Many youngsters grow up across the United States using ‘Nonstandard English’. How can the educational system help them and their families come to terms with the standard language without doing social damage in the name of educational necessity?

For sixty years a periodical currently published in the Deep South has been reporting on the complexities of U.S. usage. To mark the anniversary, a Southerner now reviews the journal of the American Dialect Society for English Today.

Teaching English as a foreign or second language is big business these days. The British Broadcasting Corporation is in the forefront, teaching English to millions throughout the world. Its English by Radio and Television Department is almost literally ‘the world's largest English-teaching classroom’. How has this come about, and what do its courses look and sound like?

ET is a forum for the discussion of ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘correct’, ‘incorrect’, ‘standard’, ‘non-standard’, ‘substandard’ and other kinds of usage. In this issue, DAVID CRYSTAL considers a bone of contention that has been with us for a long time.

Below we celebrate both a German anniversary and a coming together not just of languages but of language varieties. In this issue, KALEIDOSCOPE looks at the unusual, world-girdling hobby of MANFRED GÖRLACH, Professor of English at the University of Köln, West Germany, editor of the specialist journal English World-Wide, and co-editor of the one-volume survey English as a World Language.

For its first interview, English Today talks to Alan Lee Williams, Director-General, the English-Speaking Union of the Commonwealth, about his association's aims, history, organization, membership, projects and approach to the English language.

English Today talks to Sir John Burgh, Director-General of the British Council, about the history, evolution, policies and plans of an organization that runs a planet-wide programme of English as a second or foreign language.

In recent years, feminists in particular have argued for reform in languages like English in order to reduce or eliminate built-in masculine biases. Do they have a case, can realistic changes be made and accepted by users at large, or is the language simply adapting anyway to this challenge as it has adapted to others in the past?

EFL is now a famous – or notorious – acronym for one of the youngest of the world's service industries: the teaching of English as a foreign language. What animates it and what is its current condition around the world?

The teaching of ‘grammar’ is a matter of controversy in educational circles. In recent decades the pendulum has swung away from traditional ‘parsing’ towards ‘language in use’ – accompanied by cheers and fears in roughly equal measure. Is compromise possible between the two extremes, or even something better than simple compromise?