Appropriate English Teaching for Latin America
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APPROPRIATE ENGLISH TEACHING FOR LATIN AMERICA PAUL DAVIES Copyright © 2021 by Paul Davies Published by TESL-EJ Publications All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. ISBN: 978-0-9823724-3-2 CONTENTS Preface v Introduction vii PART I GENERAL ASPECTS OF ELT IN LATIN AMERICA 1. A Review of Two Surveys of ELT in Latin America 3 2. What’s Special about English Language Teaching in 13 Latin America? 3. The Most and the Least Successful ELT in Latin 36 America 4. Affective Factors in Language Learning and Teaching 51 5. ELT Lessons from Europe 59 6. The Role of ELT Centres in Latin America 70 7. Teachers’ Perceptions of ELT in Public Secondary 78 Schools 8. What Should PRONI Teachers Really Do in Lower 94 Secondary School? 9. Two Frameworks for ELT 103 10. ELT Futurology 139 PART II SPECIFIC ASPECTS OF ELT IN LATIN AMERICA COMMUNICATIVE SKILLS 151 11. Communicative Listening 153 12. Communicative Reading, and Language Learning 160 Through Reading 13. Starting and Developing Communicative Speaking 167 14. Communicative Writing at Beginner-elementary 175 Level THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 183 15. ELT as TEFL or TELF? Or Something Else? 184 16. Selecting Vocabulary 192 17. Exploiting Cognates 203 18. Teaching English Verb Patterns in Latin America 211 19. Working on the Pronunciation of English 220 20. Which English to Focus On? 232 AIDS AND RESOURCES 239 21. Some Perspectives on EFL Textbooks 240 TEACHER DEVELOPMENT 251 22. Actual ELT in Licenciaturas in ELT 252 23. Context and Learner-centred ELT Training 260 ELT MANAGEMENT 267 24. ELT Coordination: Why and How 268 25. General Considerations for ELT Management 275 26. Management of ELT in Basic Education 283 27. Management of ELT in Higher Education 293 28. Management of ELT Centres 302 APPENDIX 313 About the Author 315 There are basic elements of ELT wherever it is practised around the world, but ELT should also vary significantly according to students’ characteristics and needs, their learning contexts, their native language, and other factors, which may vary greatly from region to region and country to country. All Latin American countries have most major factors related to ELT in common, but many are notably different from countries in Europe, Asia and Africa. This book is about ELT specifically in Latin America, past, present and future. INTRODUCTION As its title states, this book is about English language teaching in Latin America, that is, specifically in Latin America—as opposed to ELT in Europe, the Middle East, Asia or elsewhere, or globalised ELT with little or no regional or local adaptation. Obviously, ELT almost everywhere has most ELT-related theory and ELT practice in common, but teaching English in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Peru or any other Latin American country is significantly different from teaching English in The Netherlands, Germany, Egypt, Thailand or China, not to mention in an ELT centre in the UK or USA. For example, most of Latin America is distant from the USA, the UK, and indeed most of the rest of the world—even Mexico City is almost 1,000 kms from the nearest part of the US border (Texas) and almost 3,000 kms from the furthest part (Califor- nia). Then there are socio-economic factors: an overwhelming majority of Latin Americans do not have the resources to travel or stay abroad, even just once in their lives. And there are linguistic factors: compared to Arabic and Japanese, and indeed most languages, Portuguese and Spanish have a lot in common with English, and both, especially Spanish, are widely used international viii | Introduction languages, unlike Dutch and Japanese. All that, and more, affect the need most Latin Americans have of English (little or none for most Latin Americans, and more for use in the learner’s own country than travelling and staying abroad for most of the important minority that do need English) as well as their motivation to learn English and their expectations of learning it successfully. The articles on this topic area that are collected in this book are the product of a retirement project or hobby—an open-access online magazine for ELT professionals in Latin America called English Language Teaching in Latin America, and ELTinLA for short. Upon retirement, I kept myself happily busy for two years publishing 24 monthly numbers of ELTinLA between August 2018 and July 2020, with 38 of my own articles and 11 by other contributors, all with extensive ELT experience in Latin America. The magazine was perfect for me as my first retirement hobby and, I hope, was a useful last contribution of mine to a profession and a part of the world that have treated me extremely well. Note that the magazine was not intended to be mainly for ELT academics like most Applied Linguistics and ELT journals, but for classroom teachers, ELT coor- dinators and other practising ELT professionals of all kinds, up to and including ELT academics, and this book should reflect that broad, inclusive and essentially practical approach. ELTinLA online magazine was itself the product of my 53 years of very varied ELT experience in Mexico (after an initial 2 years in Spain), with working trips to Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay and, above all, Brazil. In the decade or so before the end of my working (i.e., paid) ELT life, I wrote several articles on ELT issues specifically in Mexico and Latin America which were published in MEXTESOL Journal and one in TESL-EJ, and when full retirement finally came at the age of 79, ideas were still chattering away in my head, urging me to write them down. Those ideas were mainly about the long and contin- uing general failure of ELT in Mexico and other Latin American Introduction | ix countries, especially, but not only, in public schools, but also about the satisfactory and even highly successful ELT in some places in Mexico and other countries, and about the reasons behind both the failure and the success. Positive, negative, promising, disastrous, and yet-to-be-determined aspects of ELT in Latin America are presented and explored in this book. The real contexts, conditions and needs of the region, and the needs of its people, were always in my mind as I wrote the articles. The other contributors to ELTinLA online magazine also had Latin America and Latin Americans very much in mind, and their articles are referred to in this book where relevant. As I’ve said, ELTinLA online magazine was published monthly from August 2018 to July 2020, which means that the last 6 numbers came out during the COVID-19 pandemic. My first response to that was in the editorial of the April number of the magazine, where I wrote, “Happy Children’s Day to the children in your life, and the child still playing in your heart! And, especially if you’re ‘getting on a bit’ like me, may you get through this COVID-19 crisis fairly comfortably and come out of it ready to face whatever lies ahead”. Three months later, in the editorial of the last number of the maga- zine in July, I referred to the pandemic again, mentioning that I was born in 1939, just before the beginning of “the Second World War, the last massive global calamity before COVID-19. That’s luck for you— global calamity at the beginning and at the end of a life! But I’m not complaining, only trying to make the most of it, just like you. That’s life.” It is indeed life, and when my father came home from the War after my sixth birthday, life went on, but very differently from before the War and during the War. As I write this, eight months after lock- down was recommended for older people and people with health issues in Mexico, and elsewhere in Latin America, with almost 160,000 deaths in Brazil and 90,000 in Mexico and counting, and over 1,000 dead per 1 million population in Peru, the worst death rate in the world, the pandemic continues apace, with many serious x | Introduction issues related to it looming on the horizon. ELT is among the least of them, but it is one, and we should already be working on post- pandemic ELT. I suggest we try to answer the following questions, and similar ones, with creative thinking, not just regurgitation of old, standard pre-pandemic answers: 1. What proportion of all Latin Americans really need English and are prepared to put in the work usually required to learn it? Note that most current (pre-pandemic) national English programmes in Latin America are based on the assumption that close to 100% do: that would include cleaning, construction, delivery, farm, home making, hospital, industrial, maintenance, restaurant, security, shop, traditional market, and all other workers, as well as professionals and skilled workers in certain industries like tourism. 2. How can we best ensure that those Latin Americans who really do need English actually learn it? Note that most current (pre-pandemic) national English programmes in Latin America seem to be based on the assumption that lots of classroom ELT for all school students is best (13 years in Mexico, starting in last year of pre-school), but after all those years of ELT most institutions of higher education start their students off at beginner level again. Many people who really need and want English turn to language centres, both in institutions of higher education and for the general public, and there’s a plethora of online support for learners of English, most of it ‘traditional’ but some high quality, and this is sure to be even more important while the pandemic continues and after.