English as a Second Language Materials

One collection building goal of the Penn Libraries is to parallel the curricular and research needs of the schools, departments, and research centers on campus.  Notable in this regard is collection support for PennGSE’s M.S.Ed. in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) program, a high enrollment graduate degree that focuses on the theory and practice of language education, with an emphasis on English language teaching.

The core of the Penn Libraries English as a Second Language collection has been formed by two large gifts of library materials. In 2017, the International House of Philadelphia closed its Language Library, bringing approximately 460 volumes and four dozen CDs and DVDs. Many of the IHOP volumes were complete ESL textbook sets, with student workbooks, teacher guides, and related materials. Penn's Graduate School of Education closed its Educational Linguistics (ELX) collection in 2024 : this collection of approximately 900 titles included ESL textbook sets as well as scholarly working paper series on educational linguistics and second language acquisition.

Unfortunately, at times, some of these works go undiscovered.  Neither of our two large gift collections have provenance notes in the Penn Libraries catalog. With a tendency to search by keyword or initialisms, those exploring the library catalog for monographic works may miss the breadth of this collection due to the official Library of Congress subject heading traditionally assigned to these works:  English language—Study and Teaching—Foreign Speakers.   

To remedy this, a catalog subject heading keyword search that combines this character string and sorted by reverse chronology, reveals the wealth of print and online monographs, journal titles, and videos that broadly cover second language education in regard to English, as well as the range of terminology in use, all being grouped under the above mentioned subject heading:  English as a second language (ESL), English as a foreign language (EFL), English as an additional language (EAL), or English for speakers of other languages (ESOL), Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), and Teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL).