My experience teaching English as a Foreign Language in Brazil
Upon graduating from high school in Brazil, I started teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) as a hobby. My goal was to teach people not only to learn the language, but also to love it as much as I do. Although I was born in Brazil and I teach primarily Portuguese, I am sincere with my students and often tell them that my heart speaks the language that Whitman did. I am proud of that.
I became certified to teach English in Brazil through the Instituto Brazil Estados Unidos (IBEU), a school sponsored by the American embassy. One of the missions of IBEU, as a bi-national center in Brazil, is to promote and celebrate the culture of the United States in Brazil.
Although I have been residing in North America for almost a decade now, I still vividly remember the feedback I gained from my mentors in Brazil while exchanging ideas about learning psychology and pedagogy: “Okay, Anderson, humans, as we know, learn by interacting and communicating, but what is wrong with ‘Communicative Language Teaching,’ or CLT?” “We cannot let our students talk without being supervised; we have to walk around the classroom to make sure that they are making proper use of grammar,” I would reply. I remember that my mentors, along with other researchers, criticized CLT due to the fact that CLT did not dedicate much attention to grammar.
The process to become certified to teach English in Brazil required me to teach a group of students who were at the novice level. I was instructed by my mentors and peers to balance the use of Portuguese (L1) and English (L2) in the classroom. If I were asked to use the target language for at least 90% of the time during the first class, I would probably have thought that it was not possible. The instructions that I delivered in English to my students, therefore, were always very simple: “Please, open your books to page 20,” I would say, and my students would follow. More complex activities, such as those that required students to play a game, demanded me to give instructions in Portuguese. “While playing a game, the rules of the game must be clear to all students,” I often got told. “You do not want a student to feel disappointed because they did not win.”
I thought for a long time that I delivered great EFL lectures when I was in Brazil. Looking back now, though, I feel that my lectures could have been more dynamic than they were. I feel that there was too much focus on the textbook, on having students identify cognate words, as well as on translation.
My goal is to become an ELL instructor. I plan on taking the WEST-E exam (English Language Learning) this year. As of right now, I am conflicted and have been asking myself: “is it possible to teach an ELL class using STARTALK-endorsed principles?” According to my book (a study guide), there is not a definitive answer. The book states that I should not underestimate my students’ native language while delivering an ELL lesson because students are able to make positive transfers between their native language and English in several areas (for example, phonemic awareness, reading phonics, word recognition, and cognates). Because I want to pass the ELL exam, I am expected to master the several different models of instruction in which ELL can be taught. Many of these models seem to reflect my experience while teaching English in Brazil. They emphasize the importance of the presence of the learners’ native language in the classroom.
My heart tells me that when I become an ELL instructor, I should try to teach an ELL class using STARTALK-endorsed principles before exploring things like transfers of literacy competence. I suppose I will not have definitive answers until I have the chance to teach ELL in the United States.