ESL Education in the History of Civilization

ESL Education is uniting our world

The history of Teaching English as a second language began in Great Britain in the 15^th century. At this point, Great Britain was trading with various colonies throughout the world, and wanted to expand their empire. The British thought that in order to expand their trade routs to farther places, they needed to speak the language with the nations with whom they were trading. This is how English began to be taught in foreign countries. Over the next two hundred years, the British began to send teachers overseas to teach the upper-class colonists and local government officials British ideas and culture, and that included the English language. This would cause these British ideas and language to enter the minds of the lower classes in these countries, therefore giving rise to British civilization in those countries.

This influence of the British and English language in other countries caused a new idea to come about, the idea of being bilingual. Since a lot of these countries did not want to give up their native tongues, they started a bilingual educational system where the people could still respect their language as well as the British language (English). Later on, these educational systems expanded out of Europe and eventually came into the United States. Around the time of World War II, the United States saw the importance of foreign language teaching, and therefore there came a greater interest in ESL education. Now, there are a myriad of ESL teaching programs all around the world, all thanks to the British who wanted to expand their ideas and languages to other parts of the world solely for the sake of trade and expanding their ideas throughout the world. (source)

I was able to talk a little with a member in my last area of my mission in Korea, who is an English teacher there. She is actually from the Philippines, and has been teaching English in an English academy (those are just smaller after-school programs in Korea) for the past eleven years. She teaches mainly teenagers, and loves doing it. She said that sometimes these kids are forced into these after-school programs because their parents want them to learn English, so they could go out and make something of themselves, or possibly go abroad to America. It is because English is becoming a language that is spoken literally everywhere around the world (thanks to the British, but she did not say that). As long as there are non-English speakers in the world, there is an opportunity for ESL education.