International House World Organisation

This article may have confusing or ambiguous abbreviations. Please review the Manual of Style, help improve this article, and discuss this issue on the talk page. (May 2011) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

International House World Organisation is a worldwide network of 160 language schools and teacher training institutes in more than 50 countries.^[1]

International House was founded in 1953 by John Haycraft and his wife Brita Haycraft in Cordoba (Spain), to provide an innovative approach to language teaching.^{[1][failed verification]} At that time formal programmes of training for teachers of English as a Foreign Language were almost non-existent.^[2]

John Haycraft was the first to introduce formalised teacher training in 1962, and the course International House developed in the 1960s and 1970s became first the Royal Society of Arts Certificate in teaching English, and then the current CELTA training course organised by Cambridge ESOL.^{[citation needed]}

Teaching at International House schools broadly follows what is often called the "communicative method", which focuses on student to student interaction as opposed to the teacher-centred approach of traditional language teaching. However, since the mid-nineties, this has been augmented into what is called 'principled eclecticism' to incorporate lexical, task-based and generally more 'function-based' approaches to language learning and teaching.