English in Brazil:: Views, policies and programs

De Kyria Rebeca Finardi

The discussion of the role of English in Brazil is at the center of the discussion of the changes recently experienced in that country which is going through a moment of political awakening. Many are the claims and demands of the society and insomuch as educational reform is involved, there seems to be a general recognition that the role of English in that country must be reviewed in language policies and programs so as to meet these demands. Brazilian government funded rograms such as the English without Borders have been created as an attempt to readdress the perceived imbalance in terms of the o er of English courses. Despite the importance of this program in the national scenario, it is not available for all levels of education nor for all tertiary population. e chapters in this book describe di erent views, actions and programs in relation to English in Brazil and which show that the discussion of the role of English in that country summarizes many political, social and economic claims of the population and tensions in the country which help to understand the current scenario in Brazil in relation to globalization. With a population of over 200 million people and many challenges (and possibilities) in the economic and educational sectors, the discussion of the impact of globalization in Brazil (and the role of English within it) represents a relevant glimpse into to the struggle of other developing nations and the world in general.

• Idioma: Português
• Editora: EDUEL
• Data de lançamento: 1 de jun. de 2016
• ISBN: 9788572168762

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English in Brazil: views, policies and programs [livro eletrônico] / [organized by Kyria Rebeca Finardi]. – Londrina : Eduel, 2016.

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ISBN 978-85-7216-876-2

1. Língua inglesa – Estudo e ensino – Brasil. 2. Professores de inglês – Formação. I. Finardi, Kyria Rebeca. II. Título.

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2016

Sumary

Globalization and English in Brazil

Languages and Power in Language Policies in the Brazilian Context

A Retrospective Look at Autonomy Development in Language Learning in Brazil

English in Brazil: dealing with a political hot potato

Languages without Borders Program (LwB): building a Brazilian policy for teaching languages towards internationalization

Collaboration and EFL teacher education in the design of pedagogic materials

Brazilian Textbook Program and implications for the teaching of English in Brazilian public schools

English as a lingua franca and the internationalization of higher education in Brazil

English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) in Brazilian higher education: challenges and opportunities

Preface

This book addresses three crucial aspects about English teaching in Brazil: (1) what society craves for, (2) what legislators do about language teaching, and (3) how teachers teach foreign languages. Two of these three aspects display drastic changes over time; one is society, which has different cravings as it develops a hate/love relationship with the study of foreign languages; the other aspect is the action of legislators, who, in their eagerness to respond to their electorate’s desires, end up by openly sponsoring initiatives that cancel one another and hinder the development of a lasting language policy. Teachers, on the other hand, represent a traditional force, as they tend to pass on, from generation to generation, a set of classroom practices that have remained the same over the years, not necessarily doing what they would like to do, but what they can do under the circumstances.

Recent surveys, from both Brazilian and international organizations, such as IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) and the British Council, have shown that most Brazilians aged between 18 and 50 have studied English as a foreign language at school, but less than 1% of them can use the language at a fluent level, which is seen as one of the lowest in the world. Although fluency in English is increasing over the years, considering the higher percentage of Brazilian English speakers in the 18-24 age bracket, it is not fast enough to meet the minimal requirements of a country that is striving for internationalization in a globalized world.

This decline in determination to keep studying the language can also be observed in terms of affective involvement. In my long personal experience with foreign language teaching, I have noticed, for example, that students’ first contact with English as a foreign language at school is highly enthusiastic. Pronouncing the first words and talking to each other in simple sentences is usually an exhilarating experience for them. With time, however, what starts as instant love for the language ends up in disappointment and failure.

There are two points deserving consideration here. The first is to understand why so many start studying English and so few reach fluency. The second related point is to explain why so many enjoy the initial experience of learning a new language and end up hating it; a honeymoon ending in divorce.

I have three explanations for this problem: the first is based on observable physical conditions, easily detected by looking at what we find in many public schools all over Brazil; the second, based on what teachers do in the classroom; and the last one, based on ideology, hidden under the surface, but responsible for what appears to the eye.

In terms of what is visible on the surface, we have a long list of visible absences, relating to things that are expected to be found in a language classroom, but are not there, including technological resources, motivating teaching materials, not to mention the desirable match between teaching materials and students’ level of proficiency, reasonable class size, sufficient time in the curriculum for studying the language, among other things. It is reasonable to expect that these absences indirectly result in failing to keep interest in studying the language, for lack of opportunities to converse in English. Students do not see the relevance of English in their daily lives and are unable to transfer this relevance to a future that paradoxically becomes more distant and unattainable as the years go by. There are other neglected issues considering the teachers who are regarded as essential to the quality of education but denied good conditions to practice their profession in Brazil. Sufficient time to prepare lessons, support from the management, respect for the teaching profession, and satisfaction with salaries are all usually absent elements.

At the root of all these problems, we can argue that there is an ideology that is very effective in spreading the belief that it is impossible to learn a foreign language in public schools. There is a perception that knowing English is a commodity that becomes more valuable if held by a few. Those who have a higher level of linguistic competence are not interested in sharing what they know with those who do not have this knowledge. They are very much aware that the social capital implied in knowing a language favors those who have a fluent command of it. In other words, knowing English increases the chances of improving one’s standard of living. It is then necessary to disseminate the idea that getting a good command of English at school is not a realistic goal, resulting in a waste of time and energy on the part of the student, who would be better served focusing on more practical school subjects. Patriotic indoctrination, nationalistic pride for being monolingual, and xenophobic feelings may also affect this perception/belief. Learning somebody else’s language is serving the interests of a foreign country, in detriment of one’s country sovereignty. In a divided society, love and admiration for another language and culture are seen as alienation, treated with contempt and inverted to hate.

In terms of what legislators do, we find that language policy makers in Brazil have brought more losses than benefits, mainly for their inability to preserve a minimum level of continuity. Aspects such as reducing or increasing the number of hours devoted to foreign language teaching, making foreign language mandatory or optional, and starting language instruction at an earlier or later stage, have typically changed, sometimes from one extreme to the other, whenever a new law is approved. The Federal Educational Law, for example, known as LDB and published in 1971, replacing previous LDBs, turned the teaching of foreign language upside down, making it optional for both primary and secondary school levels; a situation that was totally inverted in the 1996’s LDB, which then made the teaching mandatory for both levels. The same occurs in terms of centralizing decisions on the federal government, resulting on practically the same curriculum for the whole country, monolithically structured; versus decentralization, when these same decisions are delegated to states, municipalities and even schools, resulting in a national patchwork curriculum. One example of decentralization going back to centralization is the National Common Basic Curriculum (NBCC in Portuguese), now being proposed: in some ways, it is very similar to what was done in the 1950’s, to be rejected in the 1960’s, and now being returned to. The undesired result of this back and forth policy is that very little progress is made, sometimes leading to urgent and unexpected measures, such as English without Borders program, promulgated in December 2012, which took teachers by surprise, suddenly asking them to prepare more than 100,000 students to study abroad.

The third point addressed here is how teachers teach languages. The emphasis on language policies and mainly on ideological aspects of teaching English seem to have little effect on what they do: teachers teach the way they were taught. There is no concern with post-method methodologies, critical teaching and even more commonplace matters such as autonomy, task-based learning and the design of pedagogic materials. Teachers do not do that: they are program implementers. They are used to the top-down approach, in which they typically have no voice, both in language policy issues, and in classroom matters as well. Policy issues are taken care of by the administration. Classroom matters, including innovations in language teaching methodologies, typically offered for teachers in in-service courses, are taken care of by language teaching specialists, typically with no practical effect on classroom practices. Either teachers may not understand what they are told to do, or they may understand it, but resist it because, inly, they feel the innovations presented to them have no chance of working in their classrooms. One way or the other, they have no voice to negotiate details that could make their proposal work properly. In the exercise of their profession, they are denied the autonomy to experiment new things. Teaching differently from the way they were taught involves delving into the unknown with unpredictable results. And if the results turn out to be different from what was expected, they alone will be accountable for the failure and, in extreme cases, may lose their jobs.

Although these considerations may sound pessimistic, they are basically optimistic, considering that the realization of these problems may lead to the necessary discussions and negotiations that could result in a solution. In spite of a well-orchestrated move to induce lower classes to self-exclude from the community of English speakers, I feel there is a flourishing perception that learning – and using – English does not necessarily mean colonization of the mind. The greatest change in the hate/love relationship with English, as far as society is concerned, is that people’s perception of the language is moving towards the idea of decolonization. The hate period is gradually giving place to the notion of empowerment. The belief held by some people that learning English gives them affordance to do more, in whatever activity they may be involved, resulting in better jobs, cultural enrichment and mainly opportunities of emancipation from poverty may sound naïve from a cynical point of view, but necessary when we realize that there is no citizenship, a Brazilian favorite catchword, without a minimum level of financial independence.

Porto Alegre, July 2016.

Vilson J. Leffa (UCPel, CNPq)

Chapter 1

Globalization and English in Brazil

Kyria Rebeca Finardi

Introduction

Before I address the motivation for writing this book or its main theme, namely, the status of English in Brazil, I briefly outline the theoretical rationale that feeds some of the assumptions that inform this introductory chapter. These assumptions relate to the role of languages in general and of English in particular in the globalized world with a special focus on the context of Brazil.

Because of the impact of Bourdieu’s ideas in almost all areas of the so-called soft sciences, I start this review with his proposal of conceptualizing language as a social-historical phenomenon and the many implications that follow this proposal. Bourdieu (1991) opposes strictly linguistic and dichotomic views of language such as Saussurian’s view of language as langue (language) x parole (speech) and Chomsky’s view of language as competence x performance because these views assume a completely homogeneous language which does exist in reality. For Bourdieu, language evolves through a complex historical process, which very often involves conflict whereby a particular language emerges as the dominant and legitimate language either eliminating or subordinating other languages to it. This dominant language is what Bourdieu claims that linguists commonly take for granted and in the case of dominant languages in Brazil, especially the official language (Portuguese) and the dominant foreign language (English), this is an example of assumptions that must be reflected upon.

Chomsky’s competence x performance view of language is criticized by Bourdieu on the grounds that speaking is much more than just the generation of a grammatically correct sequence. For Bourdieu, competence relates to a person’s capacity to produce appropriate expressions for particular audiences/contexts and it involves not only the capacity to produce grammatically correct sentences but also (and perhaps more importantly) the capacity to make oneself heard, believed, obeyed, or followed. For Bourdieu the recognition of the associated forms of power implicit in all communicative situations is lacking in Saussure’s and Chomsky’s view of language which see linguistic exchanges as intellectual operations consisting of the mere encoding and decoding of grammatically well-formed messages and that is why I adopt Bourdieu’s view of language instead of adopting a purely linguistic view as would be expected from a linguist.

Having said that, one of Bourdieu’s central idea and reason why he is well known among sociologists of education, is that there are different forms of capital, economic capital (material wealth) being only one form. Other forms of capital are cultural capital (knowledge, skills and other cultural acquisitions, as exemplified by educational or technical qualifications), symbolic power (prestige or honor) and linguistic capital (the capacity to produce expressions à propos, for a particular market). In relation to the latter form of capital, Bourdieu goes on to explain that people have different amounts of linguistic capital whose distribution is related to the distribution of other forms of capital (economic capital, cultural capital, etc) which, in turn, define an individual’s location within social space. Hence, differences in accent, grammar and vocabulary – the very differences overlooked by formal linguists – are indices of the social positions of speakers and evidence of the amount of linguistic capital (as well as of other forms of capital) which they possess. In this sense and as we shall see further on in this chapter, Bourdieu’s view of accent relates to Blommaert’s (2010) notion of globalized linguistic commodification.

In Bourdieu’s paradigm, the more linguistic capital speakers have, the more they are able to exploit the system to their advantage to guarantee a profit. The forms of expressions which receive the greatest value with the greatest profit are those which are most unequally distributed, both in the sense that the conditions for their acquisition are restricted, and in the sense that these expressions are relatively rare on the markets where they appear. Though an analysis of linguistic capital is beyond the scope of this chapter, I would like to retain Bourdieu’s notion of the distribution of linguistic capital in relation to the distribution of English (as a form of expression with great value and profit) in Brazil.

Another notion I would like to retain from Bourdieu relates to the status of a given language. According to him (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 45) the official language is bound up with the state and in order for one language (in the case of bilingualism) or a particular use of language (in the case of a society divided into classes) to impose itself as the legitimate one, the different languages have to be measured against the legitimate language or linguistic practice. Perhaps this measurement, in the case of the use of English in Brazil, is one of the motivations for this book.

Another concept that informs this chapter because of its affordances for the reflection on language as a social process in relation to the inclusion/exclusion processes of power relations permeated by language and globalization (Gimenez, El Kadri, Calvo, Siqueira, & Porfirio, 2015), is that of English as a lingua franca (ELF), defined as a contact language among speakers of different native languages or as any use of English among speakers of different native languages for whom English is the communicative medium of choice and often the only option (Seidlhofer, 2011). The concept of ELF was later expanded to the concept of English as a multilingual lingua franca (Jenkins, 2015) and Jenkins explains that although the concept of ELF shares a number of assumptions with the concept of World English (WE) (Kachru, 1983), such as that most people who learn English do not do so to communicate (mostly) with native speakers of English and that the non-native speaker’s English cannot be viewed as an interlanguage, ELF differs from WE in that it transcends geographical boundaries and is beyond description. The concept of ELF has also been linked to the notion of International Language - a term first used by Larry Smith (1983, as cited in Jenkins, 2015), who worked with WE, and later by Karlfried Knapp (1987, as cited in Jenkins, 2015) as English as International Lingua Franca, though ELF scholars were not aware of it at the time and so the term English as an International Language (EIL) was used for many years as a synonym for ELF.

Gimenez et al. (2015) suggests that the ELF agenda, along with the expansion in the meanings attributed to languages and which identify with the need for new paradigms to define its diversity, challenging linguistic ideologies derived from structuralist views of language (Blommaert, 2010) is starting to make way in contemporary research, though it still walking its first steps in Brazil as Gimenez will show in her chapter in this book.

Because most people in Brazil are not fluent in English, Finardi (2014) proposes the appropriation of the term English as an international language in that context to refer to the use of English among speakers of the same native language (Portuguese) and in relation to its function (communication with native and/or non-native speakers of English) rather than to the context where it is learned/used.

According to Cogo and Dewey (2012), there are three ways to approach ELF: 1) in relation to the context where it is used as a main contact language; 2) in relation to its function as a means of communication for speakers of different native languages and 3) as a research paradigm. Finardi’s (2014) proposal is closer to 2) though it is different from it in the sense that Finardi proposes that English is used by speakers of the same native language (Portuguese). Her proposal cannot be categorized as 1) because there is no data to confirm that English is the main contact language in Brazil; it may very well be Spanish or even Portuguese (for indigenous communities).

Despite acknowledging Finardi’s (2014) view of English in Brazil, I want to bear the concept of ELF in relation to English in Brazil and to the aforementioned measurement proposed by Bourdieu, because of the implications of ELF in Brazil, as will be suggested by Gimenez later on in this book.

Jenkins (2015) argues that ELF