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English Language Teaching in Brazil: A Gap in Policy, Problems in Practice

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Both PCN-EF (Brazil, 1998) and PCN-EM (Brazil, 2000) present progressive ideas about how a foreign language should be taught in the basic education classroom. Such ideas include a social interactionist view of language, which aligns with contemporary research in second language teaching and means a shift from the traditional grammar-translation method largely employed in Brazilian schools in previous decades. The Parameters also recommend interdisciplinary work, the implementation of crosscurricular themes, formative assessment in addition to summative, a value of students’ prior knowledge and position as critical subjects, and, thus, an approach to teaching as negotiation that aims to educate students for the full exercise of citizenship, which includes the notions of respect for difference and diversity that can be promoted by the teaching and learning of foreign languages. However, the Parameters fail in pointing out the necessary conditions for this teaching and learning process to occur. For example, they acknowledge that reading and writing should be focused on to the detriment of listening and speaking due to the difficulties faced by the teacher in basic education (Brazil, 1998): large classrooms, lack of appropriate resources including class and preparation time for the teacher and opportunities for the students to be exposed to the language outside the classroom, and, in many situations, teachers’ lack of knowledge of the subject matter. Instead, what they should do is to actively propose that a smaller number of students sit in English classes – as it was allowed by LDB 1996 and continues to be so by LDB 2015, that more class and preparation time be granted the teacher, that schools have English resources that students can access to familiarise themselves with the language, and that better teacher education be implemented. When neither PCN-EF nor PCN-EM provides solutions to the obstacles for satisfactory ELT in basic education and yet acknowledge that knowing a foreign language is beneficial, they are implicitly promoting the privatisation of ELT because they are directing students to private language centres (Capuani and Venera, 2016). There are several problems with this position given that the right to free education provided by the state is guaranteed by the Brazilian constitution. […]

By Fernanda Batista. Published online: July 17, 2020. Available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343019740_English_Language _Teaching_in_Brazil_A_Gap_in_Policy_Problems_in_Practice [accessed Oct 19 2021].