Conditions for English Language Teaching and Learning in Asia

Book excerpt: 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 decades: 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.