Homolinguistic vs. Heterolinguistic Tesol Classes

The terms homolinguistic and heterolinguistic refer to the language background of any particular TESOL class. The former denotes a class of students who all have the same native language, and the latter a class of students who come from a variety of language backgrounds. While the goals are the same for both types of classes, there are differences in the means of achieving the goals that have not received adequate attention. Much of what is currently available in materials and methodology is based on or heavily influenced by experience with homolinguistic classes. Fries' English Sentence Patterns, for example, is a revision of his Intensive Course in English for Latin-American Students.' Robert Lado's pedagogy is essentially one of concentrating on areas of difference between the learner's native language and the target language.2 If one's class contains speakers of more than a dozen different languages, such a system is clearly not practical as a basic approach. Mary Finocchiaro 3 recommends that teachers of heterolinguistic classes locate people in the school or the community who can help work out contrastive analyses between English and the languages spoken by the students. The suggestion may be helpful for teachers whose students represent only a few languages, but a glance at the chart below will indicate how difficult it would have been to follow Dr. Finocchiaro's advice in my classes last year with a distribution like this

Linguistics · Mathematics education · Pedagogy · Sociology · Multilingual Education and Policy · Philosophy · Psychology · Second Language Learning and Teaching

• The Relevance of Anthropology to Language Teaching

  Beverly Mcleod•TESOL Quarterly•1976

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