Common european framework of references for languages and chilean curricular bases :a critical contrast to the level and work system of oral production and its methodologies according to the cultural and academic contect of the chilean national reality

Abstract

As students of the English teaching programme at the Universidad Católica Raúl Silva Henríquez in Santiago, during the process to become teachers we have noticed about the environment of the educational and social context involved, in which we can find different realities and academic backgrounds depending on the educational and social context that we have been experienced in our pre-service teacher periods. There was created a project called Estrategia Nacional de Inglés 20142030 by the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Economy and Tourism during Sebastian Piñera's government, which said: "If up until a few years ago, being an illiterate meant not being fluent in one’s own language, today, the new illiterates are those without the ability to navigate through the language of technological information, master the English language, which now is the principle worldwide language." (Free translation by the members of the group) The document establishes that there are more than 8.000 English teachers in the country, but 1.284 of them do not have a proper knowledge of English; in fact only the 5.8% of the teachers have the minimum standard requested for the Ministry of Education. The main focus of this document aims to improve the effective communicative skills of Chilean students and to reach a high level of English, by giving them the tools and the support to get this goal, not only focusing on the students or on the school but also on the family and society; hence the initial and continuous training of English teachers and English for Specific Purposes. 5 Another point of view that the previous government had and took into account for the creation of the project was related to the international agreements of the country; "The use of English has grown into a tool for worldwide communication, whose use has presented commercial opportunities as well as brought about intercultural and scientific benefits among the people of the most diverse languages. For this reason, developing an appropriate level of English has become an active strategy for the development of any country, as well as a relevant advantage for the workers in competitive labor markets on both local and global levels." ( Estrategia Nacional Del Inglés, Marzo 2014) The Ministry of Education points to "strengthen the proficiencies of the Chilean population in the English language, in order to accelerate the integration of Chile into a global world and therefore improve our competitiveness” (Marzo, 2014, Estrategia Nacional Del Inglés). The Ministry of Education expects that in 2020 the 30% of the students reach the A2 or B1 level according to the Common European Framework of References of Languages (CEFR) and in 2030 a 50% of them could get such levels taken in consideration the 18% obtained in the SIMCE 2012. The Common European Framework of Reference of Languages (CEFR) is the result of developments in language education that date back to the 1970s and beyond, and its publication in 2001 was the direct outcome of several discussions, meetings and consultation processes which had taken place over the previous 10 years in Europe. We are certainly aware of the differences between the highest and the lowest social economic group of our current society, so we do not mean just in 6 the purchasing power that each person has. We are aware of the huge differences in the access to high quality of education and certainly its context; it means how the academic environment of the student could be properly enriched. In 2011, the English standardized test SIMCE, showed a significant difference between the highest and the lowest socioeconomic groups of students results, in terms of self-confidence at the moment of expressing themselves in a foreign language in three skills only; reading, writing and listening comprehension. This is mainly based on the time of exposure that each student has had on the different educational establishments which, being so reduced, could have affected the proficiency at the moment of using the foreign language. Moreover, if we take a look at SIMCE 2010 chart results, we could be shocked by the numbers because it seems to be that the national reality is so far from the goals presented by the Ministry of Education (MINEDUC) in order to have functionally bilingual students at the end of their high school programme. According to this, it seems to be essential to have more hours of English classes in order to achieve goals at a functional level for the students, that is to say, the more time of exposure to English students have, the more success in acquiring the second language goal they will have. Moreover, the more time of exposition to the language that the students must have to reach a proficient level of English, the more important the teacher’s role in the educational system seems to be. By this role, we mean how teachers develop their lessons and how this should be the key for acquiring a second language. This is basically because while the more the teachers work out their classes or sessions in English, the more the students will feel selfconfident to use English language. The results of the standardized English test called Sistema de Medición de Calidad de la Educación (SIMCE) 2010 show the analysis of factors associated to learning English aims, in order to provide evidence on the relation between characteristics of students and establishments with learning the foreign language, considering their socioeconomic conditions. The chart results also shows that the highest socioeconomic level schools, have better outcomes because of the fact that teachers make or develop their lessons fully in the target language, in this case English. One of the reasons, among many others, why students with a good economic situation have better results in such test, is the consequence of the individual work that every single English Department prepares, e.g. material and text books that are different from those given by MINEDUC, and usually at a higher level and including all four linguistic skills, adding the amount of hours exposed to the target language. Taking all of this into account, we started our research through the Chilean curricular bases stipulated by the Ministry of Education (MINEDUC) in 2013, in order to analyse the weaknesses that are eroding the efficacy of the Chilean syllabus to get better speaking production results. According to the Department of Education, students are expected to reach a B1 level of English according to the global scale from the CEFR. The above meant that it has become indispensable to look into curricular bases purposed by the CEFR referring to oral skill principally, which is the main item to study in the research. With a view of getting improvements in that area, it was necessary to contrast both the MINEDUC and the CEFR curricular bases, in order to clarify which could be the factors influencing the ability already said. It seems that B1 level is absolutely decontextualized because it is based on the CEFR, which is an international scale to measure how capable the user is to develop on independent situations, so far from our socioeconomic reality to reach equality according to the distribution of the resources. Chilean curricular bases should not be based or inspired on a European developed countries scale, in which education reaches levels almost compulsory in foreign language aspects. The main objective of this research is to prove that the CEFR is an acquired method to be included in the curricular bases for high schools because it is absolutely decontextualized and alien to our socioeconomic and educational background as nation. It is also an objective to determine if teacher’s proficiency in developing their classes has a real impact on the students in acquiring or reaching the B1 level, as the curricular bases and the CEFR propose to high school students at 12th grade who must have or develop at the end of their school program. Throughout a survey delivered to English Language Teachers who have taught in schools that apply the syllabus offer by MINEDUC, we will try to find out the teacher's knowledge about the CEFR standards, their knowledge about Programas de estudios and its ways to work with it developing speaking skill with their students in classroom in a way that they can reach an approach to the language according to all English acquisition theories and if this is according to the curricular bases in which we can find the CEFR standards on it and if this standards are accurately applied in the classrooms in order to reach and develop B1 level expressed on the curricular bases at the moment that the students obtain their twelve grade promotion in the end of their high school education.