English Language Teaching in Brazil: A Gap in Policy, Problems in Practice

The most important policy document guiding Brazilian education at present is LDB 2015. It mandates the teaching of a foreign language chosen locally from grades 5 to 12 for two 45-, 50-, or 60-minute-periods per week in all basic education. A recent reform has added to LDB 2015 that English will be the foreign language taught in secondary school throughout the country. Previous versions of LDB, however, did not mandate the teaching of English or any other foreign language in basic education, and the problems that are faced in ELT nowadays can be said to date back from the time these laws were passed.

It is worth mentioning that, by 1961, English had already been established as the most commonly taught foreign language in Brazilian schools. The LDB 1961 removed foreign languages from the list of compulsory subjects and that removal of / reduction in English classes led to an increase in the number of private language centres in Brazil as well as to the perception that only in those language centres could students learn the English language. This idea is ingrained in Brazilian society to such an extent until the present day that it becomes a self-fulfilled prophecy even when good conditions for learning seem to be present and is reinforced by important policy documents – PCN-EF and PCN-EM – when they do not establish the conditions that are necessary for the teaching and learning of a foreign language to happen successfully in basic education, but rather attempt to adjust the teaching and learning to whatever the existing conditions are, which can be interpreted as a way to promote the status quo.

Both PCN-EF (Brazil, 1998) and PCN-EM (Brazil, 2000) present progressive ideas about how a foreign language should be taught in the basic education classroom. Such ideas include a social interactionist view of language, which aligns with contemporary research in second language teaching and means a shift from the traditional grammar-translation method largely employed in Brazilian schools in previous decades.

(Available: https://www.researchgate.net. July, 2020. Adapted.)