ELT in Brazil

Today, we attended the opening plenary and four talks that seemed to align with our current practice and research. We attended the Teacher Training and Education (TTed) SIG forum, a talk on transactional strategies for reading development, a talk on fostering incidental learning, and one on post-method lesson planning.

The opening plenary, “English language – the coloniser”, by Dr. Angoy was definitely the best way to start the conference. Dr. Angoy’s plenary was inspiring and thought-provoking. It made us think about the role of the English language in our contexts and how it might be contributing to language erosion. In the Brazilian context, we are seeing the seemingly unregulated proliferation of bilingual schools/programmes/systems, which all tackle bilingualism in their very own particular ways. Mind you, this does not mean they adapt to different learners’ idiosyncrasies and needs, as most of them (at least the ones I know) seem to borrow from skill learning theory (and its infamous children: the synthetic syllabus and the PPP). Dr. Angoy posed the question: “How can we avoid the coloniality of language when English is the language of the colonizer?” and it got me thinking. To echo my words from yesterday’s report, perhaps it is time for the Brazilian government — and every other Global South government, for that matter — to claim sovereignty over our ELT and stop being regulated or rather overseen by American or British institutions and become horizontal partners in this endeavor.

The TTed SIG forum was an interesting opportunity for us to listen to other teacher educators around the world and reflect on our current challenges and how to address them. One of the challenges mentioned was teachers’ apparent lack of a long-term goal in their careers. This seems to be a symptom of the widespread precarity in our field caused, in my personal opinion, by the commodification of ELT and the poor standards accepted by the market — walking through Brighton in the afternoon, we saw a sign on a famous English school that read “CELTA: Become an English teacher in 4 weeks!”. One can only imagine that the market will not be very excited to pay a 4-week qualified professional handsomely.

The talk on transactional strategies for reading development described a study to be carried out in a school in Panama. This is a technical school where learners take high school classes and learn a trade simultaneously, and the researcher’s goal is to investigate how effective teaching reading strategies can be to foster reading development in L2. When describing the study, the speaker exemplified one of the assessment tasks (a traditional reading comprehension exercise) in which the text the learners read was closely connected to the trade they were learning in school — some sort of an electrician’s job, the correct term escapes me now. Though I find it important to get learners to read texts that are relevant to them (for obvious reasons), I wonder if this knowledge of the world would ‘contaminate’ the study results because learners could answer comprehension questions not necessarily based on text comprehension but background knowledge. On the other hand, when we think about high-stakes language exams reading sections, examination boards often select PARSNIPS-safe texts on topics no one is likely to have any knowledge of the world on. While this seems like an appropriate way to perhaps isolate the skill, I believe we end up misrepresenting the skill of reading altogether. I mean, who would ever decide to read a text about polar bears to extract detailed information from it if not on a Cambridge exam?

The talk on incidental learning got us a bit puzzled. The speakers presented an interesting project in which they get student-teachers (MA candidates) to produce vocabulary self-study packets for undergraduate learners. The experience involves some coaching, peer- and tutor-feedback on the materials created, and seems like an interesting opportunity for the MA candidates to try their hand at materials writing. What puzzled us, however, was the fact that the vocabulary self-study packets created involved traditional gap fills to revise the vocabulary seen in class and expand on it. Some of the exercises created (which were interestingly called ‘tasks’ by the speakers) involved learners matching words in a box to their definitions and then using these words to complete sentences. In light of that, we argue that the learners will engage in explicit, intentional learning and not incidental learning as labeled by the speakers. An interesting takeaway, however, was the proposed structure for these packets: revise → extend → go beyond the article (learners read articles in class where the target vocabulary was embedded, and in the go beyond exercise, they were encouraged to watch a video or listen to a podcast on the topic). I wonder if this structure can be used with real tasks to foster implicit, incidental learning.

For our last session of the day, before a guided tour around Brighton with a close friend of ours, we attended a session on post-method lesson planning. The speaker described how teachers can explore learning affordances in classroom tasks (they were, again, exercises) to catalyze learning in coursebook-based courses. It seemed to us that the main point of the talk was helping teachers turn lame coursebook exercises into better learning opportunities. I sometimes get the feeling that some teachers know that coursebooks are not the best tools for second language learning and spend an awful lot of time adapting and enhancing linguistically poor texts and exercises in a coursebook, in what seems to me to be counterproductive. My point is, if we keep adapting coursebooks and supplementing them, why bother? If a tool is not fit for the job, why adapt or supplement the tool instead of finding the appropriate tool for the job? The speaker, however, answered my question. She said, “Some teachers don’t have a choice and must use a mandated coursebook.” — point taken, but rather upsetting to have tools imposed on professionals who have no autonomy to use their expertise to decide for themselves.

It is ironic to have an opening plenary on decoloniality and end the day hearing about Global North mass produced coursebooks being mandated all over the world.

Keywords: decoloniality, teacher education, precarity, reading strategies, incidental learning, post-method

See you tomorrow for another report on IATEFL