The British Council and ELT
[The text below is adapted and abridged from a previously available essay by Richard Smith (now taken down for copyright reasons) titled 'ELT and The British Council, 1934–2014: Research notes']
The present page brings together resources digitised in the course of two small-scale resource development / research projects funded by the British Council: 'Building an archive and a record of the history of British Council involvement with ELT, 1934-2009' (2010–2011) and 'Documenting British Council involvement with ELT (1934-2014)' (2014–2015).
The projects involved systematically increasing the stock of knowledge relating to the overall history of British Council involvement with ELT by means of: building a collection of British Council publications; review of these and other sources in the Warwick ELT Archive; recording and transcription of interviews with selected informants; and updating of a UK-funded ELT Projects database. The projects also contributed to development of the British Council’s Milestones in ELTLink opens in a new window initiative.
Below are links to selected documents uploaded in the course of these project from the Warwick ELT Archive collection:
Just prior to the outbreak of World War II, the British Council had begun to take a serious interest in problems of EFL teaching in the regions it was mainly focused on, that is the Near East, the Balkans, the Baltic, Portugal and South America. By 1940 the Council had established around twenty-five British Institutes in areas of strategic importance. An overview of courses offered by the British Institute in Cairo for 1941-2 is viewable hereLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window, and a report on the first year (1940-41) of operation of the Tel-Aviv School of English, which was 'subsidised and controlled by the British Council', is here.Link opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window
In May 1950 the British Council organized an eleven-day conference in Mahableshwar, near Poona, India. The 54-page reportLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window of this first ever British Council summer course to be held in India (Phillips 1956: 88) has now (July 2015) been made accessible via the Milestones in ELTLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window'Link opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window page on the British Council's EnglishAgenda website.
In 1954 a magazine for English teachers in India was set up, being titled Teaching English - A magazine devoted to the Teaching of English in IndiaLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window (co-published by The British Council and Orient Longmans). Volume 1, no. 4 (1955) is the earliest issue of this magazine that we have in the Warwick ELT Archive. The issue contains a long article by F.L. Billows (see Smith and Maley 2004Link opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window), the Council officer who was to be mainly responsible for the Madras-based MELT campaign which spread S-O-S throughout Southern India, and which was the precursor of the 'cascading' model of teacher training still favoured by the British Council in India and elsewhere.The apparent success of constructive, neutral-seeming (because linguistically- not literature-focused) efforts in post-Independence India, combined with the establishment of applied linguistics as a discipline in the UK (a move which was strongly encouraged and facilitated by The British Council), both contributed to the way British ELT expertise was confidently promoted abroad during the 1960s. An extract from the 1960-61 British Council Annual Report reprinted as a pamphlet titled 'The English Language Abroad' Link opens in a new windowindicates this strongly. There were several other reports and position statements published around 1960-61, including the Makerere report discussed extensively by Phillipson (1992), which proclaim a similar new-found confidence in British ELT expertise at a time when 'winds of change' were blowing through the remainder of the British Empire. Indeed, in the 1960s the British Council became much more actively involved in curriculum development work and teacher-training overseas (see Phillipson 1992: 145–52).
Through ELT, it must have appeared, relationships and a benign influence could be maintained with the newly emerging 'Commonwealth' nations. At the same time, the 1960s were to see a a major expansion of UK university-based provision in the field of applied linguistics / ELT. This trend was heralded by the report English Teaching Abroad and the British UniversitiesLink opens in a new window (edited by H.G. Wayment, Deputy Controller of the Council's Education Division at the time, and published by Methuen in 1961), which was itself based on a conference arranged by the British Council at Nutford House in London in December 1960 (relevant papers from the Warwick ELT Archive hereLink opens in a new window). Feeding into the conference itself was an earlier set of recommendations produced by the Council's own 'Linguistics Panel' in 1959, entitled University Training and Research in the Teaching of English as a Second/Foreign LanguageLink opens in a new window).
The apparent success of constructive, neutral-seeming (because linguistically- not literature-focused) efforts in post-Independence India, combined with the establishment of applied linguistics as a discipline in the UK (a move which was strongly encouraged and facilitated by The British Council), both contributed to the way British ELT expertise was confidently promoted abroad during the 1960s. An extract from the 1960-61 British Council Annual Report reprinted as a pamphlet titled 'The English Language Abroad' Link opens in a new windowLink opens in a new windowindicates this strongly.
Through ELT, it must have appeared, relationships and a benign influence could be maintained with the newly emerging 'Commonwealth' nations. At the same time, the 1960s were to see a a major expansion of UK university-based provision in the field of applied linguistics / ELT. This trend was heralded by the report English Teaching Abroad and the British UniversitiesLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window (edited by H.G. Wayment, Deputy Controller of the Council's Education Division at the time, and published by Methuen in 1961), which was itself based on a conference arranged by the British Council at Nutford House in London in December 1960 (relevant papers from the Warwick ELT Archive hereLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window). Feeding into the conference itself was an earlier set of recommendations produced by the Council's own 'Linguistics Panel' in 1959, entitled University Training and Research in the Teaching of English as a Second/Foreign LanguageLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window).
Unprecedented funding was put into the promotion of ELT during the 1960s, a decade which saw the establishment of yearlong postgraduate training programmes at Bangor, Essex, Leeds and Manchester (alongside the Institute of Education and Edinburgh), which were attended largely by British Council officers and Commonwealth scholars. Pamplets produced yearly by the Council for the period 1963-67 on academic courses in the UK relevant to the teaching of 'ESL' [sic] provide insights into the development of provision (compare the pamplet for 1963-64Link opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window with that fofr 1966-67Link opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window, for example).
Early in the 1960s the Council established an English Teaching Information Centre in London to serve as an archive and to produce bibliographies of research and of published materials (notably, a series of English-Teaching Abstracts was begun in July 1961 which later turned into the journal Language Teaching (published by Cambridge University Press). Issue no. 1 of English-Teaching Abstracts can be viewed hereLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window, and the final (1967) issue before the title was changed to Language-Teaching Abstracts and publication taken over by Cambridge University Press is hereLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window.
Beginning in 1971, ETIC began to produce a mimeographed newsletter (ELT Documents) which, even in its earliest issues, began to give evidence that a new 'communicative' trend in language teaching was being worked out in the UK context (the newsletters contain seminal contributions by Dick Allwright, Chris Candlin and others). Having been produced between three to six times per year until 1976, these newsletters metamorphosed in 1978 into a series of book-length publications bearing the same title (ELT Documents), beginning at no. 101 (1978) and ending with no. 134 (1990). Several of these books have already been uploaded to the British Council's 'Milestones in ELTLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window' web-pages. Up to no. 113 the books were published solely by The British Council, from 114 to 124 by Pergamon in association with The British Council, and from 125 to 134 by Modern English Publications in assocation with The British Council). By the end of this period Chris Brumfit had become series editor. Then, from 1991 until 1996 he continued as a overall editor of a successor series (still published by Modern English Publications in association with The British Council) titled alternatively 'Review of English Language Teaching' (in paperback with volume and issue numbers) and (same content but in hardback) 'Developments in ELT'. There were 14 of these volumes, the last being dated 1996. Prior to his death in 2006, Chris Brumfit donated his own copies of these volumes to the Warwick ELT Archive, and we also have a complete series of ELT Documents, partly from the Dakin Collection, partly received via British Council donation. In 1997 the series became 'English Language Teaching Review' (published by Longman in association with The British Council). Chris Kennedy was series editor of these, with 11 volumes being published up to 2000 when the series was discontinued.
ETIC itself was closed in the 1980s, as one consequence of a severe cut in the government's grant-in-aid to The British Council, and its archival holdings were either dispersed or (in many cases) discarded. A number of former ETIC items which were not thrown away have, via various routes, found their way 'back together' to the Warwick ELT Archive, and we are always interested in possible further donations, particularly of unpublished or otherwise hard-to-obtain material (see notes on donating material and other ways you can support us hereLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window).