TYPING PARAGRAPH NO. 04
Introduction This chapter aims to describe the Tocantins English Project, a partnership between the State Secretariat of Education of the State of Tocantins SEDUC TO and the British Council. This Project was set up in 2002 and carried out in the years 2003 and 2004. The description will highlight some of the common problems faced by state sector English teachers in Brazil and the attempts made during the project to address them. It will also ask, five years after the project ended, what lasting effects the project has had. 1. The origins of the Tocantins English Project Like so many good things in life, the Tocantins English Project was full of surprises. The first surprise was when the Secretary for Education of the State of Tocantins approached the British Council, late in 2001, saying something to the effect of I have raised the funds and I want you to run the Project. The British Council reacted with caution, given the logistical and structural difficulties of working in a poor northern State of Brazil. The background to the Tocantins proposal was a large scale ELT project the British Council was involved with in the more developed southern State of Parana, with substantial funding, first from the World Bank and later from the Inter American Development Bank. That project aimed to cater for several thousand state school English teachers. The then Secretary for Education in Tocantins, Maria Auxiliadora Seabra Rezende affectionately known as Professor Dorinha, had heard about the Parana Project and decided to set up something similar in her own State. While she spoke no English herself at that time, she felt that English language teaching should be given more attention in the public education system if Brazil were to compete in a globalised world. The funds the Secretary had accessed came from the Ministry of Education (MEC) and were aimed at the improvement of high school education ensino medio in the northern States of Brazil, under a scheme known as Projeto Alvorada. So she approached the British Council. The aim was capacity building for 374 Tocantins high school English teachers, 225 in the first year and the rest to be added in 2004. My own involvement was another surprise. I first heard about the idea of a project in Tocantins at a social encounter with Eddie Edmundson in Recife just before Christmas in 2001. Eddie was working as a consultant for the British Council between two postings and was responsible for advising the Director in Brasilia on whether a project would be viable. Although I subsequently took part, as a consultant, in the baseline testing of teachers in March 2002, I only become directly involved as project manager designate, at Eddies suggestion, in mid 2002 Framework public sector ELT in Brazil A vicious circle operates in pubic sector English teaching in Brazil, particularly in remote regions. Students generally spend four years of primary school and three or sometimes four years of high school doing English, usually with two 45 minute classes per week. This seems to be a case of too little, spread too thin. But the 10 problem is compounded by two further factors. Universities receive students with extremely low language proficiency at entry level, and often consider that their job is to give the students an academic grounding rather than a practical knowledge of the language. It is thus perfectly possible for a teacher to graduate from university after some five years of studies with a licentiate degree in Portuguese and English or in English alone, but with an extremely poor command of the English language for practical classroom purposes. In addition, there is a flourishing private sector market for language institutes. These institutes may even have a vested interest in seeing that standards remain low in schools, since this boosts demand for their own services. At all events, there is a fairly widespread idea that communication in English cannot be taught or learnt in a public sector school. This leads to a low level of interest and motivation among students but worse than that, often among teachers too. The forthcoming introduction of school English textbooks under the Ministry of Education FNDE /PNLEM scheme, which provides free course books to public sector schools, can be expected to bring an improvement. But until now, teachers have generally had to depend on photocopies or texts written on board for their materials. Questions of syllabus design and progression have been sacrificed to the day to day survival needs of the teacher.
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