As you can see from the cover, 2012 is a special year for English Teaching Forum—
a celebratory year in which we mark the five decades that our journal has been in publication.
In preparation for the 50th anniversary, we delved into our archives and reviewed the
long and storied life of the journal. The first issue of English Teaching Forum, published
in March of 1963, evolved from the experimental English Teaching Newsletter that was
published three times in 1962. Response to the newsletter was so favorable that a decision was
made to publish a regular quarterly journal, and the name change signaled that development.
English Teaching Forum, as the introduction to that first issue stated, was to be “a journal
of facts and ideas, devoted to the interests of those engaged in teaching English as a foreign
language.” And, to use the vernacular, “the rest is history.”
By the time the second issue was published in June of 1963, Forum
was being “read by teachers in over seventy countries in all parts of the
world.” Over the years, the number of countries increased, and by the
1990s, circulation reached a high of approximately 125,000 readers. In
recent years, the circulation has been in the 80,000 range with distribution
in 125 countries or more.
Over its 50-year life span, Forum has published more than 3,060 articles.
Those articles were written by 2,750 authors (some authors have been
published more than once) and came from 139 different countries. With
stats like that, Forum can truly claim to be a global publishing enterprise.
In going through the archives, besides looking at the statistics, we
reviewed how Forum content has changed over the years. To share that
content with our readers, we created a special section called “Reflections”
that will appear in each issue of Volume 50. We invited authors of past
articles to revisit what they published before and to offer updated
views of their topics. We hope this approach will give our readers an
interesting perspective on English language teaching. In each issue we
will also reprint a selection of articles with an introduction by one of our
Regional English Language Officers. These reprints—once all four issues
of 2012 are published—will give a broad overview of many aspects of teaching English as a
foreign language.
We hope our readers will enjoy these special features and that they will join wholeheartedly
in our year-long celebration of the 50th anniversary of English Teaching Forum