Purpose and scope of the book

This book is a practical reference guide for teachers of English as a foreign language. It is meant to help teachers to anticipate the characteristic difficulties of learners of English who speak particular mother tongues, and to understand how these difficulties arise.

It is obviously only possible, in a work of this kind, to give an outline account of the problems of the speakers of a few of the world's many languages. We hope, however, that in the twenty-two chapters that follow many teachers will find information that is useful to them. Since the book is designed primarily for teachers of British English, the selection is biased slightly towards the problems of those students that British teachers most often find themselves teaching. Teachers of other varieties should, however, also find much that is relevant to their purposes.

Most of the chapters discuss the typical ‘interlanguage’ of speakers of a particular mother tongue. (By ‘interlanguage’ we mean the variety of a language that is produced by non-native learners.) In some cases (Swahili, Hindi, Tamil), the language focused on can be taken as broadly representative of a whole group, in that speakers of related languages are likely to share a number of the problems described. In two chapters (those on West African and Scandinavian learners), the description relates to the English of speakers of a whole group of languages.