On Tesol 74 [antikvár]

Preface Once a year the annual TESOL Convention is the forum for intensive discussion, evaluation and interchange on the many and varied concerns and activities of TESOL. Many things make up a successful convention, but the core is always the papers presented by members and guest speakers. For the 1974 Convention in Denver the Convention Chairman, Albino B. Baca, organized more than 75 speakers for the general and small group sessions. In addition there were numerous tutorial sessions, round table seminars, rap sessions, and demonstrations. Traditionally the TESOL Quarterly has published many of the best convention papers, but space limitations slow their timely appearance. To bring the benefits of the convention to a wider audience the Executive Committee voted in Denver to revive On TESOL, the series in which papers from the TESOL Conferences of 1964, '65 and '66 had been collected. The twenty-three papers selected for inclusion in On TESOL 74 were chosen to reflect the wide-ranging interests of our membership and our profession as demonstrated through the convention. The papers appear here just as they were prepared for presentation at the convention; readers should keep in mind that the authors were not given an opportunity to make revisions before publication. The multi-dimensional concerns of the 1974 TESOL Convention are delineated in the first three papers, which provide a FOCUS ON THE PROFESSION. Albert H. Marckwardt looks at changes in English language teaching practices through time, concentrating on the recent past; Peter Strevens looks at differences in terms of geographical space, specifically the differences between British and American approaches to teaching English; and Arthur H. King, though his title announces a British view, provides a global perspective on the social, cultural, and political dimensions of English language teaching in both EFL and ESL situations. IN FOCUS ON THE TEACHER the first paper, by Mary Finocchiaro, surveys the current curricular and human concerns of the ESL profession within the context of a discussion of the heavy demands that are made of ESL teachers and a summary of the characteristics of the superior teacher. The next two papers describe specific teacher training programs. Suzanne Salimbene writes about a practical one-semester program developed by a Language Center in Greece to train both native and non-native speakers of English as English teachers. Betty K. Taska describes the development of longer term, large scale English teacher training programs for non-native speakers in Francophone Africa. The last paper, by Sidney Greenbaum, addresses itself to a discussion of what kind of grammar a teacher needs to study in a teacher training program. The four papers in the FOCUS IN THE LEARNER section emphasize the need for a deeper understanding of where the language learner is when he comes to school—culturally and socially as well as linguistically. Muriel