ia. We have chosen The Stanford Teacher Competence Appraisal Guide as the instrument for appraising teacher competencies for secondary education in the United States (Stanford University, 1972). As to the other criteria, our experience and that of renown educational researchers have guided our selection--admittedly subjective and selective.
The foundation of today's "good" teachers is humanistic, based on Abraham Maslow's humanistic psychology (Maslow, 1962). Humanists express interest in the whole person rather than essentially in the cognitive faculties. It has been shown, for example, that learning is significantly enhanced when the student sees the relevance of what he or she is studying to his or her personal life (See, f.i., Galyean, 1976a and 1976b). Rappaport (1971, p. 270) holds that memory is intimately related to the emotional responses of the learner. Thus, humanistic education strives to provide a confluence of the cognitive and the affective.
Secondary to a humanistic approach, the trend is to helping learners attain communicative competence, where linguistic competence is seen merely "as an adjunct to communication" (Bowen, Madsen, & Hilferty, 1985, p. 49). Cross-cultural sensitivity is, in this operational context, a key to communicative competence.
In Europe, the most significant teaching approach is based on the Notional-Functional Syllabus (Council of Europe, 1970s). This is a syllabus "in which the language content is arranged according to the meanings a learner needs to express through language and the functions the learner will use the language for" (Richards, Platt, & Platt, 1992).
Any ESL program based on the foundation stones enunciated hereabove will be in tune with current North American and West European thinking and practices. Whether and how such
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