Conditions for English Language Teaching and Learning in Asia

by Bernard Spolsky (editor), Kiwan Sung (Editor)

In 1989, Bernard Spolsky published Conditions for Second Language Learning (Oxford University Press). At the 2012 Annual Conference of Asia TEFL, a number of senior scholars were invited to comment upon the relevance of the book to the teaching of English in their region, and to make suggestions on how it might be updated. This volume contains revised versions of these talks, and thus provides a survey of the conditions for teaching English in Asia. Most contributors found the Conditions model useful, but there has been a major change in emphasis in the past two whereas the 1989 book emphasized linguistic and psycholinguistic conditions, more recent work generally emphasizes the importance of sociolinguistic and language policy conditions for teaching English in Asia today.

245 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2014

About the author

Bernard Spolsky was educated at Wellington College and Victoria University and received a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Montreal.

He has been the head of the English Department, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Director of the Language Policy Research Center at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, where he is currently Professor of English.

Bernard Spolsky has conducted and published research in language testing, second language learning, computers in the humanities, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics and language policy. He has been President of TESOL, held a Guggenheim fellowship and a Mellon fellowship, and has been Senior Research Fellow at the National Foreign Language Center in Washington.

He has written several books for Oxford University Press: Conditions for Second Language Learning, Measured Words and Sociolinguistics.