My Challenges being an English Teacher in Brazil
Hello Everyone,
Today's post relate a little bit to my teaching context, Brazil, I'll be talking about a few issues I've been facing in my early teaching practice as an English teacher. I have been teaching at a private language school, it is based on a communicative approach, the books work with mainly British English, in the sense that the pictures of English are still shown in a very Inner Circle Perspective (KACHRU, 1985) especially to the British perspective, a few books only work with a more global perspective of English, but those are only Upper-intermediate and Advanced (Books produced by National Geographic Learning used at the language institute) the other books are densely immersed in the Inner British Perspective. I particularly have a great empathy with British English, however I can't ignore the fact that English is not the same as it was a hundred of years ago, it is now a complete crescent in the world as a Global Lingua Franca, especially in what concerns the advents of globalisation.
Even with such perspective at the school where I work, I have been trying to address the teaching by relating to students' realities and identities, I am basically new in the area of teaching and I might be misconceived about the use of English as a Lingua Franca (henceforth ELF), but I've been addressing the teaching of vocabulary and situations (as it fits into the communicative approach of language learning) to their own realities, regarding pronunciation, I only correct those which would somehow cause misunderstanding in their daily conversations, but not training them to become British English Speakers. My own English is quite a denial to my own country, since a kid I focused on having a dense Southern British English, I am happy with that and I see no problems at all in having this sort of accent, of course, I know that my English shall never be "British" regarding that my view on language used is understood as a social-linguistic issue, in this case, my English is indeed Brazilian, whence I base my vocabulary choice and my linguistic pattern of social action, as I see it, language is completely connected to the social environment it is applied, hence in my view it would be impossible to achieve a native-like English not being in such social context, I try to teach my students to accept their own reality but also I don't reproach if they want to speak with a different accent, To my own experience, it brings a lot of inspiration when learning a new language.
Today's post relate a little bit to my teaching context, Brazil, I'll be talking about a few issues I've been facing in my early teaching practice as an English teacher. I have been teaching at a private language school, it is based on a communicative approach, the books work with mainly British English, in the sense that the pictures of English are still shown in a very Inner Circle Perspective (KACHRU, 1985) especially to the British perspective, a few books only work with a more global perspective of English, but those are only Upper-intermediate and Advanced (Books produced by National Geographic Learning used at the language institute) the other books are densely immersed in the Inner British Perspective. I particularly have a great empathy with British English, however I can't ignore the fact that English is not the same as it was a hundred of years ago, it is now a complete crescent in the world as a Global Lingua Franca, especially in what concerns the advents of globalisation.
Even with such perspective at the school where I work, I have been trying to address the teaching by relating to students' realities and identities, I am basically new in the area of teaching and I might be misconceived about the use of English as a Lingua Franca (henceforth ELF), but I've been addressing the teaching of vocabulary and situations (as it fits into the communicative approach of language learning) to their own realities, regarding pronunciation, I only correct those which would somehow cause misunderstanding in their daily conversations, but not training them to become British English Speakers. My own English is quite a denial to my own country, since a kid I focused on having a dense Southern British English, I am happy with that and I see no problems at all in having this sort of accent, of course, I know that my English shall never be "British" regarding that my view on language used is understood as a social-linguistic issue, in this case, my English is indeed Brazilian, whence I base my vocabulary choice and my linguistic pattern of social action, as I see it, language is completely connected to the social environment it is applied, hence in my view it would be impossible to achieve a native-like English not being in such social context, I try to teach my students to accept their own reality but also I don't reproach if they want to speak with a different accent, To my own experience, it brings a lot of inspiration when learning a new language.
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