Following the Second World War, the British Council, along with British publishers and universities, began to take a serious interest in English as a foreign language teaching ('ELT') and the UK soon gained a dominant role in the development and export of teaching approaches and materials. This set includes the works of neglected theorists such as Horace Wyatt, who indicated that English can be taught through the mother tongue as well as 'directly', and Michael West, whose emphasis on the educational value of teaching reading 'in difficult circumstances' has often been ignored in favor of the more utilitarian, spoken-language approach to ELT.