ESL, EFL, ELL, EAL, EAP, EIL, ESP, & ESOL

Phew, that’s a string of acronyms (click here to learn more about what each abbreviation implies for English language teaching). Thanks to a bunch of isms and a couple of ations (imperialism, capitalism, colonialism, nationalism, globalization, and migration), English language learning and teaching is big business world wide and on local levels as well. The Ministry of Education in Saskatchewan, the Canadian province where I live, has followed the lead of Manitoba, a neighbouring province, in using the term EAL (English as an additional language) in its discussions of students for whom English is not the first or primary language.  The argument for the move towards EAL is that it implies addition in ways that the second in ESL (English as a second language) does not. EAL also takes into consideration the fact that many students who are learning English as an additional language speak multiple languages (therefore second is not accurate).

I have no real issue with the use of EAL over ESL other than that it doesn’t seem to be widely used outside of Saskatchewan and Manitoba. I’m still not completely convinced, though, that EAL represents the kind of shift in thinking about the position of non-anglophones in Canadian society that advocates of EAL seem to think it does. All that being said, as long as Ministry of Education programs get created and Saskatchewan teachers get trained, EAL does the trick just fine for me.

But for the record (if someone is keeping track of acronym preferences), I’m partial to ESOL (English for speakers of other(ed) languages) but I really really like emergent bilingual (Garcia, 2009).