TESOL Inc.

TESOL Inc. is a so-called professional organization for English as a Second Language teachers. It was created in 1966 by James Alatis who served at the Executive Director until 1985.

It has affiliates in over 44 countries including Greece, Japan, Uzbekistan and Taiwan. The affiliates may carry the TESOL name as well such as Korea TESOL or may not such as in Taiwan where the affiliate is called the English Teachers Association.

Qualifications to be a member of TESOL are simply to pay a membership and claim an interest in teaching English. No professional qualifications are required.

It purports to be a scholarly organization with no interest in labor issues; however it promotes jobs on its website. Further, members from the Jobs Special Interest Group manage the tesljob listerv which posts illegal jobs from overseas.

TESOL also publishes TESOL Quartlerly, one of the top academic periodical in language teaching.

The TESOL head office is in Langely, Virginia near Washington, DC. It holds a staff of less than ten employees. Typically, staff members are socialite spouses of State Department or Defense Department officials. The staff organizes very large annual conference of over 10,000 participants where publishing companies and academics heavily promote their latest products and papers.

In the past, the applied linguistics conference used to be held in conjunction with the TESOL conference, but with the increasing corporatizaion of TESOL and the influence of its corporate publishing sponsors, the applied linguistics conference has split off.

Past Presidents

 * James Alatis
 * David Nunan
 * Neil Anderson