars, dictionaries and real discourse.

Surely any publications from SA, OZ, Philippines etc take another stance?

The curriculum developed by the Peace Corps for grade 5 to 10 in Mongolia was mainly Mongolian in content. Christian ESL publications in English are mainly Christian in content and don't necessarily promote one country over another. If anything they promote an interest in Israel and the Middle East. The Danish publications for ESL in Greenland were mainly focused on Denmark and had some terrible stories about the UK, Canada and the US -they seemed designed to discourage students from going there or at least made presented both sides of a country.

Who needs textbooks to tell them what the world is like. I vividly recall coming back to the UK briefly in March 1996, just in time for Dunblane, and Stephen Dorrell finally admitting BSE was indeed a health risk. How could anyone with access to a TV or newspapers think the UK is all tea, crumpets and daffodils!