Expanding global language education in public primary schools: the national English programme in Mexico

Abstract

The paper examines the recent national programme of English language instruction in the Mexican public primary schools, called the Programa Nacional de Inglés en Educación Básica (PNIEB). The programme, initiated in 2009 by the Ministry of Education as part of the national curriculum, represents the largest expansion of English teaching in Mexico's history, entailing the hiring of 98,000 new English teachers. It is the result of an explicit educational policy intended to prepare Mexicans for the twenty-first century by emphasising linguistic and digital abilities: meaning a massive increase of English and computer skills in public schools. The launch of the programme also coincides with a major reform of basic education, as well as the extension of compulsory education from 9 to 13 years. Nevertheless, implementing the English programme, nationally and simultaneously throughout Mexico's 32 states, presents considerable challenges for a public education system that is already under-resourced. The author describes the complexity of the programme in several local contexts. The Mexican programme is analysed as part of a growing trend to expand public primary English language teaching (PELT) in Latin America and developing countries as part of an educational policy to make them more economically competitive.

Keywords:

• public primaries
• early foreign language programmes
• Mexico
• PNIEB

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I would like to acknowledge gratefully my research collaborators, especially co-principle investigators on several projects: Ruth Ban (Barry University, Florida) and Magdalena López (ITESO, Guadalajara).

2. According to this analysis, Mexico was rated ‘low' on the cusp of ‘very low' in English proficiency (EF, 2012).

3. In fact, the national programme in Chile is called ‘English Opens Doors Programme' (Matear, 2008).

4. Starting in 2011, compulsory basic education was expanded from grades 1–9 to K-12. However, the average level of educational attainment is only 8.4 years, and varies widely according to geographical region (three years higher in the north than the south) and gender (0.3 difference, INEGI, 2010).

5. This figure was cited to me by the director of a regional association on private schools. Hopkins et al. (2007) put private school attendance at 10–12% of the total population, a figure they report is much higher (compared to an average of 3%) than most other OECD countries, which they attribute to the lack of confidence of the Mexican middle classes in the public education system.

6. The previous curriculum at lower secondary included a block generically called ‘Foreign Language'; in the new curriculum it is now labelled ‘Second Language: English'.

7. The Mexican scale is called Certificación Nacional de Nivel de Idioma (CENNI), and breaks down the CEFR bands into smaller ranges that fit the Mexican curriculum. It also worth noting that although the CEFR is a European model, the PNIEB curriculum was developed by Mexican educational experts as part of broader reform of the education system (see Wedell (2003) for a history of Western-led teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) educational reform in post-colonial contexts).

8. Language functions (doing things with language, e.g. introducing yourself, asking for directions, etc.) and notions (expressed through language, e.g. time, distance, etc.) are the organising principles of communicatively oriented L2 syllabi.

9. The regular teacher, called the titular, teaches the rest of the subjects in Spanish and may have been unaccustomed to ‘giving up' their classroom to the English teachers, who have to teach largely ‘off the cart' by bringing their materials from classroom to classroom.

10. The Binational Migrant Education Program (PROBEM) was formed in 1982 to help migrant families enrol children in US schools. Since 2005, the programme has been successful in addressing issues of academic mobility for returnee families by allowing transnational students to enrol in the correct grade level by getting Mexican school administrators to accept records from American schools; the programme has not explicitly addressed language- and pedagogy-related issues of transnational students (see Zúñiga, Hamann, & Sánchez García, 2008).

11. Despite the serious difficulties I describe here in getting the programme running in the state, I should add that I was invited to observe classes in several towns in Michoacán and do a series of workshops with the teachers, and was personally extremely impressed by the dedication and professionalism of the teachers and administrators in working with limited resources (even while their pay was suspended) in a challenging context.

12. Like Michoacán, in most states it is unclear how the PNIEB will be integrated into the indigenous education system. Additionally, because of the economic conditions that foment migration and diaspora, many indigenous communities are now on the receiving end of transnational (and often English-speaking) children arriving from the USA and having attended American schools.