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In a profession littered with acronyms, it’s often difficult
to know whether you’re teaching EFL, ESL, EAL, ESOL, or something else! So what
exactly is the difference between ESL and EFL and EAL?
Well, as you probably already know ESL stands for English as
a Second Language and EFL stands for English as a Foreign Language. Although
you are still either learning or teaching English, these two acronyms have a
slightly different meaning.
ESL, EFL, ESOL, EAL?
EFL is taught in countries where the native language is not
English. For example, if you are learning English in Thailand the local
language is Thai and you’d therefore be studying English as a Foreign Language.
In most cases, students learning EFL in Thailand will often be in a class with
other students that all speak Thai as their first language. Therefore, when
teaching EFL, you will usually be in front of a class that all share the same
first language.
ESL, on the other hand, is used where English is being
taught to students who are from a non-English speaking country, but studying
English in an English speaking country. For example, a Japanese person studying
English in London. In this instance, it’s far more common to have students that
come from different countries and therefore have different languages as their
first language.
Although these two terms are similar, you can see that the
difference between the two terms is dependent on where you are learning
English.
English as a Foreign Language (EFL) is a universally
accepted term that is used around the world, but English as a Second Language
requires a little more discussion because it isn’t used by everybody. One
criticism of the term ESL is it might not be a second language for somebody, it
might be a 3rd, 4th or even a 5th language for some people. Therefore, English
as a Second Language probably isn’t the best way to describe the subject.
As a result of this criticism some countries have adopted
different ways to describe people learning English in native English speaking
countries. The United Kingdom, New Zealand and Ireland now use the term
‘English for Speakers of Other Languages’ (ESOL), and the expression ‘English
as an Additional Language’ (EAL) is becoming increasingly popular in the UK.
The United States, Canada and Australia continue to use ESL, but ‘English
Language Learner’ (ELL) is now more widely used to describe a student learning
ESL
Unfortunately, there is no umbrella term that can be used to
cover all of these different terms. Although, ESL is widely understood it is
probably the term that most people would use. TESOL on the other hand is
becoming more universally accepted around the world and is most likely to
become the universal term for this area of study.
I've used ESL in as the title for this blog as it’s the term
that most people recognize, but I prefer the term EAL because it doesn't assume
that English is the second language of the student, instead it implies that
somebody is learning English as an additional language, whether that be their
2nd, 3rd, 4th or whatever number it might be for the student.
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