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It is an honor and a privilege to contribute this piece to TESOL Affiliate News in my current capacity as TESOL President. Last year I was the Board liaison to the Affiliate Network Professional Council (ANPC), but my ties to it go back to 2017 when I was a member of the Affiliate Task Force along with two other members of the Board of Directors: @Misty Adoniou, the head of the task force, and @John Schmidt. Given my past experiences with English as an international language (EIL) in different locales, TESOL's affiliates interested me even before then.
@Farahnaz Faez and I discussed EIL in the context of language planning in one of the volumes of The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching (Faez & Taylor, 2018). The topic resonated with me given my prior work on educational language planning involving EIL, national, Indigenous and/or foreign languages in Denmark, Greenland, and South Asia. Viewing English from an EIL lens provides a nuanced view of professionals in English language teaching (ELT) as multilinguals that speak different mother tongues, other languages, and varieties of English for different purposes. It also recognizes the different historical paths leading to context-specific, dynamic, localized varieties of English. These paths inform the differing statuses and uses of Englishes from place to place, and the different programs adopted from affiliate to affiliate (as well as in contexts where there are no TESOL affiliates - yet!).
For instance, many countries have adopted Content and Language Integrated Learning (or CLIL) and English Medium Instruction (EMI) to prioritize the learning of English. Programs adopted for proficiency (and status) planning may alter the previous ecolinguistic balance of nations or regions. For instance, EMI is firmly implanted in higher education in Nordic countries, the Netherlands, etc. now, but some would argue that this shift is taking place at the cost of other foreign languages (e.g., German, French, other Nordic languages) taught in the public school system now compared to in decades past (Taylor, 2021). Different historical paths and current considerations of EIL also influence the reception of Multilingual Language Education (MLE) initiatives in South Asia (e.g., Taylor, 2020). It is not only crucial to understand the paths taken by TESOL affiliates (e.g., NELTA in Nepal) to gain an overview of how priorities and goals differ from context to context and affiliate to affiliate, but also to identify how TESOL can best respond to those needs (e.g., by providing professional development relating to the model of English program chosen, materials development, etc.). It is also crucial that TESOL understand these historical paths and context-specific global/local ('glocal') needs to meet a key priority of its strategic direction: to expand TESOL's global impact in ways that benefit members. For that reason, I have been honored to be involved with the ANPC. Thank you for what you are doing for TESOL, your learners and all our colleagues!
References
Faez, F., & Taylor, S. K. (2018). Language planning. In The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching (eds J.I. Liontas, T. International Association and M. DelliCarpini). https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118784235.eelt0687
Taylor, S. K. (2021). TESOL's way forward to policy development and multilingualism in EMI. In K. Raza, C. Coombe & D. Reynolds (Eds.), Policy development in TESOL and multilingualism: Past, present and the way forward (177-188). Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature.
Taylor, S. K. (2020). Beyond bilingual education: Multilingual education in Nepal. In Y. P. Yadava & L. Deo Awasthi (Eds.), Perspectives on mother tongue-based multilingual education in Nepal (pp. 110-126). Kathmandu: Nepal Academy.
Shelley K. Taylor, Professor, teaches in the graduate TESOL/Applied Linguistics program at the University of Western Ontario (Canada). She has conducted research on plurilingualism in TESOL, EMI, and MLE models of ELT, language and literacy development in Nepali-Bhutanese refugee children and youth refugees in postsecondary programs in Canada, and conducted work related to multilingual educational language policy planning in several countries. She is currently the President of TESOL International Association.
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