Amal and All, greetings from Boston! Amal, you pose excellent questions! All the initials point to learning the various languages in various environments. SL is being in an environment that offers the TL (Target Language) for real and useful practice outside the classroom. FL does not have that luxury. I think our focus on EFL, and secondarily ESL, comes from the fact that most of the teachers on ETNI are indeed teachers of EFL. On Internet lists for other populations of language teachers, I would imagine the focus would be something else. In Israel, I would strongly suggest that the HSL teachers and the ASL teachers create their own discussion lists. It would cut down the isolation of the individual teachers tremendously to be able to interact with teachers facing the same challenges. Unfortunately, most of the professional literature doesn't make the distinction between ESL and EFL. The result is that new EFL teachers are given procedures that make less sense than those same procedures do for ESL teachers. When these procedures tend to fail in EFL situations, the EFL teachers are frustrated and befuddled. Here in Israel, we are a bit more lucky in that we have some local publishers who present us with truly EFL material, rather than having to use ESL material from the UK or US. Jimmy Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:13:40 -0700 (PDT) From: amal higazi <amalhigazi1@xxxxxxxxx> Subject: [etni] ESL Dear all teachers, I have a question in my my mind and I want to share it with you. Why do we speak of ESL and EFL but not, say, HSL or HFL, or, perhaps ASL or AFL? Why is the focus on English? Waiting for your response. Have a nice weekend, Amal ----------------------------------------------- ** Etni homepage - http://www.etni.org or - http://www.etni.org.il ** ** for help - ask@xxxxxxxx ** ** to post to this list - etni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx ** -----------------------------------------------