A new and important part of the training and education of English as a second language teachers is the course in "Language Policy," which centers on the relationship between politics and language teaching in developing countries, i.e., on language planning. A better understanding and more knowledge might be had by including static and declining countries and areas and by the study of special fields which can be called the parameters of "language ecology." The ecology of a language would comprise, in addition to an assessment of institutional support, facts about its classification, speakers, domains of use, internal varieties, written traditions, standardization, and the attitudes of its users toward it and concurrent languages. Such ecological typology would necessitate the study of language policy and linguistics, demography, sociology, dialectology, philology, prescriptivism, lexicography, ethnolinguistics, and dialinguistics. We need to search for basic principles and concepts of these studies which can be used to arm the English teacher against ignorance, particularly since personality can hardly be separated from language--the key to culture and to learning. (Author)