TESOL Plus TELOS: Teaching English as a Language of Open Sources (TELOS)

The turn of the twenty-first century witnessed dramatic changes in the ways people act and the technologies they use. This era, also called globalization, has helped develop new curricula, materials and teaching techniques. In line with these, teaching English as an additional language has been re-perspectivised in various constructs; for example, World Englishes (WE), English as an International Language (EIL), and Translingualism (Kachru 1992; Matsuda 2012; Canagarajah, 2013). While the printed course books and materials are still the core of teaching substance, the learner has the greatest freedom to choose from English-medium materials via open access sources. These sources include YouTube videos; Facebook; online newspapers, magazines, etc.; Twitter; and so on. Compared to the period before the digital Internet leap, the learner has a multitude of free and diverse English-medium materials for exposure. This paper proposes a new global perspective to describe this recent phenomenon and suggests labelling it as Teaching English to the Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Plus Teaching English as a Language of Open Sources (TELOS): TESOL Plus TELOS. TELOS has the capacity to provide TESOL, particularly in EFL contexts, with the long-awaited multimodal and multidimensional support. The pragmatic skills that can normally be only partly taught in traditional EFL classes can be more learnable and teachable by the affordances available from the aforementioned open sources. The circle of syntax-semantics-pragmatics can now be complete thanks to TELOS.