1 ESL or ‘EAL’?: Programme or ‘support’? The baggage that comes with names. Maurice Carder, International Schools Journal, Vol. XXIX No.1. November 2009. At the Vienna International School (VIS) there are students from over 100 nationalities, with some 75 languages. Many of these students come to the VIS with little or no knowledge of English, so the school has developed a programme of language provision for the needs of the students. There are ESL and Mother Tongue departments in place in the Primary and Secondary Schools. These give appropriately structured programmes of language development in English and in students‟ mother tongues, from grades 1-12. The school is proud of its IB Diploma results, and I believe a primary reason for such results is the focus on language development in each student‟s languages. We also maintain, in the secondary department, a staff which is well-qualified; all have an MA in TESOL, Applied Linguistics, or the equivalent (see Carder, 2007, for a full description of the programme). It has not been easy to maintain such a programme. Over the 28 years of my tenure at the school, the most frequent protest from ESL department heads was about not getting sufficient staffing when there was an extra influx of students in need of ESL classes. Many senior administrators seemed, from my perspective at least, to see extra staffing for ESL as an unwelcome burden on the budget, the underlying attitude appearing to be „They‟ll pick up English, won‟t they? Why do they need classes?‟ Drawing on reserves of patience to coax more staffing out of such unwillingness was a regular challenge. One departing colleague remarked to me: „I just couldn‟t face having to educate another in-coming administrator about the fundamental importance of a sound ESL programme‟. What concerns me is the current perception of ESL and mother tongues. Staffing and curriculum for another language area, Foreign Languages, is seen in most international schools as routine and necessary (Hélot and de Mejía, 2008:199: „modern foreign languages have higher status than ESL‟). Fishman (2004) notes, as “he has been arguing in print for 35 years”, that It is just as scandalous and injurious to waste “native” language resources as to waste or air, water, mineral, animal, and various non-linguistic human resources. How long must language and cultures be trivialized if they are learned at home, in infancy and childhood, and only respected if they are acquired later, during adulthood, when they are usually learned less well and at much greater cost in competence, time and money? (ibid, p. 417). For foreign languages a curriculum and staffing are provided. It can be argued that foreign language classes have a much less demanding aim than second language classes (see Spolsky, 1999, for clear definitions of „Second Language‟ and „Foreign Language‟). In foreign language classes, often French or Spanish in international schools, students generally learn a language progressively in a carefully-structured way over five years. ESL students have to learn language for academic success in the entire curriculum, and need and deserve all the support they can get. However, the word „support‟ is generally defined as „encouragement; sympathy; help.‟ This is what we give anyone with immediate problems – a twisted ankle, sudden bereavement – but is hardly the