ELT in Brazil

This was a question we decided to tackle today in our Inner Circle. For some time, we have shared ideas, studies, books, high-quality reference materials, and solid arguments that point to adopting a teaching approach that is truly communicative and with a reactive focus on language — language at the point of need, as Thornbury puts it.

Still, many teachers are resistant to these changes, and we wanted to investigate why. Before asking around, we engaged in some introspection. What is the reasoning behind accepting that languages can be chopped into pieces, taught piece by piece, and then mastered through rounds of practice?

Well, for starters, a strong argument in favor of PPP could be “That’s how I learned English”. And it is a convincing argument. If the teacher themselves learned English through coursebooks that delivered language in a PPP-esque format, why wouldn’t their learners do the same?

Let’s put this under the microscope and investigate. In our studies on the nature of language and language acquisition, one thing was made abundantly clear: our minds are innately capable of learning languages. This process cannot be led by a teacher, but it can definitely be sped up and — as we’ve seen previously — teachers can help learners achieve higher levels of proficiency when compared to uninstructed learners. If our minds are innately equipped to learn languages, we must assess to what extent this process has been facilitated or sped up by a coursebook and PPP.

One argument against this correlation is the studies that report that naturalistic learners (those who move to another country to learn the language ‘in natura’), instructed learners (those who take language lessons in a country where the language isn’t spoken), and mixed learners (those who move to another country and take lessons) acquire language in the same order. This is an indication that the order in which language is presented, practiced, and produced in coursebooks or any other synthetic material does not affect the order of acquisition. This seems to indicate that there’s no correlation between PPP-esque instruction and acquisition.

Another argument against this correlation is the fact that in most ‘graduation-level classes’, learners’ levels vary considerably. For instance, when I ‘graduated’ from my EFL course, I was almost at C1 level — it took me a semester to prepare and be ready for the Cambridge Advanced. However, many of my classmates, I reckon, were around a B1 or B1+ level. If our coursebook was C1 and the language we were taught was really ‘C1’, what gives?

Talking to other bilingual teachers in Brazil, I realized that we — Brazilian English teachers, or any other teacher who learned English as an additional language — are poor examples of successful language learners. Not because we haven’t acquired the language to proficient levels, but quite the opposite. We are outliers, not the norm. Plus, every single English teacher whose L1 is not English has a story to tell about their learning of the language. They have immersed themselves in the language through music, movies, books, or, as in my case, online videogames. Though we might have had 3 hours of English classes through PPP-esque approaches and coursebooks, I can easily account for over 20 hours a week of communicative, comprehensible, compelling input — and if you’re an English teacher who has learned the language you teach as an additional language, I am positive you have a very similar story to tell.

Through all this immense contribution of rich input in our language acquisition process, paired up with a few hours a week of PPP which, of course, involved some communicative interaction here and there and feedback from good teachers, attributing our language acquisition success to those 3 hours a week rather than the immense amounts of communicative, comprehensible, and compelling input doesn’t seem right.

To sum up, the main points here against the correlation between PPP-esque approaches and successful language acquisition are (a) the order of language development does not mirror the order in which language is presented, practiced, and produced, (b) language taught differs widely from language learned, and (c) successful language learners always immerse themselves in the language. Coursebooks and PPP might have been there with you through this process, but it seems that they have had very little impact on your language acquisition process.

If we aim to be the best teachers we can be for our learners, we cannot settle for ‘very little impact’.