Abstract
This chapter looks at the specialist field of TESOL—Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages—and explores the ways in which it relates to the evolving discipline of English Studies. The emergence of the latter, as has been noted in other chapters in the book, is located in a specific nineteenth century moment in which the study of literature in particular came to be seen as having a unique social function. As the writer Charles Kingsley (1890, p. 262) loftily put it, the study of English was a means of inculcating in the young a thorough knowledge of ‘the English spirit’ and a means of enabling them to appreciate that ‘the English mind has its peculiar calling on God’s earth’ which it alone was capable of fulfilling. Anthony Kearney (1988, p. 260) has described this moment as one in which English literature:
became the focus for certain high ideals and expectations in the Victorian mind [and] was variously regarded as an agency for psychic renewal, as an antidote to the materialistic drives of the age, as a means of refining the crude middle-class philistines, and the even cruder masses, and as a means of creating a new sense of national identity and patriotic pride.
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Gray, J. (2016). TESOL and the Discipline of English. In: Hewings, A., Prescott, L., Seargeant, P. (eds) Futures for English Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-43180-6_6
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