MEXICANOS PRIMERO

Board of Directors
Claudio X. Gonzlez Guajardo
President

David E. Caldern Martn del Campo

General Director
Roberto Snchez Mejorada Catao
Antonio Prida Pen del Valle

Academic council
Miguel Basez Ebergeny, Gustavo Fabin Iaies, Bernardo Naranjo Piera, Roberto
Newell Garca, Harry A. Patrinos, Federico Reyes Heroles, Alberto Saracho Martnez.

Staff
Cintya J. Martnez Villanueva
Associate Director
Adriana Del Valle Tovar
Communications Director
Jennifer L. ODonoghue
Research Director
Manuel Bravo Valladolid and Alejandro Ordez Gonzlez
Participation Co-directors
Lilia Julieta Guzmn Acevedo, Fernando Ruiz Ruiz and Pablo Velzquez Villa
Researchers
Norma Espinoza Vzquez
Media Coordinator
Alfonso Rangel Terrazas
Design Coordinator
Rodrigo Jimnez Solrzano
Digital Communications Coordinator
Miroslava Flix Sariana
Public Affairs Coordinator
Francisco Melndez Garca
Operations Coordinator
Mara Teresa Aguilar lvarez Castro
Legal Studies Coordinator
Macarena Velzquez Lpez
Legal Studies Researcher Sorry. Learning English in Mexico
Paulina Martnez Rivera Jennifer L. ODonoghue
Events Coordinator General coordination
Maricruz Dox Aguilln
David E. Caldern Martn del Campo, Lilia Julieta Guzmn Acevedo, Jennifer L.
Liaison and Operations Analyst
ODonoghue, Fernando Ruiz Ruiz, Pablo Velzquez Villa, Manuel Bravo Valladolid,
Iliana Martnez Oate Miguel Szkely, Hortensia Prez, Blanca Heredia and Daniela Rubio
Assistant to the President Research
Laura Castillo Carro Alfonso Rangel Terrazas
Assistant to the General Director Production
Miriam Castillo Ramrez and Alicia Caldern Ramos Jennifer L. ODonoghue
Analysts and assistants Editorial Coordination
Esther Reyes Nieves Alfonso Rangel Terrazas
Secretarial Support Cover Design and Interiors
Gabriel Escobar Lpez, Ernesto de Santiago Corona Itzel Ramrez Osorno
Logistical support Design
Alfonso Rangel Terrazas, Rodrigo Jimnez Solrzano, Itzel Ramrez and Rafael Tapia Yaez
First Edition: June 2015. Illustration
Sorry. Learning English in Mexico

ISBN: 978-607-8438-01-3
D.R. MEXICANOS PRIMERO, VISIN 2030 A.C.
Av. Insurgentes Sur No. 1647, piso12, Torre Prisma Col. San Jos Insurgentes,
C.P. 03900, Del. Benito Jurez. Mxico, D.F.
+52 (55) 1253-4000 www.mexicanosprimero.org
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http://www.flickr.com/photos/38062135@N05/
We are thankful to the Queen Elizabeth Lower Secondary School for their
support in the production of the front and back covers of this publication.
Printed in Mexico/Impreso en Mxico
No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or by any information retrieval
system without the prior written authorization of the publisher.
Index
Foreword 6

Chapter 1
Introduction: The Right to Learn in English 7
David Caldern

1.1 English and the right to a relevant, pertinent education 8

1.2 The right to learn with and in English 9
1.3 An overview of the topic of English 11

Chapter 2
Why English? 13
2.1 Lingua franca and the right to learn  14
David Caldern 
2.2 Plurilingualism and democratic participation 19
Jennifer L. ODonoghue
2.3 English and social inequity in Mexico  27
Blanca Heredia y Daniela Rubio 

Language and scientific development  38

an interview with Dr. Rosaura Ruiz Gutierrez

2.4 English and economic opportunity 41

Pablo Velzquez
2.5 Language and its impact on brain development  50
Manuel Bravo Valladolid

Chapter 3
Public Policy for Learning English in Mexico 57
David Caldern

3.1 Learning English: The official version 58

3.2 Mexican teachers and English 64
3.3 Structural conditions for teaching English in Mexico 69

The slow road in teaching Indigenous languages 78

Fernando Ruiz Ruiz
Chapter 4
The State of English Language Learning in Mexico 83
Miguel Szkely, Jennifer L. ODonoghue y Hortensia Prez

4.1 The state of English language learning among students 86

4.2 The state of learning English among English teachers 93
4.3 Conclusions 93
Methodological appendix 96

Chapter 5
Good Practices for Teaching and Learning Languages 99
Lilia Julieta Guzmn Acevedo

5.1 Good Practice 1: The importance of having a clear national policy 100
5.2 Good Practice 2: A comprehensive implementation strategy  103
5.3 Good Practice 3: Access to information 104
5.4 Good Practice 4: Citizen participation 104
5.5 Good Practice 5: The importance of teachers 105
5.6 Good Practice 6: Incorporating technology  106
5.7 Good Practice 7: Effective teaching strategies 107
5.8 Conclusion 108

Chapter 6
Conclusions and Recommendations 113
David Caldern

6.1 Conclusions 114

6.2 Recommendations 119
 Foreword

t Mexicanos Primero, we have always aimed to take on

what is urgent and essential in order to pass on to the younger
generation the quality education which is their right, knowing
that bringing these topics into the public sphere is never easy.
There is, in our work, a dimension of citizen demand that we cannot deny.
In building citizenship, we have to identify what is lacking, demand that what-
ever is proposed be implemented, bring to light whatever is hidden, and de-
mand accountability from public powers regarding their responsibilities. The
complement and necessary counterpart of this demand is pronouncement.
It also falls to us to communicate when things have been done well, leaving
a positive legacy, and put forth ideas and proposals that are worth consider-
ing and have the potential to broaden horizons. We must assert the rights of
our children, even if compliance with them has barely begun; we must propose
a better future that, together, we can make happen; we must speak up about the
benefits of quality education, about practices that bring hope and serve as ex-
amples, and about the hard decisions that could set us on the right path.

The making of this book involved collaboration with educators and researchers
to whom we reiterate our gratitude and professional esteem: Miguel Szekely and
his colleagues at the Center for Education and Social Studies, who helped us to
develop the EUCIS, an instrument to measure objectively the mastery of English
against national parameters and their equivalence in the Common European
Framework; we also thank the foreign language experts at the National Higher
Education Evaluation Center (CENEVAL, for its acronym in Spanish), who evalu-
ated the items in the above-mentioned instrument and confirmed their validity.
We must thank the public upper secondary school directors who, in different
parts of the country joined the project, convinced of the importance of having
an honest measurement of the current mastery of English in recent lower sec-
ondary school graduates; the support from the Cinepolis Foundation and Unete
in rewarding student and teacher efforts, both during and after the application of
the exam, deserves a separate mention, as does the philanthropic support from
the Mexico Social Foundation. Blanca Heredia and Daniela Rubio, from the Inter-
disciplinary Program on Education Policies and Practices (PIPE, for its acronym in
Spanish) housed in the Center for Research and Teaching of Economics (CIDE, for
its acronym in Spanish), contributed with original research on equity and English

mexicanos primero 5
 among incoming university students. Rosaura Ruiz, the current director of the
Faculty of Science at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)
and former President of the Mexican Academy of Science, granted us an inter-
view about English, plurilingualism, and science. The research team at Mexicanos
Primero did their thing, and thus added chapters to this book developed by
Manuel Bravo, Fernando Ruiz, Pablo Velazquez, Julieta Guzman, David Calderon,
and Jennifer ODonoghue, who was also responsible for the technical review of
the work as a whole. Besides the researchers, as usual, the rest of the team at
Mexicanos Primero joined in to make this a collective work of the organization,
from operations to graphic concepts, from organizing events to connecting with
stakeholders in the sector. One final acknowledgement goes to the students, par-
ents, teachers and officials who gave their testimonies, which appear here and
there throughout the book. These expressions from the field speak of the thirst
for improvement and the indomitable will to move forward; of their frustration
with how little, how poorly, and how late services are delivered within the system;
and of the desire to do something better, or more precisely, something different.

We debated over the title, because the scope of this report provided us with
more than enough material: simulation, mediocrity, and neglect are extensive and
well-rooted in this area of learning, but we also found heroic efforts that con-
firm the resilience of our people, from double immersion in Guerrero, to rural
teachers who reach Dartmouth College. Thus we decided upon Sorry, which,
in its various uses, evokes the pitiful Sorry? uttered by someone who doesnt
understand anything, to Sorry, thats enough! expressed by those who think
that enough is enough. Demand and proposal, here is the first step to transform
English language learning and, in doing so, allow our children and youth to have
greater freedom to choose their opportunities.

Claudio X. Gonzlez Guajardo

President, Mexicanos Primero

6 mexicanos primero
 CHAPTER 1
Introduction:
The Right to Learn
in English
David Caldern

_ _ _ _
____
Introduction: The Right to Learn in English
his study is par t of an effor t by
Mexicanos Primero to insert issues
and arguments into the public debate
that contribute towards building a
more complete, demanding and solidary vi-
sion of the right to learn.
As is the case with the rest of our publications,
our aspiration with Sorry is to present, in the
first place, rigorous evidence on the state of young
peoples learning and the obstacles that they face to
achieving it; second, we aim to present a critical
examination of current rules and practices, and, finally,
to make specific proposals to reach solutions and
improve achievement.
1.1 English and the right to a relevant, pertinent
education
We decided to approach learning English as an
additional language in the context of school ef-
forts during the formative years in compulsory ed-
ucation. Mapping the discussion in this respect,
we encountered a heated controversy among of-
ficials, teachers, parents, activists, and academics.
In general, two opposite visions prevail, rarely
based on solid arguments and considering even less
the actual practices and evidence of their effects.There
is much ideology and little research in both positions,
which explains why the dialogue rapidly stalls, reaching
an impasse of mutual rejection.
On the one hand, English is seen as a tool. English
is considered an acquisition to be obtained apart from
the rest of the basic education curriculum; one more
piece - although a very important one - in the set of
learning that new generations are supposed to have,
almost exclusively underlining its usefulness to enrich
production and facilitate a persons entry into the paid
8 mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
employment system at some future time, more or less
identified with the beginning of adult life. This is how
officials in the public school system typically refer to
it, and how parents justify their desire to have more
English classes.
On the other hand, some resist valuing the role
English plays in education pathways because
they resent that its inclusion might mean a
loss. English is held to be an imposition by agencies
such as UNESCO or the OECD when designing pub-
lic education reforms, and it is even thought that an
intense effort to incorporate the language would en-
tail a loss of national identity, along with privatization,
contempt for Mexican values or even the subjugation
of Indigenous components of Mexican culture. The
extension of this prejudice among members of the
academic community is remarkable, showing them to
be less critical than they consider themselves to be;
from this position, it becomes difficult to explain why
the decision to incorporate English in public lower
secondary schools came in 1926, at the height of our
nationalist, revolutionary fervor.
Our approach in this book, on the other hand, speaks
to both extremes. Our main referent is always
that people have the right to learn, especially
girls, boys and youth. By its very nature, this hu-
man right, acknowledged in international instruments
and included in the text of the Mexican Constitution,
implies the removal of every barrier to the full de-
velopment of each persons potential. That is why we
maintain, as has also been set forth in the amended
Third Article of the Constitution (CPEUM, 2013), that
Mexicans have the right to quality education, which
means that not only should access be guaranteed or
the functionality, security, and adaptation of learning
spaces safeguarded, but also that society as a whole
has a serious responsibility - primarily acting through
its representative, the State - to guarantee the rel-
evance and pertinence of what is learned (INEE,
2010:30, INEE, 2014:12).
Relevance refers to learning that is appropriate for
peoples present and future, for the actual needs and
aspirations of their communities and society. Pertinence
refers to achieving learning that is meaningful, according
to the legitimate peculiarity of each persons rhythm,
style, culture and preferences.
| SORRY | Learning English in MEXICO |
Thus, education is irrelevant if it proposes teach-
ing things that have no connection to the dif-
ferent dimensions of daily life, outside of school
boundaries; it fails if it does not include or consider
that learning which favors justice and prosperity, lim-
iting peoples possibility to participate fully in their
world and time. Education is not pertinent when
it dismisses students contexts and starting
points, when it does not consider local and family
culture, when it omits the specific conditions in which
the learner joins the learning process.
As can be deduced, relevance and pertinence are
mutually required, they correspond to each
other; they are two sides to the same reality,
the same right. Social purposes and personal aspi-
rations cannot be separated without causing serious
harm. Throughout this collective work, we argue that
the inclusion of English in the school system - so far,
and judging generally by the outcomes to date - has
been both irrelevant and not pertinent.
It has been irrelevant because it has not provid-
ed the rules and practices that would permit
students to activate the benefits of using the
English language. Thus, opportunities for personal
and community development are reduced for most
of the countrys population, crystalizing and deepen-
ing inequalities, even when generation after genera-
tion of students have completed the courses laid out
in the Ministry of Educations (SEP, for its acronym in
Spanish) plans and programs: in Mexico the English
language is taught too little, too poorly, and
too late.
It has not been pertinent because the incorpo-
ration of English suffers from a serious deficit
in its most basic element: classroom experi-
ence. English classes, resources, methods and materi-
als are developed - with a few honorable exceptions
- outside of students realities. Their families are left
completely outside of the process, and, in practice, the
programs often turn their backs on the vibrant diversity
of Mexicos communities.Teachers are left unprepared
and unassisted in their task, programs lack pedagogical
and cultural focus, and, in general, a devastating lack
of consideration for the expectations and learning of
students themselves prevails.
mexicanos primero
Introduction: The Right to Learn in English
1.2 The right to learn with and in English
In Mexicanos Primero, we maintain that the right to
learn, understood in its entirety, also includes the right
to continue learning. As is stated in the principal
international documents on rights, learning should be
seen as an activity and not a repository (UNESCO,
2014). Thus, our focus is on learning with English: ex-
panding and deepening the different types of learn-
ing achieved during the school stage and for the rest
of our lives, thanks to the multiple opportunities that
mastery of this language provides to read, to express
oneself orally and in writing, to understand what is be-
ing said in an international conversation, and to par-
ticipate actively with ones own contributions. In our
specific context in the multicultural Mexican
context of the 21st Century, not the context
of other nations or cultures we claim the
right to learn in English.
We detach ourselves from the approach in
which English proficiency is a simple tool
in the crudest and most material sense of the
word.The position of those who consider its acquisi-
tion inert is misleading a skill that is reduced to little
more than interpreting instructional texts and answer-
ing overseas phone calls in an office - based only on
the potential to improve a depressed average salary.
With that mentality, the goal becomes lost as emphasis
is placed on inputs, discounting processes and results:
many bad practices come from importing generic
9
Introduction: The Right to Learn in English
solutions, miracle products that promise much and
deliver very little.
It is always good to remember that he who cop-
ies another persons answers does not really learn.
Sometimes, with good but not very enlightened inten-
tions, groups in the productive sector take charge of
paying for courses, recordings and books to introduce
English into public schools.The gesture is appreciated,
but not only can these efforts not be extended widely,
they also end up generating a circle of justifications for
meager learning outcomes and, over time, become
unfeasible. Applied as a kind of patch or peripheral
device, these efforts do not integrate organically into
school cultures, they do not transform them, but rather,
the opposite happens: given the trend of laxity, lack of
coordination and support that prevails within the cur-
rent school system, these programs are often simply
tossed out, having been inserted into schools without
enough local conviction or ownership.
We also separate ourselves from the endo-
gamic, entrenched mentality of those who
scorn opening up to English as an imposi-
tion. The position of those who consider that learn-
ing the language would result in a type of brainwashing
that would leave students helpless is misleading; as if it
would result in them no longer appreciating their ori-
gins, converting them into uncritical, socially-detached
automatons. The idea that expanding possibilities
to learn would reduce opportunities to think
and to engage with the world is a grotesque
contradiction. The liberating nature of knowledge is
activated through different paths, and one that stands
out is precisely plurilingualism.
Proficiency in English permits access not only to the
treasury of scientific and technical ideas and process-
es available in that language, but also, and of no less
importance, to a heritage of humanistic and political
culture for the defense and deepening of human rights.
Moreover, just as, or more important than this access
is the dimension of contribution: being able to ex-
press oneself in English empowers people and
communities to put forth their demands, to
be heard worldwide, to report discoveries achieved
in their own local contexts, to reply to other peoples
prejudices about their own culture, to claim their place
in the decisions that affect us all.
10
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
Why English?
To enter into modern life, which is global
[students in teacher preparation programs]
need to be up-to-date. They need the tools to
be able to live in this time, in a world that
is moving forward. We have more and more
information, but how do they survive? How do
they understand it? How? Everything is in English.
Director of a Teacher Preparation College
Overcoming monolingualism is a task with great per-
sonal and social consequences. As we will present in
this book, at the level of each individual, plurilingualism
plays a role in our brain development, opening us up
to the world and to others. Collectively, a monolin-
gual society condemns itself to parochialism
and conservatism, to justifying current privi-
leges, to resignation and immobility about
the current state of affairs. We confuse this is
how we are with this is where we are because we
havent decided to do better. Good ideas have feet
and teeth: they progress from community to commu-
nity and generate broader, renewed awareness; it is no
coincidence that totalitarian regimes fear contact and
cross pollination of ideas; as a result, they activate
alarms and barriers to using and interacting in other
languages that they cannot control.
The tragedy of the so-called indigenous education
in our country has not only been its offensive precari-
ousness, but rather - as Sylvia Schmelkes has indicated
so well - the national lack of capacity to consider in-
tercultural education as the heritage and right of all
Mexicans (Schmelkes, 2010). There is no dilem-
ma between the right to education in ones
maternal tongue and the right to learn in a
second - or third - language; again, remembering
the doctrine of comprehensiveness and inseparability,
both rights converge and correspond to one another.
To learn with English is much more than to
learn English. Just as teaching reading and writ-
ing in the mother tongue becomes anti-pedagogical
- both irrelevant and not pertinent - when it is re-
duced to memorizing grammar rules and mechanical
mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in MEXICO |
responses, the task of helping to learn in English cannot
be an area - a separate compartment - in the whole
school effort. Its true potential is unleashed when it
becomes a dimension, a transversal element of the
entire learning experience. We learn about music and
film, geopolitics and ethics, physics and mathematics
with English; one actually learns in English, just like one
learns in Spanish, Latin, or Nahuatl. Just as one goes
from learning to read (= decoding script and relat-
ing it to sounds and concepts) to reading to learn
(= using reading for the unlimited variety of learning
to which we gain access through reading), the true
educational process goes from learning English to
learning in English.
1.3 An overview of the topic of English
Throughout this book, quotes from parents and stu-
dents appear that give voice and meaning to the ex-
pectations and desires of Mexicans of different back-
grounds to incorporate the English language into their
lives. We also include reflections from educators, from
classroom teachers to internationally renowned scien-
tists, all pointing in this same direction.
In chapter 2, we ask ourselves why it is important
to study in English in Mexico today. We present
different dimensions that become enriched with that
learning: the implications of studying in English taking
into account its status as the lingua franca of our time;
its central role in developing citizenship, both locally and
globally; its potential for creating equity; the personal
and macro-economic opportunities it makes possible;
and the role that mastering an additional language plays
on our neurological development.
In chapter 3, we review Mexican public educa-
tion policy regarding English. We draw a picture
of the official plans and programs, both those that
are incorporated into the curriculum to be covered
by basic education students and those related to the
preparation of English teachers. After examining the
official documents, we then review the support system,
considering methods and materials, school administra-
tion and supervision.The idea is to answer the question:
What has been done so that Mexican basic education
students learn English?
mexicanos primero
Introduction: The Right to Learn in English
In chapter 4, The State of English Language Learning in
Mexico, we wanted to answer the inevitable question:
What have Mexican students really learned?
We present, as a never-before-published contribution,
an evaluation we conducted of achievement in the
English language. We applied an English exam to stu-
dents and teachers in public education institutions in
different parts of the country that provides empirical
evidence of their competence in the English language.
Having data collected directly by means of a solid in-
strument that measures comprehension and mastery
of the language, corresponding to the level expected
according to current official regulations, allows us to
get beyond laudatory rhetoric or anecdotal impres-
sions of the level of English language learning in Mexico.
In chapter 5, we ask ourselves, what is being done
well to learn English and in English, what good prac-
tices are worth studying, adapting, adopting, and ex-
panding upon? Based on a review of the experiences
in Mexico and other parts of the world with work
carried out in public schools, in contributions from
civil society organizations and community initiatives, in
exemplary education policies in developed countries
and in those fighting for development - we present a
mosaic of successful alternatives that not only bring
hope for our current condition, but also summon us
to get to work.
In chapter 6, Conclusions and Recommendations,
we recap what we have learned and put forth
recommendations for education policy in our country.
We have already lost too much time and have been
misled by partial, generic, and/or poorly informed
solutions. It is imperative not to
postpone the discussion any lon-
ger and make real the agreed upon
quality education, in other words,
one that is relevant and pertinent,
which includes a national policy
for learning English.
Learning English in Mexico
has been a very easy, daz-
zling electoral promise; a
threat to parochial ideolo-
gies; an abstract aspiration
without any responsibility
11
Introduction: The Right to Learn in English | SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |

or accountability; a disaster zone in terms of pedagogy
and education administration; an open field for preda-
tory, misleading companies; an example of simulation
and mismanagement that offends all of us. It has be-
come a cement roof for girls, boys and youth across
the length and width of Mexico, robbing them of a
chance to grow and act.
It is urgent to begin an informed debate. We have
to leave behind the adjective sorry to refer to the
poverty and limitations of our opportunities to learn,
which leave our girls and boys, as the etymology indi-
cates, distressed, grieved, full of sorrow. We can no
longer be a country that says Sorry? when questioned
in international dialogues. We can no longer excuse
ourselves from acting and continue to tell generation
after generation Sorry, no English; there is no longer
room for apologies, regrets and pretexts: today, learn-
ing in English is also a right.

References

CPEUM (2013). Political Constitution of the United States of Mexico, Article 3.

INEE (2010). El Derecho a la Educacin en Mxico [The Right to Education in

Mexico]. 2009 Report, Mexico, National Institute for Educational Assessment and
Evaluation.

INEE (2014). El derecho a una educacin de calidad [The right to quality

education], 2014 Report, Mexico, National Institute for Educational Assessment
and Evaluation.

Schmelkes, Sylvia (2010). Multiculturalidad e interculturalidad [Multiculturalism

and interculturalism] en Contracorriente. November 14, 2010. Available at:
http://www.educacioncontracorriente.org/memorias/137-multiculturalidad
-e-interculturalidad-sylvia-schmelkes-i-foro-de-cuetzalan
[Consultation: December 2014].

UNESCO (2014). Enseanza y Aprendizaje: lograr la calidad para todos [Teaching

and Learning: achieving quality for everyone], 11th Follow-up Report on EFA in
the World, Paris United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture.

12 mexicanos primero
CHAPTER 2
Why
English?
David Caldern,
Jennifer L. ODonoghue,
Blanca Heredia, Daniela Rubio
Pablo Velzquez,
y Manuel Bravo Valladolid
Why English?
2.1 Lingua franca and the right to learn
David Caldern
2.1.1 Mastery of language as an environment for learning
earning is a continuous process in
which attitudes, abilities, ideas, and
arguments grow, develop, and replace
one another; a real ecosystem. It is not
homogenous or static; it can evolve or even devolve.
Even if a person has the potential, she can spend her
entire life without activating her literary imagination,
her capacity to anticipate consequences, the possibil-
ity of playing a musical instrument or of developing
rigorous ethical discernment.
Therefore, school is a cultural device of the greatest im-
portance; it is a kind of laboratory or nursery, a space
with a controlled climate to care for the seeds, the out-
breaks of talent, solidarity and curiosity that will have to
develop in contact with the outdoors. Ideally, it is a place
of many conversations, dialogues that form and shape us
in a process of mutual influence.
Learning is something that occurs most frequently in
communicative situations rather than in isolated dis-
covery. There have been great moments in humanitys
common history in which intuitive or reflective intro-
spection bequeathed great advances: from Archimedes
Eureka! to the moment in which Einstein thought about
how the deflection of sunlight serves as proof of the
principle of general relativity.
But even those moments became relevant and made
sense because they were communicated. Thanks to
language, they were disseminated, discussed, and to-
day they continue to open the way for new learning.
14
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
Furthermore, it must be acknowledged that neither
Archimedes nor Einstein could have conceived their
respective discoveries if they had not had the conver-
sations they were involved in from childhood, a basic
network that, over time, allowed them to make ab-
stractions and conceive mental experiments, applying
general principles to specific situations.
The mastery of a language functions similarly to the
climate of an ecosystem: the richer and more varied
its components, the more new learning sprouts and
grows. It is not unidirectional because some specific
learning may generate, in turn, a micro climate that
- if it is vigorous enough - also has an influence on the
language and its speakers in general.
Some learning facilitates other learning, it multiplies it,
and that is how languages function. As will be shown
in section 2.5, the wiring in our brain helps us under-
stand the world in different configurations. With each
new language that we master, we connect the dots in
an unprecedented manner, with distinct values, increas-
ing the speed of our comprehension and the weight of
our judgments, and overcoming servitude.
Thus, learning requires a common medium to be sub-
stantiated and shared, and, therefore, natural languages
are the basis to learning artificial languages, such as pro-
gramming codes for computers or musical notes. As
Foucault (2008) argues at length in Words and Things,
not only do the terms and etymology of a language
define the space of what can be thought, but even the
grammar of a specific language orients thinking, open-
ing great possibilities while closing others. Therefore,
plurilingualism, as we commented earlier, is not only an
expansion of utilitarian possibilities - which is undoubt-
edly valuable - but also and above all it expands the
freedoms that permit new connections and a more
favorable climate for personal and community growth.
Knowing a few phrases (Thank you, Please, or I
have a headache are great assets for a traveler) can
get us out of a predicament or allow us to consider
valued teachings in the form of celebrated phrases (as
happens with so many Latin aphorisms), but achieving
true mastery of another language empowers us to have
significant conversations and fruitful exchanges. We can
think more things in different ways, and together with
many other people. From a human rights approach, it
is therefore essential to recognize the complementarity
mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico|
between the mother tongue and other languages that
can extend ones learning.
2.1.2 When does a language function as a lingua franca?
In the specialized literature, a language that plays a funda-
mental role in exchanging practices and knowledge dur-
ing a specific time in history is called a lingua franca. The
term comes from a romance language of simplified use
- a mixture of Spanish, Italian, French, and Catalan, with a
bit of Greek, Arabic, and Turkish added - that travelers in
the Mediterranean used, that was used commonly from
the beginning of the year 800 until the mid-1700s. The
languages that serve or have served as lingua franca are
many and varied, providing a common base to people of
different ethnic groups dispersed over extended territo-
ries: Aramaic, Greek, and Latin; Mayan, Quechua, Nahuatl;
Urdu, Arabic, Hindi; Russian, Mandarin, French, Spanish.
The relevance of a lingua franca is directly proportion-
al to its capacity to connect different people. As the
Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy notes in an
archaic tone, the value of a lingua franca rests in the
contacts it allows because, with such a language, na-
tives from different towns can understand each other
(DRAE, 2012; translation ours). The best example of
its effect as an extension of freedoms happens when
the lingua franca that is used is not the native tongue
of any of those involved in a conversation: a Lebanese
academic talking to a Senegalese businessman in French,
an Iranian artist talking to a Tunisian engineer in Arabic.
Prejudice against explicitly learning a lingua franca is
the counterpart of strategies of linguistic imposition
established by certain powers, throughout history,
as one more resource of control. Imposition is the
mentality behind a famous speech given in 1912 by
General Hubert Lyautey before the French Academy,
in which he stated that a language is a dialect that
possesses an army, a navy, and an air force (Nadeu
and Barlow, 2014: 4).
Linguistic resistance, when used to reclaim ones own
identity, has bequeathed us great examples of human
dignity in favor of the right to learn ones own language.
We all win with the refusal of the Catalans, Bretons,
Irish, Estonians, Ayuukjys or Coptics to give up their
mother tongues and assimilate Spanish, French, English,
Russian, Nahuatl, or Arabic, respectively.
mexicanos primero
Why English?
However, we must distinguish between the imposition
of a foreign language for daily use and its correspond-
ing efforts to devalue the mother tongue - an exercise
in violence that undoubtedly must be repelled, and
the acquiring of another language to facilitate more ex-
tended communication with other groups.
A careful historical review shows that the condition of
being a lingua franca is not immediately linked to mere
force, but rather prospers precisely due to the possibil-
ity of more horizontal exchanges. For example, Greek
prevailed as the contact language in the cities of the
Mediterranean basin during the 1st to 6th centuries of
our era, in spite of attempts by Roman administrators
to impose Latin in official documents. Despite eight
centuries of military and political dominion, Arabic did
not take root on the Hispanic Peninsula, and peoples
of different origins - Iberians, Celts, Germans, and even
the Maghreb settlers who were moved from North
Africa, preferred to speak a romantic language to un-
derstand each other in their daily lives. Nahuatl, Mayan,
or Quechua experienced explosive growth prior to or
independent of the consolidation of empires based
on city-states.
The prestige and contagion of a lingua franca are not
only based on its undeniable convenience for commer-
cial transactions, but rather are also determined by its
use as a means to learn and communicate ideas. When
Latin was only an arcane language used in Catholic
rituals, it played a crucial role in the scientific and po-
litical philosophical revolutions of the 17th and 18th
centuries in Europe, giving way to heated disputes that
frequently had skeptic, agnostic, or even anti-religious
characteristics. Italian was consolidated as the lingua
franca for chamber music, essential for the great com-
posers even if they were born in the Baltic, the British
Isles, or in the heart of Germany. From the time of the
promoters of the first encyclopedias, French became
fundamental to inspire revolutions - for example, the
presence of Rousseau in the text of the first Mexican
constitution (Villoro, 2005) - and as the lingua franca
of medical culture until only a few decades ago. The
mutual dialogues and influence on the scientific com-
munity caused by the logic and physics of the 20th
century could not be explained without the common
means provided by the German language, or the cur-
rent exponential extension in information technology
programming without English.
15
Why English?
2.1.3 English as the lingua franca
A long series of historical peculiarities have turned
English into the principal lingua franca of our era. Factors
such as the competition between English and French
contributed towards this (when there is a prior domi-
nance, the new speakers prefer the challenging lingua
franca), as well as the colonial and commercial efforts
of the United Kingdom and the influence of American
expansionism. It is worth quoting a Mexican-American,
the director of Zcalo Public Square:
Even Islamist Jihadist propagandists would concede
that English is a convenience in spreading their word.
And any relative decline over time of Americas
global power and influence will actually help, rather
than hurt, the cause of English worldwide, further
decoupling peoples perception of the language
from their perceptions of the United States and
its influence. (Martnez, 2014)
We must also consider the close link between new
technologies and new media and the English language:
despite the fact that the French the Lumieres - in-
vented cinematography, an Italian - Marconi - radio
transmission, and a Russian Zvorykin- the kinescope,
soon the media for remote transmissions that had the
greatest scope were saturated by content generated
in English. From the beginning of the 20th century to
the present, the bulk of movies, television programs,
and telecommunications reflect this.
Considering ten factors - from the number of speakers
and translations to the Human Development Index and
fertility rate- the Calvet Barometer for World Languages,
Why English?
If you do not know
English, you are no
one, anywhere.
Director of a Teacher
Preparation College
16
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
as part of the European Plurilingual Observatory, ana-
lyzes the 137 languages having more than five million
stable speakers on the planet. The Barometer recog-
nizes English as having first place in prevalence among
the worlds languages, with a large difference existing
between it and its closest counterparts, French and
Spanish (Calvet and Calvet, 2010).
Another aspect that is not insignificant to its prevalence
as a communicational bridge is the relatively simple
structure of the language: for those for whom it is not
their native tongue, English is a favored option because
it does not include complicated verb tenses in its daily
usage, its lexicon structure is modular, and there are no
declinations or joining.
It is estimated, for example, that more than 80%
of the global interactions in English occur between
speakers whose native tongue is not English (Weil
and Pulin, 2011:28). Therefore, unlike with the tra-
ditional, mandatory teaching of a foreign language,
which sought to approach the imperial standard
through a strong component of vertical, authoritarian
discipline, the teaching of a lingua franca emphasizes
horizontal contact:
Attitudes regarding English are also changing through
its use and dissemination as a lingua franca. For ex-
ample, American or British pronunciation might not
be appropriate or considered necessary.When teach-
ing, pronunciation must be clear to guarantee effec-
tive learning. Both students and teachers tend to get
used to and adapt to different accents and usage of
English as they make contact with them. Likewise,
attention to the correct way is less important than
effective teaching and learning, for example, through
the ability to create interaction during the lessons.
(Weil and Pullin, 2011: 29)
Thus, teaching the language has advanced towards
no longer considering learning English in terms of a
foreign language, but rather as a second language, or
even better, as a lingua franca. A review of the most
accredited publications and academic networks, such
as the ELT Journal (for example, number 4 in 2014) or
the English as Lingua Franca Research Network, which in
2015 will hold its annual conference in Beijing, shows a
clear tendency towards favoring the strategy of learning
in English, capturing the interests, rhythms, and cultural
references of the learners.
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| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico|
2.1.4 The right to learn with the lingua franca
Recapping, English as a lingua franca now implies a
great responsibility for school systems that aspire to
fulfill and exercise the right to learn. It can no longer
be conceived as an elegant, peripheral addition that is
more or less optional in the curriculum; not to actively
propose its mastery as part of the education system
through a national public policy is to relapse into ir-
relevance and lack of pertinence.
The relevance of English is clear. Most of the outstanding
materials and publications in every field of knowledge
and social action involve English. Mexican students have
the right to the greatest scope of learning and possible
academic level, the highest achievement of learning
that is established in the third paragraph of the Third
Article of the Constitution; denying young people ac-
cess to English through negligence, a lack of foresight,
or simulation is simply unacceptable.
Its pertinence is also crucial. Unlike what commonly
happened during other historical periods, the vast ma-
jority of the younger generation is pre-motivated to
learn the lingua franca. Aside from school, their world
already contains important references to English: in
their preferred sports and in the music they listen to,
in the social networks they frequent and in the pro-
grams and movies they watch.
It frequently happens that their intuitive approach to
this language is frustrated by the lack of the playful,
creative, and artistic dimensions that naturally attract
them, but are absent in the teaching in their classrooms.
It is a contradiction that, in a time characterized by an
astronomic and never-before-seen variety of alterna-
tives and starting points that could motivate English
language learning, we continue to focus on dull gram-
mar exercises, memorized vocabulary lists, and literal
translations without conversations.
mexicanos primero
Why English?
As we explained, learning is never inert: it mixes, com-
plements, and acts as a catalyst, an enzyme, a yeast
for more learning. Thus, it is not only about knowing
English, like a kind of insurance in view of a possible
future trip or a distant job interview, but rather as the
possibility of putting a wider vision to work in the pres-
ent, with at least twice the depth and unlimited breadth.
At the beginning of his mandate, Jose Mujica,
President of Uruguay, made some strong decisions
for the education system of the country that caused a
commotion. As the Vice President of the Cuban Union
of Journalists tells it, Mujicas decisions were motivated
by a concept of liberating, supportive, creative, and
critical growth: I used to say that the intelligence that
is good for a country is distributed intelligence. Now I tell
you that the nonconformity that is good for a country is
distributed nonconformity. It has invaded our everyday
lives and pushes us to ask ourselves whether what we
are doing cant be done better, and that is why, in his
opinion, it is essential to learn how to navigate on the
Internet, ask the best questions, and also incorporate
English into basic education in his country from pre-
school on, because English - says Mjica - is not only
the language that Americans speak, it is the language
with which the Chinese make themselves understood
in the world. And we cannot be left out (Marrero,
2010; translation ours).
Nor can we. We cannot resign ourselves to inequality
or be content with bad English when we finish lower
secondary school, which would be laughable if it did
not result in a present and future tragedy. The mas-
tery that our girls, boys and youth have of the lingua
franca of our times cannot continue to be linked to the
purchasing power of their parents, which reproduces
and deepens the inequalities that offend and hurt us
so much. Learning in English can no longer continue
to be a privilege. It is a right.
17
Why English? | SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |

References

Calvet, Alain and Calvet, Louis-Jean (2010). Baromtre Calvet des Langues du Monde.
[Calvet Barometer of World Languages]. Available at http://portalingua.observatoire-
plurilinguisme.eu/Portalingua/www.portalingua.info/fr/poids-des-langues/ [consulted:
November 2014].

DRAE (2012). Diccionario de la Lengua Espaola [Spanish Language Dictionary], Madrid,

Royal Spanish Academy, 22nd edition.

ELT Journal (2014). Volume 68(4). Oxford University Press. Available at:
http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/content/current [consulted: November 2014].

Foucault, Michel (2008). Las palabras y las cosas. Una arqueologa de las ciencias hu-
manas [Words and things. Archeology of human sciences], New edition, Mexico, Siglo
XXI. (Original edition: 1966. Les mots et les choses. Paris, Gallimard).

Marrero, Juan (2010). Las cabezas pensantes, el conocimiento y la inconformidad

[Heads that think, knowledge and inconformity], on Cubadebate. Available at: http://
www.cubadebate.cu/opinion/2010/05/23/cabezas-pensantes-conocimiento-incon-
formidad/#.VI0JdMaNP0S [consulted: November 2014].

Martinez, Andres (2014). Why Mandarin wont be a Lingua Franca, Time Magazine,
November 14, 2014. Available at: http://time.com/3585847/mandarin-lingua-franca/
[consulted: November 2014].

Nadeau, Jean-Benoit and Barlow, Julie (2014). The Story of Spanish, New York, St.
Martins Griffin.

Villoro, Luis (2005). Rousseau en la Independencia Mexicana [Rousseau in Mexican

Independence], Casa del Tiempo. UAM Magazine, VII(80), pp. 55-61. Available at:
http://www.uam.mx/difusion/casadeltiempo/80_sep_2005/55_61.pdf [consulted:
November 2014]

Weil, Markus and Pullin, Patricia (2011). English as a lingua franca in education.
Internationalization speaks English, Permanent education. Revue Suisse pour la for-
mation continue, 2011-1, pp.28-29. Available at: https://www. academia.edu/459366/
English_as_a_lingua_franca_in_education_-_Internationalisation_speaks_English [con-
sulted: November 2014].

18 mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico|
2.2 Plurilingualism and democratic participation
Jennifer L. ODonoghue
e live in a world that is increasingly
global. Events in other parts of the
world become part of our local ex-
perience. Migratory tendencies, demo-
graphic changes, and information and communications
technology have expanded our contact with others
and changed our relations with people around the
world. Even in the most isolated towns, cell phones,
television, and Internet connect us with relatives, friends
and strangers around the world. Thus, along with our
national identity, the vision of ourselves as citizens of
the world has gained relevance in our lives (Green,
2012; Hosack, 2011).
At the same time, most of the worlds inhabitants
today are bi- or plurilingual. In Europe, for example,
more than half of the adult population reports being
able to speak a second language, one out of every four
a third language, and one out of every ten a fourth
(European Commission, 2012). In the United States,
one out of every five people report that they speak
a language other than English in their homes, and the
vast majority of them say that, additionally, they can
express themselves well in English (Ryan, 2013); in
short, even in a country that is generally considered
monolingual, one out of every six people is, in fact,
plurilingual. According to some estimates, two out of
every three girls and boys around the world are grow-
ing up in a plurilingual context: most of the worlds
inhabitants live life through more than one language
(Marian y Shook, 2012).
mexicanos primero
Why English?
In this context, it is not surprising that linguistic abili-
ties are connected to participation, not only in ac-
ademic and economic contexts (as we shall see
in sections 2.3 and 2.4), but also with respect to citi-
zen participation. In the European Union, plurilingual-
ism has been considered, for more than a decade, as
necessary to actively participate in the social and
political processes that form an integral part of dem-
ocratic citizenship (Council of Europe, 2006: 5). It is
maintained that learning other languages, when they
are acknowledged and valued as part of the cultural
landscape, contributes towards education for demo-
cratic citizenship and has the potential to promote so-
cial justice and equity (Starkey, 2010). Even in Mexico,
learning a second language, in this case English, has
been described as basic literacy for every global citi-
zen (Lopez Andrade, 2008).
In this chapter, we seek to delve deeper into this topic
to understand why and how plurilingualism in general,
and the learning of English in particular, are related to
democratic citizen participation and the development
of the competencies necessary to act upon it.
2.2.1 Creative democracy and empowered citizens:
some definitions
In this chapter, we refer to controversial concepts and
normative ideas, making it relevant for us to state our
position regarding these big ideas, such as democracy
and citizenship. In contrast to theorists who define de-
mocracy as an institutional arrangement for elite deci-
sion making (e.g., Schumpeter) or those who mainly
emphasize basic liberties (e.g., Rawls), in this chapter,
our discussion is based on a tradition that conceives
of democracy as a continuous creation, a process
based on collective, collaborative efforts (e.g., Addams,
1902[1994]; Boyte and Kari, 1996; Dewey, 1916, 1927;
Freire, 1990). Seen in this way, democracy is not an
aim in and of itself, but rather a means to continuously
make and re-make the public world - incorporating
different ends that might emerge in this process.
John Dewey, for example, developed a concept of
creative democracy in which democracy is seen
as a constructive process, a trip that citizens take
together (Parker, 1996:114). Likewise, Henr y
Giroux (2002) defines democracy as a social process
of critical questioning and permanent rebuilding.
19
Why English?
This conception has important implications for the role
of citizens in a democratic society whether locally, na-
tionally or globally. Peoples active participation becomes
essential, and effective citizenship requires that people
see themselves as creators of the public world. It means
developing a public identity and having opportunities to
activate that identity in collective efforts. More than a
legal status, citizenship in this sense encompasses both
an identity and a practice of participation (Hosack, 2011).
On the other hand, citizens are marginalized when their
capacity is limited and their opportunities to become
public actors, to participate in the process of creating
and sustaining the public sphere, are reduced. Paulo
Freire, for example, compared oppression to the denial
of an individuals or a groups capacity to be self-defined
subjects, creators of history and culture (Glass, 2001).
Underlying our argument in this chapter, then, is the
idea that the development and empowerment of
democratic citizens (nationally and globally) require
the elimination of social, cultural, economic, and po-
litical barriers that inhibit their participation, as well as
strengthening the competencies that encourage it, of
which plurilingualism is one.
2.2.2 Global citizenship and democratic participation
Recent decades have been characterized by the ar-
duous, but noteworthy expansion of democracy and
human rights around the world, carrying with them
fundamental implications for our concept of global citi-
zenship. Beyond what is embodied at the national level,
our human rights are legitimized and guaranteed by
a series of agreements and conventions that establish
our universal personhood beyond our belonging to
any specific nation. Within these rights is that of taking
part in public life, to participate in the management
of public affairs (United Nations, 2012).
In a globalized world, topics ranging from the political,
economic, social, cultural, ecological and technological
to those of health and security are understood to be
global, with consequences that are hard to contain,
both geographically and socially (Breidbach, 2003), and
which require solutions that are necessarily multilateral.
Likewise, it is acknowledged that the solution to these
problems is no longer limited to cooperation between
nations, but rather extends to local actions taken by
each one of us as citizens. We cannot resolve the great
20
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
Why English?
I consider English useful to us
because we learn about other
culturesIt is essential to be able
to get closer to and learn a bit
about other cultures.
Father, Guerrero
ecological problems of our time, for example, without
a concerted, collective, international effort.This opens
up new opportunities for citizen development. Our
efforts to recycle or separate trash, even if they oc-
cur locally, connect us to a larger movement, allowing
us to develop identities that go beyond the local. In
this process, we acknowledge that we are - and we
become active citizens of the world.
More and more frequently, these local actions are
grouped in more formal associations, communities that
work together to reach shared objectives and goals. In
this way, thematic organizations with long histories, such
as the International Union for Conservation of Nature
or Amnesty International, have expanded all over the
world (See Table 2.2.1). However, their growth pales in
comparison to that of associations specifically dedicated
to mobilizing global citizenship. Over a span of seven
years, the groups Avaaz and Change.org have activated
tens of millions of people in almost every country in
the world. As stated on the website of Change.org,
technology has made us more connected than ever.
It is now possible for anyone to start a campaign and
immediately mobilize hundreds of others locally or
hundreds of thousands around the world.
2.2.3. The importance of language to democratic
participation
Democracy, seen as a co-creation, depends upon our
collective efforts in a shared task. In part, this work con-
sists in our capacity to create a communicative sphere
in which we can participate and maintain a discourse
about our common project, as is the building of a
democratic society or world. Jrgen Habermas (1984),
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| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico| Why English?

Table 2.2.1 Examples of global citizen associations

Topic Year founded Membership Reach

Change.org Citizen activism 2007 >83 million No data

Avaaz Citizen activism 2007 >40 million 194 countries

World Wildlife Fund Environment 1961 5 million >100 countries

Amnesty International Human rights 1961 >3 million >150 countries

Greenpeace Environment 1971 >2.8 million No data

International Union for

Environment 1948 >1,200 organizations >160 countries
Conservation of Nature

Social justice, sustainable

La Va Campesina 1992 164 organizations 73 countries
agriculture

400 teacher and

Education
Public education 1993 education worker 170 countries
International
organizations

Binational Front
Mexico and the
of Indigenous Indigenous rights 1991 No data
United States
Organizations (FIOB)

Source: Prepared by the authors with information from: change.org, avaaz.

org, wwf.org, amnesty.org, iucn.org, viacampesina.org, ei-ie.org, fiob.org

for example, argues that democratic public life cannot
be carried out if matters of public importance are not
discussed by citizens. Thus, the opportunity and the
ability to participate in public discourse become two
of the foundations of democratic citizenship, lending
critical importance to public policies oriented towards
developing plurilingualism: competence in language(s)
is a characteristic of democratic citizenshipboth as
its prerequisite and its practice (Breidbach, 2003: 7).
This vision of the importance of linguistic competence
for democratic participation in an intercultural world
emphasizes the active role of citizens. Others have ar-
gued that the importance of plurilingualism lies in having
a better-informed population, expressing the idea that
since a citizen is an informed, responsible person
nothing that is experienced in society should be alien
to a democratic citizen (Audigier, quoted in Starkey,
2010:127). What we want to highlight here is that the
importance of developing linguistic abilities goes far
beyond receiving; it is vital to our capacity to act in and
with the world, to shape the world around us.
In the process of activating our citizenship, our specific
linguistic needs will depend upon both the level and
type of participation (See Table 2.2.2). As members of
multiple communities, our participation as citizens can
occur on the sub-national, national, or supra-national
level, for which we need to mobilize different linguistic
competencies.
If we think about the specific case of Mexico, we can
see the importance of developing regional and/or
minority languages, such as Indigenous languages, at

mexicanos primero 21
Why English? | SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |

the sub-national level. According to the data from
the 2010 census, 6% of the population over 5 years
old - in other words, around 6.7 million people -
speak one of the 89 Indigenous languages used
in Mexico, with Nahuatl and Maya being the most
common (INEGI, 2010). Of the rest of us who live
in Mexico, 98% cannot even understand an Indigenous
language. Therefore, we must promote the right to
learn in Indigenous languages, making them par t
of our national heritage.
Likewise, in Mexico we have an increasing population
of visitors and immigrants, especially from countries
where Spanish is not regularly spoken. In 2013, more
than 10 million visitors from non-Spanish speaking
countries arrived in Mexico (INM, 2014); almost a quar-
ter of a million of them came from Asia. This number
represents an increase of over 13% compared to the
previous year. Added to these people who enter the
country temporarily, Mexico receives an important
number of immigrants. In 2010 almost one million
people born outside of the country were residing in
Mexico. More than seven out of every ten of them
came from the United States, but other populations,
like Koreans, are rapidly growing; in just one decade,
their population multiplied more than 12 times (INEGI,
2011). In general, these foreign-born residents gather
in cities, but 95% of the almost 2,500 municipalities in
the country have at least one person who was born
outside Mexico. There are almost a half a million girls
and boys in basic education schools who were born in
other countries, and an important number of them do
not speak Spanish as their first language. It is important
to think about the implications of these demographic
changes for our education and linguistic policies.
When we activate our citizenship on the supra-national
level, the urgency to develop a plurilingual policy, un-
derstood as the capacity to participate in relevant
communications in plurilingual environments, is perhaps
even clearer (Breidbach, 2003). At this level, national
language communities intersect, and we can no longer
think about them as separate entities; we are united
by global and universal matters.
The recent democratic movements in Egypt
and Turkey provide eloquent examples of the impor-
tance of having the linguistic competencies needed to
participate in the global arena. In both cases, media and
social networks played a fundamental role in organizing
demonstrators as well as broadcasting their struggle to
the rest of the world.We can see, for example, how the
use of English multiplied dissemination of the events
in Egypt during January and February 2011, critical
months for its pro-democracy movement (See Table
2.2.3; as can be noted, the networks or conversations

Table 2.2.2 Levels and types of democratic participation

Levels of Constellations Linguistic

participation of participation needs
Regional or minority
Regional communities of minority languages
languages
Sub-national
National language
Multilingual regional or urban communities
Lingua franca

National National linguistic communities National language

Multilateral participation among several

Supra-national Lingua franca
national linguistic communities

Source: Adapted from Breidbach, 2003.

22 mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico|
in English, which in many cases were held by Egyptians
themselves, surpassed the number of conversations in
Arabic, the countrys official language). Similarly, in Turkey,
what began as a local movement that the government
tried to suppress gained the worlds attention when
information about the demonstrations and the gov-
ernments authoritarian reaction to them extended to
other parts of the world by means of English (Khazan,
2013). In both these cases, English acted as a lingua
franca, carrying the voices, demands, and experiences
of these citizens to different parts of the world, where
they became part of the international discussion on
participation and democracy.
2.2.4. Language learning and the development of citizen
competencies
The concept of global citizenship has been defined in
different ways. While national citizenship is an acci-
dent of birth, global citizenship is a voluntary associa-
tion, a choice that means ways of thinking and living
in different communities - localities, regions, nations,
Table 2.2.3 Network of Twitter users who tweeted about the protests in Egypt,
January and February 2011, according to language used
rabe
Ingls
English
Source: www.visualnews.com/2011/02/14/visualizing-the-egypt-influence-network/
mexicanos primero
Why English?
and international communities - that overlap (Green,
2012). Likewise, global citizenship has been put forth
as an ethical concept that seeks to develop feelings of
common humanity, a sense that we belong to a world
community, an understanding of the responsibilities that
this entails, and the capacity to act as world citizens
(Hosack, 2011). It implies a feeling of cultural empathy,
the ability to move skillfully and navigate in multiple cul-
tures, an awareness of the interdependence between
people, systems, and countries in the world, as well as
a feeling of shared responsibility. Citizen participation
represents the seed and the fruit of these attitudes and
abilities. When we feel a connection with our commu-
nities (again, of different types and at different levels),
it is more likely that we will translate that connection
into participation, into action. In this section, we take
up the possible relationship between language learning
and the development of these citizen competences.
Learning other languages offers opportunities to de-
velop the knowledge, abilities, and attitudes vital for
democratic citizenship.
Arabic
23
Why English?
Knowledge: on the one hand, learning another
language implies knowing other cultures, cus-
toms, and social practices, as well as learning an-
other history.The development of this knowledge,
in turn, can stimulate greater understanding of
our own culture and history (Georgiou, 2009).
On the other hand, classroom experience us-
ing other languages can serve as an opportuni-
ty to investigate international issues and events
(Hosack, 2011) and, in its best version, offer a
space to explore human rights and global citizen-
ship. However, the teaching of other languages has
been criticized because, in most of the proposed
learning experiences, its focus is centered on the
private world (family, school, work) and not on
public topics (peace, gender relations, racism,
social and cultural movements, political systems,
etc.; Starkey, 2010).
Abilities: besides being able to communicate in
another language, when communicative teaching
strategies are used that prioritize discourse, dis-
cussion, and debate, the process of learning other
languages itself can develop abilities that are at
the core of citizenship, such as the ability to lis-
ten to others, to re-formulate our words so as to
be understood by others, to offer another point
of view, or to present a valid argument (Starkey,
2010). Additionally, in the language classroom, we
can develop our abilities to investigate other cul-
tures, interpret them and relate them to aspects
of our own cultures. Likewise, some studies have
found that bilingual people have greater abilities
for resolving conflicts (NEA Research, 2007).
Attitudes: researchers have identified a broad
range of attitudes associated with citizenship that
are developed through learning other languages.
Students of foreign languages are more tolerant
24
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
of differences between people (NEA Research,
2007; Georgiou, 2009), more sensitive, curious,
and open, and less likely to judge other cul-
tures or believe that their own culture is supe-
rior (Starkey, 2010). Learning another language
can also have a positive impact on levels of self-
confidence (Starkey, 2010), as well on aspirations
and life expectations (Bando and Li, 2014).
In sum, learning other languages affects our way of
thinking, being, believing, acting and interacting.
2.2.5 Conclusion
A public policy that supports the development of
plurilingualism and an intercultural society can have
political implications that challenge the status quo.
Monolingualism, such as that which we currently ex-
perience in Mexico, is part of a construction imposed
as an ideal, but which can be attributed to political
and not necessarily educational factors (Starkey, 2010).
However, linguistic competencies and intercultural un-
derstanding can no longer be seen as extras or op-
tional; they form a central part of being a citizen of the
modern world (Council of Europe, 2006; Department
for Education and Skills, 2007; Ministerial Action Group
on Languages, 2000).The key question for all of us who
live in Mexico is whether we want our young people
to be active participants in the building of this world,
or whether they will be condemned to being passive
recipients of what others decide.
If our purpose is to educate democratic citizens, capa-
ble of building and sustaining a public sphere in which
justice, equity, inclusion and respect prevail, we need
plurilingual, intercultural citizens who understand both
Mexico and the world, and who are prepared to share
the best of ourselves with others.
mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico| Why English?

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Addams, Jane (1902[1994]). On Education, New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction

Publisher, 226 p.

Bando, Rosangela and Li, Xia (2014). The Effect of In-Service Teacher Training on Student Learning
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December 2014].

Boyte, Harry C. and Kari, Nancy N. (1996). Building America: the Democratic Promise
of Public Work, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 255 p.

Breidbach, Stephan (2003). Plurilingualism, Democratic Citizenship in Europe and the

Role of English, Strassbourg, Language Policy Division of the Council of Europe, 24 p.

European Commission (2012). Europeans and their Languages, Special Eurobarometer

386, Directorate-General for Education and Culture, Directorate-General for Translation
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Council of Europe (2006). Plurilingual Education in Europe. 50 Years of International Cooperation,

Strasbourg, Council of Europe Language Policy Division.

Depar tment for Education and Skills (DfES) (2002). Languages for All: Languages
for Life. A Strategy for England, London, Department for Education and Skills.

Dewey, John (1916). Democracy and Education, New York, Macmillan, 439 p.

Dewey, John (1927). The Public and Its Problems, Chicago, Swallow, 236 p.

Freire, Paulo. (1990).The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York, Continuum Publishers, 186 p.

Georgiou, Mary (2009). Language learning for global citizenship: the intercultural
and political dimensions of Foreign language education, in Palaiologou N. (ed.). Intercultural
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Policy Institute (IMEPO), under the aegis of UNESCO.

Giroux, Henry A. (2002). Public Spaces, Private Lives: Beyond the Culture of Cynicism,
Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 205 p.

Glass, Ronald D. (2001). On Paulo Freires Philosophy of Praxis and the Foundations
of Liberation Education, Educational Researcher, 30(2), 15-25.

Green, Madeleine F. (2012). Global Citizenship: What are we talking about and why does it
matter?, Trends & Insights for International Education Leaders, 1-4.

Habermas, Jrgen (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action, Boston, Beacon Press, 465 p.
Hosack, Ian. (2011).Foreign Language Teaching for Global Citizenship, Ritsumei, 18(3), 125-140.

mexicanos primero 25
Why English? | SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |

INEGI (2011). Los nacidos en otro pas suman 961,121 personas [People born in
another country sum 961,121], Conociendonos todos 1(2).

INEGI (2010). Censo de Poblacin y Vivienda 2010 [2010 Population and Housing
Census]. Available at: http://www.inegi.org.mx/est/contenidos/proyectos/ccpv/cpv2010/
Default.aspx [consulted: November 2014]

INM (2014). Entradas areas de extranjeros, por continente y pas de residencia,

2013 [Entry of foreigners by air, by continent and country of residence], Entry
Records,Table 1.4. Available at: http://www.politicamigratoria.gob.mx/es_mx/SEGOB/
Registro_de_Entradas_2013 [consulted: December 2014]

Khazan, Olga (2013). These Charts Show How Crucial Twitter Is for the Turkey
Protesters: How a small group of hidden influencers spread their message far and
wide, The Atlantic, June 12, 2013. Available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/interna-
tional/archive/2013/06/these-charts-show-how-crucial-twitter-is-for-the-turkey-pro-
testers/276798/ [consulted: November 2014]

Lpez Andrade, Guillermo Pablo (2008). La Enseanza de Idiomas en Mxico.

Diagnstico, Avances y Desafos [Language Teaching in Mexico. Diagnosis, Advances and
Challenges]. Ppt. Available at: http://www.slideshare.net/jeancabe730605/la-enseanza-
de-idiomas-en-mexico [consulted: November 2014]

Marian, Viorica and Shook, Anthony (2012). The Cognitive Benefits of Being
Bilingual,The Dana Foundation. Available at: http://www.dana.org/Cerebrum/Default.
aspx?id=39483 [consulted: October 2014]

Ministerial Action Group on Languages (2000). Citizens of a Multilingual World,

Edinburgh, Scottish Executive Education Department.

United Nations (2012). El derecho a la participacin [The right to participate], High

Commissioners Office. Available at: http://acnudh.org/2012/12/el-derecho-a-la-par-
ticipacion/ [consulted: December 2014]

NEA Research (2007).The Benefits of Second Language Study, Regarding World Language
Education. Available at: http://www.ncssfl.org/papers/BenefitsSecondLanguageStudyNEA.
pdf [consulted: November 2014]

Parker, Walter C. (1996). Advanced Ideas about Democracy:Toward a Pluralist

Conception of Citizen Education, Teachers College Record, 98(1), 104-125.

Ryan, Camille (2013). Language Use in the United States: 2011, American
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Starkey, Hugh (2010). Language Learning for Human Rights and Democratic
Citizenship, in C. Ros i Sol & J. Fenoulhet (eds.), Mobility and Localization in Language
Learning, Oxford, Peter Lang.

26 mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico|
2.3 English and social inequity in Mexico
Blanca Heredia and Daniela Rubio1
Interdisciplinary Program on Education
Policies and Practices (PIPE)
Center for Research and Teaching
in Economics (CIDE)
nglish is not just another language.
English is something like electricity
or the Internet; it is a platform that
broadens and empowers the possi-
bilities for communication and information, both indi-
vidually and collectively. If you know English, you are
connected to the world. If you do not, the universe
in which you live, interact with others, think, learn and
inform yourself is considerably reduced.
In Mexico, despite being neighbor to the most impor-
tant English-speaking country in the world, as well as the
many ties that connect us to the United States, there
is barely any mastery of English. Besides being limited
in general, the knowledge and use of the English lan-
guage in our country is, above all, profoundly unequal.
In this brief essay, we explore the relation between
English and social inequity in Mexico. We address this
topic, to which public research and debate has paid little
attention, because we consider it urgent to visualize
and discuss the very high costs that the lack of an ef-
fective national policy for teaching and learning English
has for Mexico in terms of equity. The social costs of
this omission, as we will discuss here, are enormous
because the lack of a minimally acceptable quality of
public education has limited access to learning English
to a very narrow minority (who can pay for it) and,
1
We appreciate Daniel Leffs collaboration in preparing this work.
mexicanos primero
Why English?
with that, it has not only contributed towards repro-
ducing social inequity, but has exacerbated it.
2.3.1 The state of English in Mexico: Limitations and gaps
A rigorous empirical investigation on the levels of mas-
tery of English in Mexico is practically non-existent;
hence the enormous importance of the study carried
out by Mexicanos Primero, presented in this volume,
on the levels of English among public lower secondary
school graduates in the country (see Chapter 4). This
work is the first to contribute an objective, rigorous
measurement of the knowledge and use of that lan-
guage in Mexico. The desolate panorama it offers on
how the English language is taught in our public edu-
cation system is, however, consistent with information
from the few surveys and studies on the topic prior
to said work.
For example, and in accordance with one of the very
few international exercises in comparative evalua-
tions of the mastery of English as a second language
that are available, the English Proficiency Index (EPI)
of Education First (EF) places Mexico in a low level,
in 39th place among the 63 countries considered in
its 2014 edition (Education First, 2014).
This position places us below countries like Peru,
Brazil, Russia, China, Spain, Vietnam, and Argentina.2
Moreover, and in accordance to this same study, the
level of English in Mexico decreased between 2007 and
2012 in relation to other participating Latin American
countries, which, it must be emphasized, present very
low levels of mastery of English in relation to other
regions in the world.
A survey on the topic carried out in 2013 by Consulta
Mitofsky showed similar results: only 12% of those
who answered reported that they knew how to speak
English. The variations by place of origin stand out in
that survey. For example, while 14.5% of the urban
population say that they speak English, only 2.4% in
rural localities do. Likewise, in the northern part of
the country, at least one out of every five people said
2
EFs English Proficiency Level measures the average English ability of
adults in a country using data from two different EF tests taken by
hundreds of thousands of adults each year. One test is open to any
Internet user for free. The second is an online proficiency test used
by EF during the process of registering students before starting an
English course. Both include sections on grammar, vocabulary, written
comprehension and listening comprehension. (EF, 2014)
27
Why English? | SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |

he could speak and understand English, while in the words, a lot of work still needs to be done to respond
south the corresponding figure was only one out of to such fundamental questions as: how many, who, and
every 25 people. how much do Mexicans learn English.

In another survey of Human Capital in Mexico, carried
out in 2008 by the Center of Research for Development
(CIDAC), 35% of the participants stated that they knew
at least a little English, but only 2% said that they had
high functional mastery of this language. Approximately
half of those who answered the survey indicated that
they had not studied English due to economic reasons
(lack of money or time).
The above data indicates that the percentage of
Mexicans who can communicate well in English is
very, very low. There are limitations in the available
information (perceptions, self-reports, limited demo-
graphic segments); however, it also reveals the need
to do more robust empirical research on this matter.
Here we are not only referring to an analysis of the
causes and consequences of the state of English in
Mexico, but rather to something even more basic: a
simple quantitative description of the problem. In other
2.3.2 Inequity and the level of English as a foreign language:
Mexico in a comparative perspective
As we mentioned at the beginning of this text, daily
experience and the available limited empirical evi-
dence indicates that mastery of the English language
in Mexico is a resource that is distributed in a very un-
equal manner. In order to put the Mexican experience
into a broader international context and investigate
how common the relationship between inequity and
mastery of English is in other countries, we performed
a simple correlational analysis between inequity (Gini
coefficient) and the level of English in the sample of
countries represented in the English Proficiency Index
of Education First, 2013.
Figure 2.3.1 presents the results of this analysis. As we
can see, there is a positive relationship between social
equity and English level. In other words, the greater the

Figure 2.3.1. Inequity and English Level

70
Gini Index = 100 Maximum Inequality
Gini Index = 0 Maximum Equality Sweden
65 Correlation Coefficient = 0.57601
Estonia Norway
Denmark
60 Finland
Poland
Slovenia
Malaysia Germany
55
India
EPI

Argentina Spain Czech Republic

China Japan
Ukraine
50 Brazil
Costa Rica Mexico Vietnam
France
Russia
Colombia Chile Peru Egypt
Turkey
45 Jordan
Guatemala Venezuela
El Salvador
Panama Thailand
40
Iraq

35
60 55 50 45 40 35 30 25 20
Inequality Equality
Gini Index

Source: Prepared by the authors based on data from the World Bank and Education First

28 mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico|
equity, the better the level of English and vice versa.
In the graph, Mexico is situated slightly above the re-
gression line, which indicates that it presents a general
level of English that is a bit higher than what would be
expected given its high levels of social inequity.
The fact that where there is greater inequity we ob-
serve a lower level of English, although it requires much
more research, might suggest that they symbiotically or
mutually reinforce each other. In other words, in very
unequal societies, the mastery of English is usually low
because it tends to be concentrated in the small seg-
ments of the population that have high income levels.
Although that concentration reflects this pre-existing
inequity, it usually contributes towards perpetuating
and even expanding it by virtue of the important eco-
nomic benefits that are associated to the mastery of
English itself, as well as its value in societies in which
very few people speak and adequately communicate
in that language.
2.3.3 Socioeconomic level and mastery of English in Mexico
CIDACs 2008 survey on Human Capital reports that
70% of those surveyed who had family incomes of more
than $683 USD a month declared that they knew some
English, in contrast to 25% who had family incomes of
less than $109 USD a month. Likewise, it was found
that those who have more income and schooling are
more willing to pay to improve their English, both in
the proportion of people willing to do so and in the
amount of money they are willing to pay.
In academic articles, we find an analysis done by
Gonzalez, Lima, and Castillo (2004) carried out with
incoming students at nine different institutions of higher
education in Mexico City (six public and three private,
ranked among the best universities in Mexico). The
authors collected socioeconomic information from
approximately 5,000 students and analyzed the cor-
relation between that information and their scores in
English.The principal finding in this work was that stu-
dents who had higher socioeconomic levels - those at
the private universities - obtained much better scores
on the English test than students with less income.
Following up on this study, Davies (2009) suggests that
if the results of the previous study were interpreted
optimistically, one might think that the universities would
be responsible for providing students with the necessary
mexicanos primero
Why English?
English, so that when they finished their studies (re-
gardless of whether they attended a public or a private
university) they would reach similar levels of English.
What he finds, however, is that the improvement in the
level of English is much greater in private universities,
while there is not much progress in public universities.
He concludes that Mexican public universities are fail-
ing to provide their students with all the tools needed
to access a better future.
In order to delve deeper into the relationship between
socioeconomic levels and the level of English, we ana-
lyzed the results of the diagnostic English tests given to
incoming students at a prestigious university in Mexico
that is both very selective academically and quite di-
verse in socioeconomic terms. The group of students
that were analyzed all had high scores on the Academic
Aptitude Test (1424 on average, of a maximum of 1600
points), because that is a requirement for admission
to the university. Once admitted, students must take a
diagnostic test of their mastery of English, the results of
which are used to place them in courses appropriate
for their level of knowledge and use of the language.
Students are classified into seven levels, which go from
Elementary to Advanced English for Academic Purposes
3).3 The principal factors that are taken into account to
determine each students level are his results on the
Oxford Online Placement Test and the quality of his
writing in LEARN: Writing Tasks.The average score on
3
Freshmen are placed In the following levels (ordered from the lowest
to the highest): Elementary, Pre-Intermediate, Intermediate, Upper
Intermediate, English for Academic Purposes 1 (EAP1), English for
Academic Purposes 2 (EAP2), English for Academic Purposes 3 (EAP3)
Why English?
I would like them to teach us English more
often so we could learn more, because
right now it is too late to teach
English to those of us in 6th grade.
Student, 6th Grade, Hidalgo
29
Why English? | SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |

the English evaluation was 83 points on a scale from
0 to 120.
Doing a little exercise on the impact that different
factors have on English test results, we observe that
factors related to students socioeconomic levels have
the greatest impact. For example, when we observe
information related to family income, we find that for
every additional thousand pesos (about $68 USD) that
parents earn, students score 0.125 more points on the
English test. Likewise, the outcome of the English test
is not affected by the type of upper secondary school
students attended (public or private) or by results on
the Academic Aptitude Test.
What this exercise showed us was that if we imagine
two students with an identical result on their Academic
Aptitude Test, but one of them comes from a family
that has $683 USD more in income, that student tends
to get 1.25 more points on his English test than the
other. Figure 2.3.2 shows how the higher the income,
the higher the grade in English.
Of the students that were analyzed, 72% had a schol-
arship from the university to cover the cost of tuition
and housing.The scholarship was granted as the result
of a socioeconomic study carried out on the students
and their families. We found that this indicator better
reflected students socioeconomic level because it not
only measures family income as reported by the student,
but also includes an interview and home visit where
other variables are observed (for example, the number
of lightbulbs in the home). The higher the scholarship
granted, the lower the students socioeconomic level.
The result of this exercise, when comparing the rela-
tionship between the scholarship granted and the re-
sult in English, was similar to the above. We observed
that for each additional thousand pesos in scholarship
granted to the student, English test scores fell by 0.44.
Once again, we can imagine two students with an
identical result on their Academic Aptitude Test, but
one of them has an economic scholarship of $5,120
USD for his undergraduate studies and the other has

Figure 2.3.2. Relationship between family income and English test results.

100
93.36 90.56
90 84.72
80
69.69
English test Average

70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
No Scholarship $1 - $1,760 $1,760 - $2,820 $2,820 - $3,350
Range of Scholarship Awarded (USD)

Source: Analysis conducted by the authors for this essay.

30 mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico|
$1,706 USD. According to our analysis, the student with
the lower scholarship gets a grade that is 22 points
higher on his English test than the student with the
higher scholarship.
Finally, the most important socioeconomic factor re-
lated to obtaining a better grade on the English test is
the mothers level of schooling. Once again, the data
suggest that students whose mothers had at least an
undergraduate degree scored 11 points higher on the
English test than those students whose mothers did
not have at least an undergraduate degree.
Remembering that the sample that was analyzed was
a group of students with high intellectual capacity, but
who came from different socioeconomic groups, we
can conclude that, in effect, student socioeconomic
level has a very important effect on the level of mas-
tery of English, much greater than intellectual capacity.
2.3.4 The economic value of English
We know that in Mexico there is growing demand for
trained human resources with the ability to communi-
cate effectively in English. In a recent study published
by the Manpower Foundation (2014), 36% of employ-
ers surveyed mention that it is not easy for them to
fill their vacancies due to the scarcity of people who
know and have the ability to communicate in a foreign
language. Similarly, an article published on the Universia
website indicates that the OCC Mundial human re-
sources company estimates that 90% of the vacancies
they advertise on their website require mastery of
English and on the Trabajando.com website they esti-
mate that having accreditation in English increases the
possibility of getting a job by 44% (Universia, 2014;
translation ours). With the increase in the needs of the
market, those who can access the best jobs (which
usually require English) are the few who have had the
chance to learn it.
Talking recently with a group of Mexican young people
who participated in the International Mathematics
Olympics (IMO), the following question arose: Is it
usual for companies to approach ex-Olympians to
recruit people who have exceptional talent? The reply
from one of the participants in the meeting was: My
husband, who works at Oracle, a technology company,
mexicanos primero
Why English?
has tried to recruit IMO participants several times,
but they never hire them because they dont speak
English. Apparently here in Mexico those who are
good at math dont speak English. Despite the fact
that we did have participants at the meeting who are
now studying overseas, it seems to be the exception
and not the rule. In other words, even for such tal-
ented Mexican students as the six who participate in
the International Mathematics Olympics each year, it
is not enough to access the best education and em-
ployment opportunities; they must also have the skills
to communicate in English.
Similarly, in a recent CIDAC report (2014) they in-
terviewed employers to understand what skills job
candidates were lacking, to which someone replied, I
have been recruiting for more than 20 years. Although
I have seen people come better prepared in math, in
English it is still less than satisfactory. Likewise, in the
survey conducted for this same study, at least 30% re-
plied that English is a very important and very scarce
tool in the workplace.
Mastery of English offers more and better employment
opportunities.The same happens with educational op-
portunities. English strongly conditions access to gradu-
ate studies overseas, particularly in the United States
and other English-speaking countries. In this respect,
the results of a survey of ex-Fullbright fellows, spon-
sored by the US-Mexico Commission for Educational
and Cultural Exchange (COMEXUS), which analyzes
the fellows origins by type of university - public or pri-
vate - are interesting.The principal conclusion is as fol-
lows: the number of ex-fellows who studied in public
universities is slightly higher than those from private
universities. However, when we compare these groups
of ex-fellows with the number of undergraduate stu-
dents registered nationwide, we observe that private
universities are over-represented in Fullbright by 12%
(ANUIES, 2011; translation ours). (See Figure 2.3.3)
These data and many anecdotal experiences confirm
that, in effect, mastery of the English language has be-
come a key resource to access the best educational and
professional opportunities. In addition, as we showed
in the previous section, socioeconomic origin usually
has much more influence on learning English than fac-
tors such as intellectual capacity.
31
Why English?
2.3.5 Teaching English as public policy
Mexicos public education system has been offering
English to its high school students for many years
now.To judge by the devastating results of Mexicanos
Primeros study presented in Chapter 4, the effectiveness
of the English programs has been practically negligible.
The last effort to bring English to all public basic educa-
tion schools was made in 2007. That year the Federal
Government established the National English Program
in Basic Education (PNIEB, for its acronym in Spanish),
starting its pilot program in 2009. With this program,
English language teaching became mandatory from third
grade of preschool to third grade of lower secondary
school (Martinez, 2011). With PNIEB, national stan-
dards were established (for example, over 100 hours
of English each year), but each state was responsible
for establishing and reaching its own learning goals. At
the same time, English was included in the Curricular
Reform for Teacher Preparation Programs as a subject
in the regular program for pre- and primary school
undergraduate degrees (Martinez, 2011).
Figure 2.3.3. Percentage of ex-Fullbright fellows with
undergraduate studies in public and private universities
Fellows
80%
70%
60% 55%
50% 45%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
Public
Source: Fulbright, 2011.
32
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
However, PNIEB faced a multitude of problems, among
which are: an enormous deficit of teachers, teachers
with low mastery of English, as well as limited budgets
and important variations from year to year (Serdan,
2014). Thus, for example, in a study presented by the
National English Coordination (Martinez, 2011), it was
estimated that in order to achieve adequate national
coverage a total of 92,441 English teachers would be
needed by 2020. However, in 2010 there were only
around 11,000.
Among other things, in most cases, the deficit in teach-
ers has led public schools to not have the minimum
essential conditions to adequately teach English courses.
So those who are interested in having access to learn-
ing English have to do so through private schools or
private lessons.
Despite efforts to implement programs to promote
teaching English, it is clear that the topic has not been
a high priority in our education system. Insufficient re-
sources - material and, above all, human - granted to
English programs have probably strongly limited their
Total Enrollment
67%
33%
Private
mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico|
impact and might contribute towards explaining the
disastrous results in the evaluation of English levels
among students who graduated from public lower
secondary schools, which are reported in Chapter 4
of this book.
Conclusions
Social inequity is the countrys most serious structural
problem.This is so because it breaks us apart and pre-
vents us from uniting and building together. Many, very
diverse factors have contributed and continue to con-
tribute to the extreme, unfair inequity. One of these is
the low quality of education in general and the strong
inequity in access to opportunities for education that
effectively provide platforms for each person to grow
and develop.
In this essay we present a first exploration of the rela-
tionship between inequity and the mastery of English
in the country.The principal findings of this work pro-
vide evidence that favors our initial hypotheses with
respect to the strong concentration of the mastery of
Methodological note
The database that was analyzed contains 122 obser-
vations from students who have applied for different
undergraduate studies at the educational institution
under consideration. Of these students, 104 took a test
of their knowledge of the English language where the
scores ranged from 0 to 120. The average score was
82.65, the highest was 109 and the lowest 4.
Another interesting variable is the result on the aca-
demic aptitude test. This test was taken by the 122
students under consideration, and the highest pos-
sible grade was1,600 points. In the sample, the av-
erage score was 1423.64, the lowest 1,300 and the
highest 1,565.
mexicanos primero
Why English?
English and, therefore, the opportunities for education
and employment this opens to sectors having greater
income. What these findings suggest is that the ineq-
uity in access to learning English not only reproduces
existing social inequity, but tends to expand it.
Building a national policy for teaching English that is
worthy of the name would offer millions of Mexican
children and youth, for whom public school is their only
option for an education, a potentially very powerful
lever to access better opportunities for development.
The simulation we are in - English programs that do
not teach English - besides wasting scarce resources,
only contributes towards perpetuating and exacerbat-
ing our enormous inequities.
Continuing on the same path, with the justification that
English threatens our national identity, is a very good
way for the country to keep offering possibilities only
to the same (very few) people as always. This state
of things urgently needs to be changed, by everyone
and for everyone.
Because we have different variables that act as strong
indicators of socioeconomic level, we made several
models for the regression. This was in order to evalu-
ate their real weight on the final grade in English, as
well as their significance.
A first model uses family income as the proxy for the
students socioeconomic level. Family income includes
fathers, mothers, and if such is the case, guardians in-
come. Likewise, it includes information on mothers
and fathers education. We were also interested in
knowing whether the type of upper secondary school
(private or public) had any significant weight on test
results. Finally, we wanted to explore whether the
results on the Academic Aptitude Test had a strong
relationship with the English test or not.
33
Why English?
Model 1
si = 0 + 1Ingresoi + 2LicMi + 3LicPi
+ 4Privadai + 5Aptitudi + 1i
Where si is the score obtained by the individual i on
the English test; Ingresoi refers to the individuals fam-
ily income; LicMi and LicPi take the value of 1 if the
mother and the father have an undergraduate degree,
respectively, and 0 if they dont; Privadai is a dummy
variable that takes the value of 1 only if the individual
comes from a private school; Aptitudi refers to the
result on the academic aptitude test; 1i is a term of
idiosyncratic error and j is a parameter that relates
the variable j with the result on the English test.
In a second model, we used the same variables and
we also included a variable referring to the scholarship
the institution grants to those students with economic
need.The higher the scholarship, the lower the socio-
economic level of the student.
Model 2
si= Xi + 6Becai + 2i
Where ai is the amount of the scholarship the institu-
tion has decided to grant the student i; 6 is a scale
that relates the amount of the scholarship to the result
Table 2.3.1 Description of variables
Variable
Family income
Mother Undergraduate degree
Father Undergraduate degree
Private School
Socioeconomic scholarship
Academic Aptitude Test
34
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
on the English test; Xi y j are vectors that contain
the variables and parameters In Model 1 and 2i is the
new term of idiosyncratic error.
In the third model we used explanatory variables only
for Privadai, Becai and Aptitudi. This is in order to
show that the estimate for parameter 6 (which is re-
lated to the scholarship) hardly changes when other
variables that also act as proxies for the socioeconomic
level are excluded.
Model 3
si = 0 + 4Privadai + 5Aptitudi + 6Becai + 3i
Where the variables and the parameters are those
previously mentioned and 3i is the new term for error.
Finally, to analyze the importance of parents educa-
tion, in a fourth model we only include the variables
of LicMi and LicPi.
Model 4
si = 0 + 2LicMi + 3LicPi + 4i
Where once again the variables and the parameters
are those explained previously and 4i is the new
term for error.
Units
Thousands of pesos
1 = Mother has Undergraduate degree;
0 - Mother has no Undergraduate degree
1 = Father has Undergraduate degree;
0 = Father has no Undergraduate degree
1 = Private;
0 = Public
Thousands of pesos
Points (maximum possible points 1,600)
mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico| Why English?

Table 2.3.2 Regressions with ordinary least squares

Dependent variable: Grade on English test

1 2 3 4
0.125* 0.00805
Family income
(0.0728) (0.07244)
12.95*** 11.04** 11.48**
Mother Undergraduate degree
(4.715) (4.431) (4.644)
1.086 0.334 1.855
Father Undergraduate degree
(5.246) (4.902) (5.227)
8.176 3.678 1.743
Private School
(5.305) (5.089) (5.014)
-0.438*** -0.459***
Socioeconomic Scholarship
(0.114) (0.103)
0.0436 0.0359 0.0355
Academic Aptitude Test
(0.0339) (0.0317) (0.0312)
0.0149 33.38 43.63 73.75***
Constant
(48.80) (46.39) (45.43) (4.881)
Obs. 100 100 103 103
R2 (0.142) (0.260) (0.200) (0.065)

Note: Standard errors are in parenthesis

*** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1

Table 2.3.3 Results on the English test per quartile of

socioeconomic scholarship granted

Quartile Percentage Scholarship (usd) English average

1 27.2% No scholarship 93.36
2 17.5% $1 - $1,760 90.56
3 17.5% $1,760 - $2,820 84.72
4 37.9% $2,820 - $3,350 69.69
Observations 103

mexicanos primero 35
Why English? | SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |

It should be noted that in our database the variable
for mothers schooling is significantly correlated (using
a confidence interval of 90%) to the variables used as
socioeconomic level proxies.Together, the variable for
mothers schooling with the variable for income (or, if
such is the case, the socioeconomic scholarship) ex-
plain the bulk of the variation in students results on
the English diagnostic test.
In the results for the regression in Model 1, we ob-
served that, in effect, family income bears significant
weight on English test results. The higher the family
income, the higher the score the students obtained
on the English test.
In Models 2 and 3, when we entered the socioeco-
nomic scholarship variable, we observed that it is also
significant. The higher the amount of the scholarship
granted to the student, the lower the score on the
English test. Given that the scholarships under consid-
eration are granted based on a socioeconomic study,
the higher the amount of the scholarship, the lower
the familys socioeconomic situation. That is why we
see a negative correlation when this variable is used
as a proxy for students socioeconomic level.
Additionally, in models 1, 2, and 4 we find that mothers
education is the variable with most influence on getting
a better grade in English. It should be noted that the
rest of the variables also bear a correlation to results
on the English test, however, these are not statistically
significant. One interesting finding is that the score on
the Academic Aptitude Test is the variable that presents
the lowest correlation to results on the English test.
Table 2.3.3 allows us to better understand how the
result in English is affected by the level of Income. In
the table we divided the level of socioeconomic schol-
arships that were granted into quartiles. It can be seen
that those students without economic scholarships have
better averages in English. The higher the scholarship
they were granted, the lower the grade.This tendency
is especially noticeable in the last quartile, in which the
grade in English goes down by approximately 15 points
in comparison to the previous quartile.

References

Fulbright (2011). Principales resultados de la encuesta a ex-becarios Fulbright

[Principal results from the survey of ex-Fullbright fellows] -Garcia Robles. Available
at: http://bit.ly/gDsIXn [consulted: October 2014]

World Bank (2014). Gini Index. Available at: http://datos.bancomundial.org/

indicador/SI.POV.GINI [consulted: October 2014]

CIDAC (2008). Encuesta CIDAC: Capital Humano en Mxico [CIDAC

Survey: Human Resources in Mexico]. Available at: http://www.cidac.org/esp/
cont/reportes/encuesta_cidac__capital_humano_en_mexico.php
[consulted: October 2014]

CIDAC (2014). Encuesta de competencias profesionales Qu buscan -y no

encuentran- las empresas en los profesionistas jvenes? [Survey on professional
competence, What do companies seek - and not find - in young professionals?].

36 mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico| Why English?

Available at: http://cidac.org/esp/uploads/1/encuesta_competencias_

profesionales_270214.pdf [consulted: October 2014]

Consulta Mitofsky (2013). Mexicanos y los idiomas extranjeros [Mexicans

and foreign languages]. Available at: http://consulta.mx/web/images/
MexicoOpina/2013/NA_MEXICANOSeIDIOMAS.pdf [consulted: October 2014]

Davies, Paul (2009). Strategic Management of ELT in Public Educational Systems:

Trying to Reduce Failure, Increase Success, The Electronic Journal for English as a
Second Language, 13(3).

Education First (2013). ndice de Level en Ingls (EF EPI) Reporte 2013 [English
Proficiency Index (EF EPI) 2013 Report]. Available at: http://www.ef.com.mx/__/~/
media/efcom/epi/2014/full-reports/ef-epi-2013-report-mx-new.pdf [consulted:
October 2014]

Education First (2014). ndice de Level en Ingls (EF EPI) Reporte 2014 [English
Proficiency Index (EF EPI) 2014 Report]. Available at: http://www.ef.com.mx/__/~/
media/centralefcom/epi/v4/downloads/full-reports/ef-epi-2014-spanish.pdf
[consulted: November 2014]

Gonzlez Robles, R., Vivaldo Lima, J., and Castillo Morales, A. (2004). Competencia
lingstica en ingls de estudiantes de primer ingreso a las instituciones de educacin
superior del rea metropolitana de la Ciudad de Mexico [Incoming students
English language abilities in institutions of higher education in Mexico City and its
Metropolitan Area], Mexico, ANUIES y UAM Iztapalapa.

Manpower (2014). La Escasez de Talento Contina [The Scarcity of Talent

Continues]. Available at: http://www.manpowergroup.com.mx/uploads/estudios/
Escasez_Talento2014.pdf [consulted: October 2014]

Martinez, Juan Manuel (2011). Programa Nacional de Ingls en Educacin

Bsica, Presentacin en la Vigsima Reunin Nacional de Control
Escolar [National English Program for Basic Education, Presentation at
the Twentieth National Meeting for School Control], Guanajuato 2011.
Available at: http://www.controlescolar.sep.gob.mx/images/archivopdf_2013/
reunion11/05programanalingles.pdf [consulted: October 2014]

Serdan, Alberto (2014). Anlisis del gasto del Programa Nacional de Ingls en
Educacin Bsica, Documento de trabajo, Programa Interdisciplinario sobre
Poltica y Prcticas Educativas (PIPE) [Analysis of the cost of the National English
Program for Basic Education. Working document. Inter-disciplinary Program on
Educational Policies and Practices], CIDE, June 6, 2014.

Universia Mexico (2014). Los conocimientos de ingls son necesarios en el 90%

de las vacantes, Seccin Mercado Laboral [Knowledge of English is necessary
in 90% of Vacancies, Labor Market Section]. CNN Expansin. Available at: http://
noticias.universia.net.mx/en-portada/noticia/2014/01/21/1076529/conocimientos-
ingles-son-necesarios-90-vacantes.html [consulted: October 2014]

mexicanos primero 37
Why English?
Language and scientific development
An interview with Dr. Rosaura Ruiz Gutierrez
any people consider English the lingua
franca of science (Van Weijen, 2012;
Nio-Puello, 2013).According to some
studies, the vast majority of scientific
publications are published in this lan-
guage: between 87% and 97% in the social sciences, 79%
in health, and 96% in the physical sciences (Garcia Delgado,
Alonso and Jimenez, 2013).This has been a growing trend
in many European and Asian countries (Ven Weijen, 2012).
China, for example, has seen a tendency to change the
language of scientific publications from Mandarin to English
to encourage innovation and strengthen their technologi-
cal power (Cyranoski, 2010). Likewise, Latin America has
witnessed a gradual increase since 2008 in the percent-
age of articles published in English (Sanz Valero, Tomas
Castera and Wanden-Berghe, 2014).
At the same time, the Mexican government has pro-
moted new policies and strategies to strengthen the
development of science, technology, and innovation. The
goal of the Special Program for Science,Technology, and
Innovation, for example, published on July 30, 2014, is
to make scientific and technological development and
innovation the pillars for sustainable economic and so-
cial progress (DOF, 2014; translation ours). It specifically
seeks to increase investment in scientific research and
technological development, to train and strengthen high-
level human capital, boost the development of local and
regional capacities, contribute towards the transferal and
use of knowledge, and to contribute towards strengthening
the countrys scientific and technological infrastructure.
In this section we present an interview with Dr. Rosaura
Ruiz Gutierrez, Director of the Faculty of Science at the
National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM, for its
acronym in Spanish) and former President of the Mexican
38
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
Academy of Science, to seek her perspective on the rela-
tionship between English and scientific development. She
speaks not only of the importance of English, but also
about the need to strengthen our linguistic competencies
in general to offer a broader cultural horizon to our girls,
boys and youth.
The relevance of English for scientists today
The English language is fundamental and essential for
anyone dedicated to scientific work because not only is
it the lingua franca used by scientific and academic com-
munities in the world, but also the principal scientific
journals and means of scientific dissemination use this
language as their base.To this we need to add that the
English-speaking world and its scientific-technological
research and innovation institutions are major players,
and they cover a large part of the global production in
this category. In that sense, not to master the English
language (or not know it at all) means losing access to
a large part of the information, both historical and cut-
ting edge, not being able to share our findings due to
not having access to the principal means of scientific
dissemination and discussion, as well as reducing our
own professional horizons; in other words, not knowing
English today means being left out of the international
scientific community and marginalizing ourselves.
Although there are excellent translations of the prin-
cipal texts that are used in teaching the sciences, as I
mentioned, most of the current specialized articles and
journals are written in English.These texts are essential
in a rapidly changing field like science. Therefore, it is
fundamental that we promote teaching and learning of
this language for anyone who wants to dedicate himself
to science. To this we should add that, at present, it is
impossible to finish a degree in any scientific discipline
without having a basic mastery of the English language
because it is already an official graduation requirement
at most of the principal insti-
tutions of higher education
in Mexico.
Strengthening the role of
Spanish in science
Despite the above, one of
the main efforts we need
mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico|
to make in Mexico is to promote a greater pro-
duction of publications on scientific research and
development in our language, as well as strengthen
the means to disseminate them - the existing ones,
and we have first class ones - but in order to have
even more and better ones. In this respect we can-
not ignore the fact that Spanish has the second most
native speakers (more than 410 million), just below
Mandarin, Spanish is the dominant language on the
American continent, it is the official language in 22
countries and moreover, it is the third most used
language on the Internet.
In the case of scientific production in the Spanish
language, of course it is essential to attract a broad
audience; to do this, summaries are prepared of
scientific articles both in the base language and in
English, French, and even Portuguese, to generate
interest and attract readers of other nationalities.
In Mexico, just like in a large part of the Spanish-
speaking world, we have first class, cutting-edge sci-
ence, and therefore, we must also focus on making
our language one of the main paths for transmitting
and producing knowledge.
It is essential to have the tools to approach other
cultures, such as learning other languages, but we
must also know that Spanish can and must be an epi-
center and a cultural resource for the whole world.
Language and future scientists: promoting interest in
science
To promote young peoples interest in science, it is
not essential that they master any particular language
because science is universal, and its scope crosses
any frontier; we just need to think about mathemat-
ics and its formal logical language, which will always
be the same for anyone independently of his moth-
er tongue. Additionally, the fact that science tells us
about the universe, the world, the environment, and
human beings makes it extremely captivating, and its
intrinsic capacity to marvel anyone who approaches
it lies therein. Given this, it is not necessary for boys
and girls to master the English language to become
interested in science, although this would be ideal
and most desirable.
mexicanos primero
Why English?
In the Mexican context, we must start with the fact
that we are a multicultural country where boys and
girls are informally educated in one of the many na-
tive languages that are spoken in the country, even
achieving some mastery of the Spanish language.The
above makes it essential to promote projects and
efforts that provide these children access to formal
education in relation to their native language, besides
Spanish, in which they can learn the basic skills. In
other words, learn the main concepts and methods
of basic sciences in a language they are familiar with.
It is also important to prepare materials for teaching
science that are written in Indigenous languages and
train teachers so that they can teach them, so that
children can have access to scientific knowledge from
an early age. In my experience, proficiency in English
does not determine the degree of interest that can
be awakened in young people, but the lack of tools
to share information about science to boys and girls
who communicate in Indigenous languages does affect
their learning.Therefore, it is essential to strengthen
teaching and learning of both science and Spanish.
In this sense we should mention the data from the
Program for International Student Assessment (PISA),
which show us that, year after year, Mexican students
have the worst performance in mathematics, read-
ing, and science of all the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.
Mastering several languages will always be an ad-
vantage and a tool that will serve us in innumerable
ways in our personal and professional development,
but before that, we must master our own language.
Therefore, if a young person decides to undertake an
undergraduate science program, she must be aware
that she will have to strengthen her knowledge and
mastery of the Spanish language, in addition to learn-
ing English, for her own benefit and because her ca-
reer will require it.
Recommendations to improve language learning
and teaching in Mexico
I believe that it is important to start early. Boys
and girls should become familiar with the language
even before starting as well as during their primary
39
Why English? | SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |

education for them to be truly bilingual, or trilingual,

and teach them to think in English, in Spanish, and, if Why English?
such is the case, in their native tongue. As boys or
girls grow up, learning another language becomes Sometimes we dont do
more and more difficult, so it is important that they anything [n English class],
be exposed from a young age not only to materials we only copy. I would like,
written in English and Spanish, but also to audiovi- for example, to do something
sual materials in order to feel comfortable with the to reaffirm, to apply what
language and so that learning it does not become we have learned.
an unpleasant task, but rather a useful tool for life.
Student, 9th grade, Guanajuato
To do this, it will be essential for schools - public and
private - to have a teaching staff that, besides integrating
educators of the English language in particular, is bilingual
and prepared to strengthen their students education
from a broader cultural horizon.

References

Cyranoski, David (2010). Strong medicine for Chinas journals, Nature 467(261).
Doi:10.1038/467261.

Official Journal of the Federation (DOF) (2014). Programa Especial de Ciencia,

Tecnologa e Innovacin [Special Program for Science, Technology and Innovation]
2014-2018. Available at: http://www.dof.gob.mx/nota_detalle.php?codigo=5354626&fec
ha=30/07/2014 [consulted: November 2014]

Garcia Delgado, Jose Luis, Alonso, Jose Antonio and Jimenez, Juan Carlos (2013).
El espaol, lengua de comunicacin cientfica. [Spanish, the language of scientific
communication] Madrid: Fundacin Telefnica.

Nio-Puello, Miryam (2013). El ingls y su importancia en la investigacin cientfica:

Algunas reflexiones [English and its importance in scientific research: Some
considerations], Revista Colombiana de Ciencia Animal, 5(1), pp. 243-254.

Sanz Valero, Javier, Tomas Castera, Vicente and Wanden-Berghe, Carmina (2014).
Estudio bibliometrico de la produccion cientifica publicada por la Revista Panamericana
de Salud Publica/Pan American Journal of Public Health en el periodo de 1997 a 2012
[Bibliometric study of scientific production published by the PanAmerican Journal of
Public Health during the period 1997 to 2012], Revista Panamerican de Salud Public,
35(2), pp. 81-88.

Van Weijen, Daphne (2012). The Language of (Future) Scientific Communication,

Research Trends, 31. Available at: http://www.researchtrends.com/issue-31-november-2012/
the-language-of-future-scientific-communication/. [Consulted: October 2014].

40 mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico|
2.4 English and economic opportunity
Pablo Velzquez
astering English opens economic and
professional opportunities. Today al-
most two billion people in the world
communicate using the English lan-
guage (Neeley, 2012), and our girls, boys and youth
should not be left out of this great global community.
Being able to communicate in English helps us to prog-
ress economically, both as people and as a nation. Let
us look first on a personal level. Considered the most
widely used language in the world (UNESCO, 2009),
English enables one to have greater possibilities for
professional success (Reyes, Murrieta, and Hernandez,
2012). Today, 58% of employers worldwide indicate
that knowing English helps to get a job, while 75%
of upper management jobs require mastery of English
(Randstad, 2011).The growth of international compa-
nies and transnational jobs, as well as migration around
the world, have increased the demand for transnational
human skills, in other words, the ability to communi-
cate in foreign languages, intercultural competencies,
as well as information and knowledge about the world
(Diez Medrano, 2014).
Likewise, collectively, a country whose citizens can
communicate in a second language has more capacity
to increase its interaction with the world through the
exchange of goods, services, and human resources
(Education First, 2014).
In this chapter, we will explore the relationship be-
tween English and greater job opportunities and bet-
ter salaries on the individual level, as well as how the
language impacts the countrys level of economic
mexicanos primero
Why English?
competitiveness. Finally, we advocate effective teach-
ing and learning of English in our country as a means
to close the socioeconomic gap that reigns in Mexico
today. English must cease to be a privilege, restricted
to a small sector of the population that has access to
learn it, and become a right of all that is exercised day
after day in Mexico.
2.4.1 English and employability
Data from non-English-speaking countries indicate that
mastering a second language, especially English, has
become a general requirement among employers. A
report prepared on the Spanish peninsula indicates that
mastery of another language can increase the possibil-
ity of finding a job by 29% (Adecco, 2012). In Mexico,
human resource consulting firm Randstad indicates
that a high percentage of companies require at least a
60% mastery of the English language (Randstad, 2011).
Without knowing exactly what this 60% means for
employers, we can infer that they seek candidates who
can at least understand the principal points in clear
texts and can explain their opinions or justify their
plans.This description would correspond to having an
intermediate level of proficiency in English (Council of
Europe, 2011), which would exclude almost four of
every five youth who graduate from lower secondary
school in Mexico who, according to our study, do not
have the minimum abilities necessary to communicate
in English (See Chapter 4).
If our girls, boys and youth do not learn English
in basic education, the probability of learning it
decreases over time given the exclusion we ex-
perience in the Mexican school system. Taking
into account that, out of every 100 children who
enter first grade, only half will reach the first year
of upper secondary school, and only one out of
every three will finish upper secondary, the possibilities
of learning English are considerably reduced for two
out of every three youth, who will find themselves ex-
cluded from formal education by the time they should
have reached the last year of upper secondary school.
In other words, postponing the learning of English for
vocational or higher education is too late for the ma-
jority of young people in Mexico.
A lack of knowledge of English can pose limits for
applying for more specialized and/or better paid job
openings. In Mexico, only 15% of job vacancies offered
41
Why English?
by employment bureaus on the Internet require profi-
ciency in English (Manpower, 2014).This could lead us
to the simplistic, erroneous conclusion that English is
not that important to finding employment. However,
an in-depth analysis of the openings that are offered
shows us precisely how important being able to com-
municate in this language is to getting a job with a
better salary. Most of the vacancies published refer to
jobs that do not require any specialization, so we have
an enormous denominator of vacancies that do not
require specialization or more years of schooling, but
which also do not offer decent salaries; on the other
hand, the vacancies that do require English provide
better economic opportunities.
In general, as we go up the value chain to more spe-
cialized jobs, salaries increase. In Mexico, almost six out
of every ten people who work in the primary sector
of the economy (agriculture, fishing, forestry, mining)
receive less than one minimum wage per day (ENOE,
2014; equivalent to $4.78 USD1). Conversely, around
half of the people who work in the secondary or ter-
tiary sectors earn an average of more than two mini-
mum salaries a day (more than $9.56 USD). And as
we look at the job openings with better salaries and
better positions, being able to communicate in English
becomes paramount. For example, worldwide, three
out of every four positions in upper management re-
quire knowing how to communicate in this language
(Randstad, 2011).
Therefore, we reiterate that being able to communi-
cate in English not only opens access to more varied,
but also to better job offers. This does not deny the
importance of improving the quality of basic education
in Mexico; although English can encompass skills that
permit learning more, that will be difficult if we do not
raise the quality and quantity of the rest of our educa-
tion in Mexico. An adult who graduates from primary
school who can communicate in English will face a
labor market that privileges schooling over the mas-
tery of that second language. Likewise, a person who
has an undergraduate degree, yet no skills in English,
will face limitations in his professional development
because he does not have these competencies. As
one state English coordinator summed it up, in order
to be professionals who move beyond manual labor,
1
1 USD = 14.65 MXN (www.x-rates.com; exchange rate as of January
19, 2015).
42
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
young people need a good education that includes
effectively learning English.
Communicating in English does not run parallel to
our knowledge, but rather is a source of fuel that pro-
pels us to go farther in all aspects of our professional
development.
2.4.2 English and economic returns
English not only helps us to find employment, but also
increases our economic returns. In India, for example, a
country where 22 official languages coexist statewide,
knowing how to communicate in English accrues no-
ticeable economic benefits in terms of salary. In a study
conducted in that country, speaking English fluently was
associated with a salary 34% higher than that of those
who did not speak English (Azam, Chim, and Prakash,
2013). People might argue that the economic ben-
efit is not a result of learning English, but rather from
belonging to a more educated generation. However,
the evidence suggests that this is not so. Controlling
for variables such as age, economic condition, years
of schooling, sex, and type of industry, among others,
the difference between people who speak English
and those who do not continues to be both positive
and significant.
Studies carried out in Israel also provide evidence that
learning English is associated with higher salaries (Lang
and Siniver, 2009). Although the Israeli case indicates
that investments in learning English are just as profit-
able in economic terms as spending on other forms of
education, we must emphasize how mastering English
and having more years of schooling complement each
other. In other words, the idea is not to change one
year of schooling for one year of studying English, but
rather to take advantage of how these two situations
complement one another. Moreover, evidence shows
that as one attains a higher degree of schooling, the
benefits from speaking English are multiplied (Azam,
Chim, and Prakash, 2013).
Another analysis carried out in the European Union
developed an index composed of two factors: social
position and the number of assets an individual owns.
Although social position is self-reported and, therefore,
can express bias, we must keep in mind that this variable
gives an idea of how much people feel they are valued
mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico| Why English?

in society and whether mastering English produces a of job vacancies with a salary of less than $341 USD
positive effect that goes beyond economics.The results a month require the use of English. In contrast, ap-
indicate that there is a positive, significant difference proximately half of the vacancies with salaries above
between people who can express themselves in English $3,400 USD a month require the use of this language
and those who cannot. In other words, English cannot (OCC Mundial in Mexico, 2014). Although we do not
only increase ones personal economic return, but also know exactly what percent of the increase in salary
the social perception one has of oneself. The findings corresponds to being able to communicate in English
are valid for non-English-speaking countries, and the - given that the higher the salary, the more years of
study suggests that the socioeconomic effect could be schooling or higher academic degrees are required, the
even stronger in lower-income countries; in Mexico, need to be able to communicate in English to access
the benefits could be even greater than the average these opportunities is undeniable.
for non-English-speaking countries (Diez Medrano,
2014). Similarly, some authors have argued that there In conclusion, the specialized literature demon-
are personal benefits attributed to education that go strates that learning English brings positive direct
beyond those measured by income, such as better and indirect economic benefits, both professionally
health, longevity, and greater happiness, among others and personally. If a person wants to have a better
(Cegolon, 2014). Perhaps having a second language job and/or a higher salary, learning English, together
that opens the doors to higher paying jobs might also with reaching higher levels of education, is a feasible
bring these types of benefits. path for achieving it.

In Mexico, we observe a tendency wherein speak- 2.4.3 English and national economic development
ing English is related to higher salaries. In Figure 2.4.1,
we can see that the higher the salary, the greater the Mexico is part of the global community. Our inter-
need to be able to communicate in English. Only 11% action with the world has increased steadily, both in

Figure 2.4.1. Percentage of job openings that require English by salary range (USD)
Percentage of openings that require English

60%
53%
50% 48% 47%
45% 45%
42%
40%
34%
30%
23%
20%
14%
11%
10%

0%
$0 - $341 $341 - $683 - $1,024 - $1,365 - $2,048 - $2,730 - $3,413 - $4,437 - Greater
$683 $1,024 $1,365 $2,048 $2,730 $3,413 $4,437 $5,460 than
$5,460
Salary Range of openings

Source: Prepared by authors with data from OCC Mundial (November 2014)

mexicanos primero 43
Why English?
absolute numbers and percentages. Foreign trade of
Mexican goods, as a percentage of the Gross Domestic
Product (GDP), has almost doubled in 24 years, go-
ing from 33% in 1988 to 63% in 2012 (World Bank,
2012). Likewise, our growing economic relations with
the world go beyond our interaction with other Latin
American countries or Spain; 89% of our exports go
to countries that do not speak Spanish (The Atlas of
Economic Complexity, 2012).
Despite the fact that Mexicos economic interaction
with the world has increased, government strategies
to ensure that English is learned in basic education are
still deficient, without positive results. Taking into ac-
count the importance of English as the lingua franca
(see section 2.1) it is inevitable to reflect on how, even
with these limitations, our interaction with the world
has grown, which, in turn, urges us to take advantage
of the even greater opportunities Mexico would have
if there were a public policy committed to promoting
the learning of English.
One fact: in the Business English Index 2013 (BEI),
whose purpose is to measure the level of English lan-
guage skills in the business environment, Mexico is the
third worst evaluated country among the 77 that par-
ticipated in the sample; it is only above Honduras and
Colombia (Global English, 2013). Analyzing this result
by economic sectors, we find three industries that have
been essential to Mexicos economic development:
electric machinery, energy, and automotive. Together,
these three sectors employ approximately 929,000 di-
rect workers (INEGI, 2014). In 2012, 52% of our exports
were concentrated in these three industries (The Atlas
of Economic Complexity, 2013). However, accord-
ing to the same BEI, it is precisely in these three sec-
tors that we recorded the worst performance in
English in the world. Additionally, greater value-add-
ed sectors, such as the aerospace or pharmaceu-
tical industry (OECD, 2011), barely represent 2%
of Mexican expor ts, although the interactions
in these environments show better results in
the BEI.
These data might be due to a harmful inverse
causality that we have with the world: we do not
speak English because the predominant industries
do not require it, limiting us to selling cheap labor
at a competitive advantage. Additionally, we have been
unable to advance in sectors that require higher levels
44
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
of specialization and offer a higher added value to the
country, precisely because we do not speak English.
Despite the fact that the world is more and more
connected every day, the requirement for and prac-
tice of English are still low in Mexico. If we consider
that the automobile and machinery sectors could
be key in a process of structural transformation, our
situation is even more worrisome. Worldwide, these
sectors demand specific skills, which are not found in
Latin American countries, including Mexico (Enterprise
Surveys, 2010). Given this lack of specific skills, we end
up assembling raw materials from other countries,
but not creating new products or services that have
greater added value.
In Mexico we have a two-dimensional paradox of supply
and demand: on the one hand, young people do not
concern themselves much with learning English because
few jobs demand it, yet, on the other hand, companies
offer few positions that require greater specialization
in view of the non-existence of bilingual people. In the
recruiting stage, only one out of every seven vacancies
offered in Mexico requires candidates to know how to
speak English fluently (Manpower Mexico, 2014). So, in
the work performance stage, barely 20% of Mexicans in
the labor force are in a position that requires speaking
with people from other countries, which is below the
world average of 27%. Of those who communicate
with personnel from other countries, only 45% of them
use English as the language for communication, while
another 46% use Spanish (IPSOS, 2012). In the mid-
term, the low demand and practice of English could
leave us behind in international competition, considering
that 68% of companies with international expansion
plans will need employees with skills to communicate
in English (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2012).
To understand the impact English has on national
competitiveness, however, we should think not only
about attracting jobs and acquiring knowledge, but also
about generating them. In Figure 2.4.2, we can see how
greater investment in science and technology is cor-
related to improvements in learning English, according
to the English Proficiency Index (Education First, 2014).
According to the 2014-2018 Special Program for
Science, Technology, and Innovation, the purpose of
investment in science and technology in Mexico is to
increase scientific and technological knowledge and the
mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico| Why English?

Figure 2.4.2 Relationship between investment in science and technology

and English proficiency

70
Netherlands Denmark

Sweden
y = 3.6533x + 50.254
R = 0.33098
65
English Proficiency Index Score EF 2014

Poland Norway Finland

Austria

Estonia
Belgium
Germany
60 Argentina
Malaysia
Singapore
Hungary
Czech Republic
Romania
Portugal
Slovakia
55
South
India Korea
Italy France Japan

Mexico Russia
50 Colombia Uruguay Brazil
China
Ukraine
Chile Turkey
Costa
Rica
Guatemala
45

Egypt

40
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5
Investment in science and technology (% of GDP)

Source: Prepared by the authors with data from the World Bank, 2011 and Education First, 2014.

capacity to innovate in order to increase productivity only 18% of Mexicans achieve levels of higher educa-
and levels of wellbeing (DOF, 2014; translation ours). tion (OECD, 2014), the budget destined to science and
Restricting access to knowledge that is only published technology would exclude four out of five Mexicans.
in Spanish is a major constraint: 87% to 97% of scientific An injustice, to say the least. We stress the multiplier
publications are published in English (Garcia Delgado, effect of investment in science and technology: more
Alonso, and Jimenez, 2013), and one out of every and better investment brings and requires a higher
four books published in 2013 was published in English quality of education. This would favor a better mas-
(International Publishers, 2013). Currently Mexico tery of a foreign language, which would permit greater
contributes only 0.79% of the worlds production access to knowledge and an increased probability of
of knowledge, a figure that is three times lower than innovation: a virtuous circle. We maintain that there
that of Brazil (CONACyT, 2013). Even worse, Mexico is no better use of public funds, no greater economic
is one of the countries that invest less in science and return, than a budget dedicated to education.
technology, leaving us behind, while we watch how
other countries advance. If Mexico wants to increase Mexico is now caught in the middle income trap.
its participation in the worlds scientific community, it This phenomenon explains why, once a mid level of
needs to teach English effectively from an early stage. income per capita is reached, countries find it difficult
to restructure their economies towards activities that
We must be clear: increasing investment in science and are more knowledge and technology intensive, with
technology helps, but is not enough. Considering that greater added value (Foxley, 2012). To overcome this

mexicanos primero 45
Why English?
inertia, it is necessary to increase the level of peoples
skills to face the changes in the global economy and
advance in the process of structural transformation
(OECD, 2014). In other words, it no longer suffices to
produce more goods or services with fewer resourc-
es; in seeking to overcome the middle income trap,
new goods and services must be created. Therefore,
more and better skills must be developed; there must
be higher levels of education, specialization and abili-
ties, among which learning the English language is key.
If we want to generate goods and services with higher
added value and become a more competitive country,
with better salaries and professional opportunities for
Mexicans, an important first step is to communicate
with the rest of the world, and for that, we need to
learn English.
2.4.4 Breaking the cycle of inequity
According to the 2013 Program to Democratize
Productivity (DOF, 2013), one of the factors that
explains Mexicos slow economic growth is the low
level of investment in human resources. If we seek to
democratize productivity in Mexico, one critical step
is to ensure the effective teaching of English in our
schools, as is established in the national curriculum. If
we do not, we will continue to perpetuate an inequi-
table situation, where only those Mexicans who have
higher economic resources and/or more schooling
have the opportunity to learn English (See section 2.3).
In a survey of perceptions carried out in Mexico in
2008, only 23% of those surveyed indicated that they
spoke or understood English (CIDAC, 2008). However,
this averge hides the disparity between people with
higher or lower levels of income. While 60% of the
people with a monthly income of more than $683
USD indicated that they spoke or understood English,
only 11% of the people with incomes of less than $109
USD said the same.
This inequity is even greater with respect to levels of
schooling. Almost two out of every three people with
university studies indicated that they spoke English, but
only one out of every 20 people with primary edu-
cation said the same. It should be stressed that, since
it was a survey of perceptions, the results might be
biased. From this, we see the urgent need to evaluate
46
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
Why English?
How can youth expect to
be more than laborers if they
do not have quality education?
But they cant go very far if that
training isnt complete, if it
doesnt include English.
State English Coordinator
objectively whether the national education system is
really developing Mexicans English skills. Hence our
effort in Chapter 4 to get a valid measurement of the
level of proficiency in English reached generally in our
education system.
If we want to cure a disease, we first need to know
how serious the condition is to provide the proper
treatment. Up to now, in Mexico, we have not known
how sick we are due to the simulation in the education
system when it comes to teaching the English language.
Making the teaching of English effective in basic edu-
cation would permit leveling the playing field for our
girls, boys and youth. This does not mean that we will
lose our linguistic inheritance. Scandinavian countries
have an education system that has been very success-
ful in fostering learning English. Finnish, Swedish, and
Norwegian children can communicate in high levels
of English from the age of 14, but they are also among
the best with respect to their communicational skills
in their first language (OECD, 2013). Moreover, these
countries try not to leave any child behind and all are
empowered to learn in their language and in English.
Letting only those who are willing and capable of pay-
ing for an opportunity to get a private education have
access to English worsens the situation of inequity
we now experience in Mexico. If we want everyone
to have the same opportunities, for them to learn in
more than one language, and to successfully develop
professionally, we must level the playing field for learn-
ing the English language.
mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico| Why English?

2.4.5 Conclusion
English allows us to increase our economic return, both
individually and collectively. Personally, there is a posi-
tive association between being able to communicate
in English, having more possibilities of finding a wor-
thy job, and being able to advance professionally and
economically. Nationally, mastery of foreign languages,
particularly English, would bring greater competitiveness
to the country.These must be reasons for the govern-
ment to not only establish a national policy or program,
but also for it to guarantee that English is learned ef-
fectively, by everyone. It means opening the frontiers
of knowledge and allowing our girls, boys and youth
to not see English as only a tool to get a better salary,
but also as a right that will allow them to learn more
and better, to develop personally and professionally.
In Mexico, however, English is currently a matter of
privilege and not of right. The State has failed (See
Chapter 4). We are perpetuating a cycle of inequity,
where only those girls, boys and youth who have the
possibility of paying to learn English are the ones who
can take an active part in the global community. Do
we want things to improve for everyone? Let us end
the simulation about learning English in schools and
let us demand that everyone, independent of ori-
gin, be able to master the lingua franca of our time.
A country can only be more competitive if it is also
more equitable.

References

Adecco (2012). III informe de empleabilidad e idiomas [III report on employability

and languages]. Available at: http://www.adecco.es/_data/NotasPrensa/pdf/380.pdf
[consulted: November 2014]

Azam, Metahbul, Chin, Aimee, and Prakash, Nishith (2013). The returns to English-
Language skills in India, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 61(2), pp. 335-367.

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org/indicator/TG.VAL.TOTL.GD.ZS [consulted: November 2014]

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Cegolon, Andrea (2014). The Private Rate of Return to Education Analysis, Nuova
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CIDAC (2008). Encuesta CIDAC: Capital Humano en Mxico [CIDAC Survey: Human
Resources in Mexico]. Available at: http://www.cidac.org/esp/cont/reportes/encuesta_
cidac__capital_humano_en_mexico.php [consulted: November 2014]

CONACyT (2013). Desarrollo, Tecnologa e Innovacin [Development, Technology,

and Innovation]. Available at: http://www.conacyt.mx/index.php/el-conacyt/desarrollo-
tecnologico-e-innovacion [consulted: November 2014]

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Council of Europe (2011). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages:

Learning, Teaching, Assessment. Available at: http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/Source/
Framework_EN.pdf [consulted: September 2014]

Diez Medrano, Juan, (2014). The socio-economic returns of fluency in English as a

foreign Language, Sozialstrukturanalyse 2014, pp. 239-257.

DOF (2014). Programa Especial de Ciencia, Tecnologa e Innovacin 2014-2018 [2014-

2018 Special Program for Science, Technology, and Innovation]. Available at:
http://www.dof.gob.mx/nota_detalle.php?codigo=5354626&fecha=30/07/2014
[consulted: November 2014]

DOF (2013). Programa para Democratizar la Productividad 2013-2018 [2013-2018

Program to Democratize Productivity]. Available at: http://dof.gob.mx/nota_detalle.php?
codigo=5312422&fecha=30/08/2013 [consulted: November 2014]

Economist Intelligence Unit (2012). Competing across borders: How cultural and
communication barriers affect business. Available at: http://www.economistinsights.com/sites/
default/files/legacy/mgthink/downloads/Competing%20across%20borders.pdf

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[consulted: November 2014]

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www.enterprisesurveys.org/data/exploreeconomies/2010/mexico [consulted:
November 2014]

Foxley, Alejandro. (2012). La trampa del Ingreso Medio: el desafo de esta dcada para
Amrica Latina [The Middle Income trap: this decades challenge for Latin America].
Santiago, Corporacin de Estudios para Latinoamrica, CIEPLAN. Available at: http://
www.cieplan.org/media/publicaciones/archivos/308/Libro_Digital_La_trampa_del_
ingreso_medio.pdf [consulted: November 2014]

Garcia Delgado, Jose Luis, Alonso, Jose Antonio, and Jimenez, Juan Carlos (2013). El
espaol, lengua de comunicacin cientfica [Spanish, language of scientific communication].
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Workforce, 2013 Business English Index. Pearson. Available at: http://static.globalenglish.
com/files/GlobEng_BEIreport%202013_EN_A4_FINAL.pdf [consulted: November 2014]

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INEGI (2014). Encuesta Mensual de la Industria Manufacturera [Monthly Survey of

the Manufacturing Industry]. Available at: http://www.inegi.org.mx/est/contenidos/
proyectos/encuestas/establecimientos/secundario/emim/tabulados.aspx [consulted:
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www.internationalpublishers.org/images/stories/news/AnnualReport.pdf [consulted:
December 2014]

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previous month]. Available at: www.occ.com.mx [consulted: December 2014]

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UNESCO.org/images/0018/001847/184755E.pdf [consulted: September 2014]

mexicanos primero 49
Why English?
2.5 Language and its impact on brain development
Manuel Bravo Valladolid
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
hen Mario Vargas Llosa received the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010,
he stated that the most important
thing that had happened to him in
life was learning how to read at the age of five. Don
Mario shared how reading enriched his life, breaking
through the barriers of time and space. Vargas Llosa
is right; language transforms us, it humanizes us, and
it transports us. We navigate in words, we think with
words, language moves us, excites us, and opens
hidden doors, and that is why it connects us with
ourselves and with others. We fly and grow with the
ideas that sprout from words. I am doing it right now.
If one language takes us to other places: What hap-
pens when we learn a second language? Besides com-
munication, what other benefits does learning another
language have? Does our brain wither or become flex-
ible in its capacity to learn a second language? Does
the mother tongue help in learning another language?
These are some of the questions we seek to answer
in this space. Perhaps the most valuable thing that we
want to share is our amazement at the capacity and
potential we have as human beings to learn and to
continue learning throughout our entire lives.
2.5.1 What happens with language in our brain?
The brain develops according to how we exercise it.
In fact, the more we learn, the faster our brain works,
50
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
and language is one of the best gymnasiums we have.
Talking, writing, or reading are examples of the most
complex brain activities (Carter, 2011; Doidge, 2007,
and Dweck 2006 cited in Mehisto, 2012; Gazzaniga,
2010).
This means that language is not only a social construct:
it has a bio-cognitive and a neuro-cognitive base. Let
us look, as if it were a map, at the cerebral coordinates
for language in our brain.
A century and a half ago we discovered that language
processing has specific locations in our brain, especially
in the Broca (discovered in 1865) and Wernicke (in
1874) areas, named after the scientists who discov-
ered them. Damage in the Broca region atrophies our
production of words, in other words, the capacity to
speak, leaving our comprehension intact. Deterioration
in the Wernicke region destroys our comprehension
and the meaning of sentences without changing our
ability to produce words (Seung, 2013).
We now know that our linguistic functions are not lim-
ited to the Broca and Wernicke areas (Bartra, 2012).
Technological advances in different studies on language
indicate that there are large regions of the cortex
around them that show activity - without our knowing
their exact functions yet - as we can see in the illustra-
tion in Figure 2.5.1 (Carter, 2011). Each brain is differ-
ent; although most people have the principal language
areas located on the left side of the brain, in others it
is distributed on both sides, and for some only on the
right (Carter, 2011). What makes us unique individu-
als is our cerebral wiring, also called the connectome
(Seung, 2013).
We now know that the area of the left temporal lobe,
besides specializing in speaking and understanding lan-
guage, also specializes in names of things and verbal
memory, while the intonation, tone and rhythm when
speaking, or prosody, is processed in the right temporal
lobe (Gazzaniga, 2010).
2.5.1.1 What distinguishes us from a chimpanzee?
One of the questions that has troubled man is: why
do animals not talk? The vehemence with which some
people insist that their animals understand what they
say is quite common and funny: I swear that my dog
understands me. No animal has developed such a vast,
mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico|
complex communication system as humans have, be-
cause we not only communicate the present, but also
the future, what is possible, and our hopes or desires
(Marcus, 2004). Some brain and language scholars, such
as Steven Pinker (2007) and Noam Chomsky (2012),
suggest that we have an instinct about language, a kind
of device to pick up language that makes us unique in
acquiring new information. The truth is that neurosci-
ence has discovered certain singularities in the human
brain, some of which are related to language.
Michael Gazzaniga (2010), a neuroscientist who spe-
cializes in the differences between human brains and
those of other animals, indicates that a fundamental
aspect is the complexity of our cerebral wiring. We are
different because we have a neocortex that is three
times bigger than what would correspond to the size
of our bodies. We also have a greater amount of white
substance, which probably leads us to have more neu-
ral connections (also called synapsis). Likewise, it has
been discovered that we have some unique mini corti-
cal columns located in an area of Wernicke called the
planum temporale, although we still do not know pre-
cisely their function.The planum temporale of humans,
chimpanzees, and rhesus monkeys is bigger on the left
CUADRO
Figure2.5.1
2.5.1PPRINCIPALES
rincipal REAS
areasQUE SE ACTIVAN
There are areas around Brocas Area
Broca and Wernicke
that have shown activity
in several studies of
language; their shape
and location vary from
person to person. Even
in the same person,
outlying areas may
change over time.
Outlying areas
that are activated
around Broca.
mexicanos primero
Why English?
side than on the right, but in the microscopic depths,
the human left hemisphere is exceptional.
Language scientists and specialists continue to explore
these topics. Noam Chomsky (2012), for example, ar-
gues that there were likely some slight genetic changes
in a hominid in Africa that led to this cerebral wiring
that has allowed this human capability for more than
100,000 years.
2.5.1.2 What happens in the brains of bilingual people?
How is it possible that a bilingual person does not
confuse one language with another when he is speak-
ing? Languages are stored in separate cerebral areas,
thus one does not interfere with the other. The brain
uses different groups of neurons in the frontal lobes
to generate each language (Bartra, 2012; Carter, 2011).
Incredibly, a lesion in one area of the brain could cause
the complete loss of one language, while the other
would remain intact. Figure 2.5.2 contrasts, on the one
hand, the areas of the brain that turn on when a bilin-
gual person switches languages, and on the other, the
areas that are activated when a monolingual person
and a bilingual person hear the same language.
activated EN EL LENGUAJE
by language
Arcuate fascicle
Geschwinds
Territory
Wernickes Area
Outlying areas
that are activated
around Wernicke.
51
Why English? | SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |

Likewise, the brain does not treat a second lan- Structural differences. Comparative cerebral stud-
guage learned at a later age the same as the mother ies between
CUADRO 2.5.1 PRINCIPALES REAS QUE SE ACTIVAN monolingual and bilingual people
EN EL LENGUAJE
tongue. If a language is absorbed during childhood, show differences in some cerebral structures,
it shows broader and more intense associations like greater density in the gray matter in the fron-
than a second language. When a person reads in tal cortex of the left hemisphere. This density is
Arcuate fascicle
his mother tongue, for example, more brain activity more pronounced among those who learned the
is registered than while reading in a second language second language before they were five years old
(Carter, 2011).
There are areas around Brocas Area
(Carter, 2011; Cook, 2012).Geschwinds
In synthesis, bilingual-
Broca and Wernicke Territory
ism forms a more sophisticated cerebral network
2.5.2 What are the benefits of learning a second language? (Doidge, 2007 cited in Mehisto, 2012).
that have shown activity
Many.inInseveral studies
fact, we haveofyet to encounter a study that Metalinguistic awareness. This is a term that re-
language;
finds no their
benefits. shape
Here we recover some of the cogni- fers to peoples understanding of a language and
and location
tive benefits vary from
and others related to health. its explicit function. It is related to knowledge
person to person. Even about the language itself, which includes sounds,
in the same person, Wernickes Area
words, and grammar. Metalinguistic awareness
Cognitive
outlyingbenefits
areas may also includes the capacity to use a language and
change over time. expand upon rules that were previously implicit.
Our brain speaks better. When one speaks a For example, bilingual people show greater capac-
Outlying
second language, it creates more connections areas Outlying
ity to detect areaserrors (Mehisto, 2012;
grammatical
between the neurons and the cerebral that are activated Woolfolk, that
hemi- are activated
2010).
spheres.They have even found differences inaround
ten- Broca. around Wernicke.
month-old babies, favoring those who are bilin- We think differently. Bilingual people expand their
gual (Cook, 2012). perception and description of the world around

CCUADRO 2.5.2 CRerebral

hart 2.5.2 EGIONES regions
CEREBRALES QUE are
that SE ACTIVAN EN LAS
activated in PERSONAS
bilingualBILINGES
people

Caudate Nucleus

Dorsolateral
When bilingual people Prefrontal Cortex
change languages, their
brains register activity in
other regions.The caudate
nucleus is activated during
the change. Further, when
bilingual and monolingual
people hear the same
language, bilinguals register Inferior Frontal
Cortex
activity in additional brain
areas (shown in red). Brocas Area Monolinguals
Bilinguals

52 mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico|
them, they think outside of the box.They can de-
scribe their environment in greater detail (Cook,
2012).
Episodic and semantic memory improves. The
first, as its name indicates, is related to events and
their relation to time, place, emotions and activi-
ties. Semantic memory includes general knowl-
edge: ideas, facts, and problem-solving (Mehisto,
2012).
We think better. Ellen Bialystok and Dana
Shapero (in Mehisto, 2012) found that bilingual
children understand more quickly, are more
able to interpret information and have greater
cognitive flexibility; in other words, they have
greater capacity to work with simultaneous in-
formation than monolingual people. Likewise,
they manage their cognitive processes bet-
ter, pay more attention and resolve problems
more easily. This is scientifically referred to
as improved executive function.
An interesting study presented in 2014 in the
annual neurology journal discusses the impact
of bilingualism throughout life. The authors fol-
lowed 853 participants who were analyzed in
1947 at 11 years old and again in 2008-2010,
when they were between 62 and 64 years old.
The bilingual participants performed significantly
better in cognitive skills, intelligence, and reading.
This included those who acquired another lan-
guage during adulthood (Bak, Nissan, Allerhand,
and Deary, 2014).
We learn better. What we know so far suggests
better handling of complexity, more rational ex-
planations, and metacognitive development (Tsui,
2012). High levels of bilingualism are correlated
with improved cognitive abilities (Woolfolk, 2010).
Perhaps that is why some studies have found
improvements in other academic domains, like
mathematics (Mehisto, 2012).
Multi-competence. This is what we call the ca-
pacity for one person to incorporate different
structures of thought in different languages. This
enables bilinguals to solve problems ingeniously,
creatively, and enjoyably (Cook, 1991 quoted by
Mehisto, 2012). When monolingual people hear
mexicanos primero
Why English?
Why English?
The doors are open for someone
who knows English a person
who does not know English
is almost illiterate.
Mother, Mexico City
a word, they compare it with the repertoire of
sounds, rules, and meanings from only one lan-
guage, and when they produce language, they
draw it from that sole repertoire. Conversely,
bilingual or plurilingual people must choose from
a wealth of different language repertoires. A bilin-
gual person is constantly asking himself: Should I
think, speak, or interpret these sounds according
to the rules of my language A or my language
B? It is a beneficial mental exercise that is being
performed every minute (Diamond, 2010).
Creativity? In 2009, the European Commission in-
dicated that there is strong evidence (more than
200 scientific articles) that being bilingual some-
how triggers creativity. However, more recent
studies indicate that this relation is not so direct.
They suggest that the processes and mechanisms
triggered by bilingualism, such as concentration
(cognitive control) and information processing,
are what activate creativity (Hommel, Colzato,
Fisher, Christoffels, 2011).
Other benefits
Life insurance for old age. There is strong evi-
dence that suggests that learning a second lan-
guage can protect against - or at least delay - de-
generative diseases that appear in old age (Carter,
2011). Some studies record a delay of almost
four years (3.9) in the appearance of dementia
and five years for diseases such as Alzheimers
(Diamond, 2010; Mehisto, 2012).This, besides di-
rectly benefitting people and their families, offers
53
Why English?
Why English?
It opens doors to work and
other opportunities that exist
elsewhere, in other countries
In many cases, its a second
language for everyone.
Student, 9th grade, Guanajuato
considerable savings for governments in terms of
public health costs.
Personal and social wellbeing. Bilingualism brings
different views closer; therefore, it can be an
important vehicle for developing empathy and
respect for others (Nisbett, 2012). Recent stud-
ies of bilingual people have found that they have
more sensitivity, as well as greater flexibility, in
their interpersonal communications. Flexibility is a
personal ability that frequently appears in studies
of wellbeing and happiness that is also valued by
the labor market (Cskszentmihlyi, 1990; Moore,
2006; Seligman, 2007, cited in Mehisto, 2012).
2.5.3 Do we always have the same capacity to learn a
second language?
The best time to learn a second language is during
early childhood.The earlier we learn an additional lan-
guage, the more similar our pronunciation will be to
a native speaker. After adolescence it is hard to com-
pletely eliminate the accent of our mother tongue.The
explanation is that acquiring a second language later
is more difficult because our mental maps for speech,
determined by our native language, are not compatible
with the mental maps required by the second language
(Kuhl, 2000, cited in Bartra, 2012). It should be noted
that, even if we did not learn the language, to have
heard it during our childhood helps reduce this pos-
sible disadvantage (Anderson and Graham, 1994, cited
in Woolfolk, 2010).
However, there is no crucial period that limits the
possibility of learning a language during adolescence
54
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
or adulthood. In other words, learning a language is
not restricted to a critical stage (Hakuta, Bialystok, and
Wiley, 2003 quoted by Mehisto, 2012; Marinova-Todd,
Marshall, and Snow, 2000 quoted by Woolfolk, 2010).
Lynne Diaz-Rico and Kathryn Weed (in Woolfolk,
2010), for example, have found, through research on
language acquisition, that adolescents go through learn-
ing stages much more rapidly. Likewise, they suggest
that adults have more language learning strategies and
knowledge - in general of how to master a second
language. The difference in favor of younger children
is primarily in pronunciation.
Our brain is fascinating, and this fills us with hope, both
for those who are not yet bilingual and for future gen-
erations of girls and boys. Language may be the most
powerful example of our learning machinery. In syn-
thesis, although some studies posit that there is more
flexibility to learn a second language during childhood,
especially early childhood, the doors for language
learning stay open throughout our lives (Bartra, 2012).
2.5.4 Does the mother tongue help in learning another
language?
Apparently it does. The hypothesis of the cognitive
advantage afforded by the interaction and crossing of
one language and another (two or more languages)
is becoming stronger and stronger (Mehisto, 2012).
The literature that addresses these matters is called
second language acquisition, SLA. Until now, teach-
ers and students were commonly forbidden to speak
their native language in the classroom when trying
to learn another language. However, those learning a
new language are whole people, and learning should
not be isolated from who they are. We learn precisely
with a mind that already knows one language.This has
an influence on learning and using the new language.
Specialists like Vivian Cook (2012) suggest that, instead
of forbidding the first (native) language in the class-
room, teachers should use it as an ally. For example,
for handling meaning, explaining grammar, and chang-
ing language codes.
Based on these findings, the government of Singapore,
an education system with some of the best results in
the Program for International Student Assessment
(PISA), recently adopted an education policy that fa-
vors mastering English and reinforcing teaching of the
mother tongue (MOE, 2014; see Chapter 5 for more
mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico| Why English?

on Singapore). Switzerland has implemented a similar
policy; the assumption is that if they reinforce learning
their own language, it will be easier for them to learn
other languages (Aguila Rubin, 2014).
2.5.5 Closing
A brain does not function much if it does not have
language to enjoy. In addition, the more languages
there are, the greater the advantage to the brain. In
this space we have seen that bilingualism is good policy,
not only because of the doors that would be opened
to Mexican youth in terms of professional, academic,
or cultural opportunities, which would be argument
enough to defend it, but rather because bilingualism
triggers cognitive, emotional, and health benefits. In
synthesis, being monolingual is no longer an option.
Bilingualism is not an additional subject or domain, but
rather a way to relate with oneself and with others; a
way to be in the world. Being bilingual or plurilingual
allows us to look, enjoy, think, and express ourselves
in the world we live in.
Up to now, Mexicos education system has deprived
many generations of the benefits of being bilingual.This
must change. We must offer children in Mexico what
they deserve, which is only the best. Nothing should
hinder new generations from enjoying the benefits of
bilingualism and plurilingualism.
If we want to improve our childrens education, peti-
tions and demands are not enough. We need to seek
an encounter through dialogue, a meeting of possibili-
ties and desires, of hope. Hence, just like the rest of
our projects, we seek to start a conversation, a dia-
logue about bilingualism because, as Jorge Luis Borges
(2014) said,dialogue must be infinite; conclusion would
be very sad.

References

Aguila, Marcela (2014). Integracin: Comencemos con la propia lengua

[Integration: Lets start with our own language], Swissinfo, available at:
http://www.swissinfo.ch/spa/integraci%C3%B3n--comencemos-con-la-propia-
lengua/5234738
[consulted: November 2014].

Back, Thomas, et al. (2014). Does Bilingualism Influence Cognitive Aging?,

Annals of Neurology, 75, pp. 959-963.

Bartra, Roger (2012). Antropologa del cerebro. La conciencia y los sistemas

simblicos [Anthropology of the brain. Conscience and symbolic systems], Mexico,
FCE, 235 p.

mexicanos primero 55
Why English? | SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |

Berdan, Stacie (2014). Being monolingual is no longer anoption, The New

York Times. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/01/29/
is-learning-a-language-other-than-english-worthwhile/being-monolingual-is-no-
longer-an-option [consulted: November 2014].

Borges, Jorge Luis (2014). Sobre la poesa en nuestro tiempo [Poetry in our
time]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shw0TYaNEL4 [consulted:
November 2014].

Carter, Rita (2011). El cerebro humano. Una gua de su estructura, funciones y

trastornos [The human brain. A guide to its structure, functions, and disorders], Mexico,
Altea, 256 p.

Chomsky, Noam (2012). The science of language. Interviews with James McGilvray,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 328 p.

Cook, Vivian (2012). The Native Speaker and the Second Language User,
Plenary at the International Conference on Foreign Languages. Teaching and Applied
Linguistics (FLTAL), Sarajevo. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/2083622/
THE_NATIVE_SPEAKER_AND_THE_SECOND_LANGUAGE_USER [consulted:
November 2014].

Diamond, Jared (2010). The Benefits of Multilinguism, Science Magazine, 330, pp.
332-333

Gazzaniga, Michael (2010). Qu nos hace humanos? La explicacin cientfica

de nuestra singularidad como especie [What makes us human? A scientific
explanation of our uniqueness as a species], Madrid, Paidos Iberica, 470 p.

Hommel, Bernhard, et al. (2011). Bilingualism and Creativity: Benefits in

Convergent Thinking come with losses in Divergent Thinking, Frontiers in
Psychology, 272, pp. 1-5.

Mehisto, Peeter (2012). The Cognitive Benefits of Bilingualism, Cambridge

Assessment Singapore, pp. 3-11.

MOE (Ministry of Education of Singapore) (2014). Available at: http://www.moe.

gov.sg/education/primary/ [consulted: November 2014].

Pinker, Steven (2007). The stuff of thought. Language as a window into human nature,
Nueva York, Penguin Books, 499 p.

Seung, Sebastian (2013). Connectome. How the brains wiring makes us who we are,
Boston-Nueva York, Mariner Books, 337 p.

Woolfolk, Anita (2010). Psicologa Educativa [Educational Psychology], Estado de

Mexico, Pearson, 614 p.

56 mexicanos primero
 CHAPTER 3
Public Policy
for Learning
English in Mexico
David Caldern
Public Policy for Learning English in Mexico
his chapter provides an overview of
education policy regarding English
teaching in our countrys school sys-
tem. We use the expression ed-
ucation policy to refer to the decisions that
are made and the practices that are actually
in place, although many elements of planning,
implementation or evaluation and assessment
that correspond to a strict definition of public policy
are left out.
As we discuss in chapter 5, education policy for learn-
ing a second language has solid roots when it is based
on A) a Nacional policy of interculturalism, B) an in-
tegral implementation strat-
egy for plurilingualism, and C)
continuous and guaranteed
access to strategic and rel-
evant information. None of
these three conditions are
met in Mexico, and we re-
turn to them in the conclu-
sions and recommendations
of this study. Meanwhile, in this
chapter, we stick to what is
present and visible in school-
based efforts guided by official
authorities.
In our review we will try to identify:
1. How learning English is defined in Mexico in the
official approach and what students are ex-
pected to learn.
2. What is the situation of teachers, what
teaching strategies they employ, and what access
they have to and what use they make of specific
educational materials.
3. How the support network - financing, coor-
dination, and access to technology - functions.
58
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
3.1 Learning English: The official version
3.1.1 Laws and history
Although a theoretical basis for learning English
could be derived from the Constitution of the
Republic, it does not make any precise
reference to interculturalism as part of
the identity or aspiration of the entire nation,
nor to learning a second language. On the one
occasion in the entire text that the term intercultural
appears, the Constitution establishes:
To reduce the gaps and setbacks that affect
Indigenous peoples and communities, said author-
ities [Federation, States, and Municipalities] have
the obligation to [] guarantee and increase the
levels of schooling, favoring bilingual and intercul-
tural education, literacy, the conclusion of basic
education, productive training, and upper secondary
and higher education. (CPEUM, 2014; translation
ours)
Plurilingual and intercultural education is still not de-
scribed in the Constitution as a right for everyone,
but rather is restricted to, or specifically for, Indigenous
peoples, and, even in their case, the justification is to
reduce the gaps and setbacks. It is significant that
the reference appears in Article Four and not in the
Third, placing plurilingualism and intercultur-
alism within the framework of a compensa-
tory social policy for vulnerable populations,
but not as part of the universal right to learn.
According to the current constitutional text, pluri-
lingualism is acknowledged as a complication to be
faced, not as a goal to be reached; interculturalism is
understood as a compensatory strategy, but not as
the reciprocal appreciation of diversity, and even less
as the expansion of potential or, therefore, one of the
principle guidelines in national education.
Nor does the General Education Law (LGE, for
its acronym in Spanish) go very far. In the list of
the purposes of education, plurilingualism is put forth
as an object of knowledge for Mexicans - something
like a topic in history or civics - and there is only faint
recognition of Indigenous peoples rights:
Through education, promote knowledge about
the Nations linguistic plurality and respect for the
linguistic rights of Indigenous peoples.
mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
People who speak Indigenous languages will have
access to compulsory education in their own lan-
guage and in Spanish (LGE, 2013, Article 7, Section
IV; translation and emphasis ours).
In 2009, the Education Commission of the House of
Representatives rejected two initiatives - one by Lilia
Cruz (Democratic Revolution Party) and the other
by Oscar Gonzalez (National Action Party), both of
which were directed towards making the Mexican
States obligation to include English in the official cur-
riculum explicit in the General Education Law. The
Commission gave two reasons for this rejection: they
considered that only the federal Executive can deter-
mine the national curriculum, and maintained, there
are not enough conditions to guarantee its feasibility in
the short- and mid-term (House of Representatives,
2009; translation ours).
At the time of publication of this study, on December
19, 2014, it was decreed that an explicit mention of
information technology would be included in the LGE
to support students learning, expand their life skills,
and promote their insertion into the knowledge soci-
ety (DOF, 2014; translation ours). A second language,
however, must apparently continue to wait for a bet-
ter moment.
A quick review of the history of English teaching in
the national education system provides important ele-
ments for reflection today because, as we mentioned,
decisions and practices define actual education policy,
sometimes independently of advances in profession-
alism, systematization and accountability that are the
ideals of public policy. The attitudes and visions
embodied in regulations, official decisions, and
plans and programs explain, to a large degree,
what we have achieved, and what we have not,
in learning English in Mexico.
Barely four years after being established as the rector
of national education, in 1926 the Ministry of Education
(SEP, for its acronym in Spanish) decided to incorpo-
rate the subject of Foreign Language into the official
lower secondary school curriculum (Martinez, 2011).
It was specifically applied as teaching English, with a
small presence of French. Jose Manuel Puig, Moises
Saenz, and Ezequiel Padilla, the officials at the SEP
who instrumented popular nationalist edu-
cation, considered it important to provide a
mexicanos primero
Public Policy for Learning English in Mexico
complete, relevant edu-
cation in public schools
that would open students access to
texts beyond those in Spanish, and
they made every effort to attract capable
teachers to the classrooms to introduce a
second language.
In 1932, with the SEP saturated by the vision of Narciso
Bassols and as a prelude to socialist education, the
subject was suspended (Santos, 1998). Here is a sample
taken from a speech given by Bassols himself:
What instruments would the future of our nascent
nationality have if teachers cooperate in the dissolv-
ing of that nationality, becoming dark rodents in the
social edifice we are trying to build? [] To forget
that, to neglect our obligation to form a homog-
enous, cultured country, would cause serious harm
to Mexico. (Bassols, 1932:131; translation ours).
This rancid, authoritarian mentality, which
maintains that homogeneity in Mexico is de-
sirable, that it should be imposed from above
by educational authorities, and that a second
language threatens our nationality, continues
to have unfortunate echoes to date.
Since the new study plan was established in 1941,
English has been uninterruptedly present in
the official high school curriculum for 74 years;
since 1960 it has been taught three hours a week in
each of the three grades at that level. However, until
the change in 2009 that we will outline in section 3.1.2,
it had only been present in public preschool
and primary education in the shape of a few
pilot programs and as a result of individual
decisions of some states, among which Coahuila,
Morelos, Nuevo Leon, Sonora, and Tamaulipas stand
out for their commendable efforts (Reyes, Murrieta,
and Hernandez, 2012). Without these state initiatives,
which began in 1992, the panorama of teaching English
early in public schools would be a desert.
The English module, incorporated in the 2005-
2006 school year, as part of the Encyclemedia
program, directed towards 6th grade and piloted in 13
states, deserves special mention (SEP, 2006). Despite its
novel approach, especially the idea that the classroom
teacher, supported by this digital resource, did not have
59
Public Policy for Learning English in Mexico
to know English in order to guide students work, it was
only implemented effectively in a few schools. A work-
load of two 50-minute sessions a week was determined
for the selected schools, besides providing a teachers
guide (in Spanish) and a workbook for the students.
In semi-official presentations, the programs promot-
ers proclaimed that this program, developed with ad-
vice from The Anglo-Mexican Foundation, would allow
students to reach level A1 in the Common European
Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR;
see, for example, CSCE, 2014).
In actual practice, the teachers had problems imple-
menting the foreseen two hours a week, they did
not receive the expected support, and, in terms of
teaching objectives, the marvelous mate-
rial turned out to be limited audiovisual aides
which did not deliver as much as promised.
Insistently and enthusiastically praised to the skies in
the authorities rhetoric, the program was not formally
followed up on, nor were its achievements verified; it
ended up dying of neglect and carelessness, without
having been formally evaluated - there is no informa-
tion whatsoever in Mejia and Martinezs (2010) general
evaluation of the Encyclemedia program - nor was it
officially cancelled.
Additionally, the role that English has played as
one of the factors attracting parents to chose
private education is not negligible. Parallel to what
happens with other dimensions, when comparing one
or another type of schools, actual achievement re-
garding learning with English in private schools
is uncertain, except for rare, honorable, and typically
expensive exceptions.
Outside of the limited circle of schools that are truly
bilingual from the first day of preschool, which are few
and concentrated in the main cities, English teaching
in private schools is characterized by impor-
tant weaknesses: little continuity between grades,
high teacher turnover, a general repeat-translate-gram-
mar rules teaching model, isolation from the rest of the
curriculum, little time dedicated to it, and content that
is far removed from students experience and interests.
Yet, although it is so limited, the introduction to a sec-
ond language that students receive in private schools
has, over decades, turned out to be clearly bet-
ter than the option of their peers in public
60
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
schools, the vast majority of whom literally
have their first English class when they are
twelve years old.
Parents frequently make a second invest-
ment: despite the fact that English is included in the
schools they pay for, they make a second disburse-
ment to pay for private tutoring, registering their chil-
dren in courses offered during out-of-school time
(typically by specialized organizations or academies,
some of which are local while others are subsidiaries
of transnational systems), or else taking advantage of
low-cost opportunities increasingly offered by pub-
lic universities, cultural houses, and other public in-
stitutions, that are not connected to the compulsory
school system.
For their part, parents of public preschool and
primary students who have more income be-
gan to resort to these same three alterna-
tives:private lessons, English academies, and
extension programs, of course, in a more limited
way than their counterparts from private schools due
to having, on average, considerably lower purchasing
power. The supply of English in the public edu-
cation system for the initial grades has been
strongly subsidized by parents in almost all the
states that offered it. Prior to the national program
in 2008-2009, and even during the first two cycles of
its implementation, parents were asked to contribute
- from their own pockets - to finance part or all of
the materials that their children would use (Ramirez,
Pamplon, and Cota, 2012), and, ironically - in a coun-
try where the official rhetoric that education is free is
repeated ceaselessly and where millions of dollars are
regularly diverted to make illegal payments to those
who charge as teachers, but do not teach, even sub-
sidizing the cost of teachers.
The education policy that prevailed
up to less than five years ago implied
universal access to English in Mexico,
but only with a reduced workload of
360 hours of class and only start-
ing at the age of twelve. A small
number of states in the coun-
try offered, to a limited part
of the population of younger
students, some additional ex-
perience in pre- and primary
mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
school, with diverse levels of quality. For their part,
parents concentrated on expanding their childrens
access by using the familys economic assets to pay
for additional courses or to register them in bilingual
schools, without having a referent to allow them to
make an objective comparison to judge and decide
upon the quality of learning achieved by their children.
In sum, English has been taught little and late
in Mexico.
3.1.2 The great leap forward: PNIEB
The Education Sector Program 2007-2012 put forth,
as its first strategy for basic education, an integral re-
form; this was translated into the phased prepa-
ration of new plans and study programs as of
2008. These programs, still current at the writing of
this chapter, are based on the profile defined in 2006
for students graduating from lower secondary school.
They are based on a competencies approach for stu-
dents, specifying expected learning achievement in
each competency area, and, finally, establishing teaching
guidelines for the classroom experience.
The adequacy of this approach can be contested; in
our opinion, it maintains a disturbing prescriptive ac-
cent, harassing teachers with excessively detailed in-
structions, while leaving the expected responses of
students themselves as something too generic. Also,
the distance between what was announced in the
documents and speeches, on the one hand, and the
progress that was effectively achieved in implemen-
tation, on the other, can be criticized; but in any case
it should be acknowledged that, for the first
time in the history of our national education
system, the curriculum was developed with a
focus on and organized around student learn-
ing. The goal of learning was separated - in principle,
at least - from a structural logic based on subjects,
a legacy that we have carried since Gabino Barreda
introduced educational positivism into Mexican basic
education in the 19th century.
Although the coherence between grades and levels was
not such an explicit component in initial documents, the
decision making process progressed, finally leading to
the articulation of all of basic education. A national
mandatory curriculum, the 2011 Study Plan,
which resulted in the celebrated Agreement 592, was
created for twelve successive grades, from the
mexicanos primero
Public Policy for Learning English in Mexico
first year of preschool (age 3) to the third year of lower
secondary school (9th grade; SEP, 2011).
In the case of English, an intense sequence of deci-
sions were made:
a) A review of the state programs in effect, evalu-
ating their practice in the classroom with a team
of 34 researchers from 12 public higher educa-
tion institutions who began work in 2008 (see
Ramirez, Pamplon, and Cota, 2012, who were
themselves members of this team);
b) The rapid development of a series of common
subjects, still at the state level, piloted in 2009;
c) Even more rapidly, and jostling with the two pre-
vious decisions, a unique sequence of mandatory
state subjects was established in the 2009 Study
Plan, and the SEP created the National English
Program in Basic Education (PNIEB, for its acro-
nym in Spanish).
d) Finally, in 2011, they presented a cross-cutting,
articulated block of English for ten successive
grades, from the third year of preschool through
9th grade, with their respective subject programs
and curricular standards.
Currently, the regulatory referent for learning
English in the basic education school system
is Agreement 592 (SEP, 2011). In its initial consid-
erations it establishes:
That the Plan and study programs in Basic
Education must favor a curriculum that fosters stu-
dents learning in their mother tongue, whether this
be Spanish or any of the Indigenous languages rec-
ognized in our country; the learning of English
as a second language, and the development of
competence in the use of information and com-
munication technologies, in response to the legiti-
mate social demand in favor of pertinence, equity,
and quality in Mexican public schools and the so-
ciety of knowledge. (SEP, 2011:3-4; translation and
emphasis ours)
This certainly is a great leap forward. It recogniz-
es, especially in the conceptual document (SEP, 2010),
that a second language is not merely the addition of
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a co-curricular complement, but rather is an or-
ganic part of the competence area of Language and
Communication. In Agreement 592, the starting
point for education in English is included from
the first characteristics of the profile of gradu-
ating students, and interculturalism is recog-
nized as part of the personal heritage of each
student:
the second encompasses 3rd and 4th grades, while
the third groups 5th and 6th grades; the fourth cycle
includes 7th, 8th, and 9th grades. Each cycle is con-
nected to specific referents for learning achievement,
indicated by their corresponding levels in both the
National Language Proficiency Certificate (CENNI)
and the Common European Framework (CEFR), as
can be seen in figure 3.1.

As a result of the education process throughout
Basic Education, the student will show the follow-
ing characteristics: A) Use the maternal language,
oral and written, to communicate clearly and flu-
ently and to interact in different social and cultural
contexts; moreover, the student has the basic tools
to communicate in English. [] f) They as-
sume and practice interculturalism as an
asset and a way of coexisting within social, cultural,
and linguistic diversity. (SEP, 2011:32, translation and
emphasis ours)
PNIEB outlines four cycles: the first, the last year of
preschool and 1st and 2nd grades of primary school;
In the PNIEB approach, English - together with Spanish
and the Indigenous languages - forms the Language and
Communication field in the basic education curriculum
(SEP, 2010). All languages - in the formal educa-
tion efforts in Mexico - must be addressed us-
ing a Social language practices (SLP) focus,
in other words, as interactions between peo-
ple. The interactions representing the SLP imply spe-
cific activities with the language, and three in particular:
a) Do with the language, in other words, learn to use
the language for communicational purposes, such
as to present ideas, locate oneself in a place, and
gather information;

Figure 3.1. Expected levels of achievement per cycle and grade in PNIEB

CEFR LEVEL CENNI LEVEL GRADES CYCLE

B1 8 9 10 7th 9th 4th cycle

A2 5 6 7 5th 6th 3rd cycle

A1 2 3 4 3rd 4th 2nd cycle

1+ 2nd

1 1st 1st cycle

1 Preschool

Source: Prepared by the authors based on Fig. 3, SEP, 2010:18.

62 mexicanos primero
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b) Know the language, in other words, to know and
use the phonic and semantic aspects, use the gen-
erative capacity of the grammar, master writing
and spelling; and
c) Know how to be with the language, in other words,
favor attitudes that are connected to intercul-
turalism, socialization, tolerance, inclusion, and
develop confidence in the capacity to learn
and communicate in more than one lan-
guage (SEP, 2010:31; translation and emphasis
ours).
According to the description of this approach in
Agreement 592, students are expected to de-
velop specific skills in comprehension (oral
and written), expression (oral and written),
multi-modality (productions that combine
images and sound, artistic language), and at-
titudes (from valuing ones own identity to
promoting equity) in different environments: daily,
family, academic and educational, literary and play (SEP,
2011:88-92).
The examples of expected learning proposed in the
2011 plan are, in our opinion, of very different rel-
evance and pertinence. At the end of the process, it
expects some very elemental productions, such as a
catalogue of products (an execution in English of low
relevance because it implies an almost mechanical
identification of vocabulary), while at the same time
expecting students to resolve situations with enormous
demands, such as participating in a debate using the
second language (an execution that is highly relevant).
However, it is clear that in the approach of the national
education system as of 2011, the goal is a focus on
natural interaction in the second language
with other education dimensions, already
pointing towards learning with English. This
happens, for example, when students are asked to
develop a manual on environmental risks, which cap-
tures learning outcomes connected to the dimension
of Exploring and understanding the natural and social
world, corresponding to the area of Science in lower
secondary school.
With this English reform, the package of 360 hours tra-
ditionally offered (three hours a week in each of three
grades in lower secondary school) is changed to a total
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Public Policy for Learning English in Mexico
of 1,060 hours (by adding 100 hours during each of the
seven grades before lower secondary school, that is,
one in preschool, and six in primary school).Thus, the
parameter of achievement, and explicit goal, in
the graduates profile was to move from level
A1 (according to the CEFR) to level B1 at
the end of lower secondary school. That logi-
cally implies the need to change current lower sec-
ondary school programs (and practices), which have
an enormous historical inertia providing low results,
low pertinence, and low relevance, and which also
require adjusting the profile of teachers at that level;
before PNIEB, requirements for teachers were more
generic. Likewise, the decision to move the different
state programs to one common national program
implied establishing subject programs and the cor-
responding profile of a specialist teacher for seven
additional school grades.
We maintain, as can be deduced from the previous
paragraphs in this section, that the referents for this
change were very fortunate in theoretical terms: they
changed from antiquated, complacent, gener-
ic, rustic wording to a cosmopolitan, demand-
ing approach with specific parameters subject
to independent verification, that was no longer
disgracefully endogamic.
In this telling of the two periods of learning English in
Mexico, before and after PNIEB, it is important to point
out the contrast: a government decision dramati-
cally and hastily changed, within a period of
only three academic cycles, institutional ar-
rangements and the expectations for learning
a second language that had prevailed in the
national education system for seven decades.
We do not share the vision of those who, in academ-
ic judgments on public policies, are scandalized by
such accelerated transitions. If the change is to be
criticized, it is not because it was sudden, but
rather for its inefficiency in terms of reaching
expected results or its unsustainability over
time; we shall return to this in section 3.3.
National and international experiences show that sim-
ple continuous improvement, understood as
incremental change, rarely serves quality and
equity in learning, and hardly ever resolves the
problem of exclusion from the right to learn.
Girls, boys and youth who face barriers that challenge
63
Public Policy for Learning English in Mexico
their right to learn are rarely served through a micro-
metric removal of obstacles. In general, what does work
are bold changes that shake the status quo, undoubt-
edly causing distress to many of the participants in
the formal education system, especially to those who
- with change - will lose their comforts or ill-gotten
spoils because they can no longer take refuge in the
anonymity of negligence or placidity in the lack of rigor.
We know what Mexican students are expected
to learn, both in the variety of learning and
the performance metrics, in order to master
English. In other texts we have argued that the final
question to discern whether an educational policy
should be considered successful or not is: And with
all this, did they learn? In the case of PNIEB, if we limit
ourselves to official reports, we do not know. With all
its merits as an innovative approach, we still
do not know whether the 2011 Plan is being
properly implemented and if the expected
changes are happening in terms of what stu-
dents learn because, ultimately, that is what
really matters. No formal assessment was made of
students CENNI levels or the CEFR equivalents, there
is no conclusive report published in the past sixty
years, there has been no formal accountability for this
change, which, theoretically, should be of great impact.
It is precisely due to the value that we at Mexicanos
Primero give to the principle that education policy
should be judged by the effective exercise of
the right to learn, that we decided to go directly
to the field and conduct an assessment of a represen-
tative group of students who just finished their basic
education in order to identify whether they achieved
the expected learning: that is the content of the next
chapter, chapter 4, with which we want to take this
step to verify achievement, a step that authori-
ties have omitted.
Let us continue then, with the general review, now
looking at teachers.
3.2 Mexican teachers and English
3.2.1. An ambiguous identity
To be an English teacher in Mexico is often a compli-
cated, ambivalent condition. On the one hand, precisely
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because they are dedicated to an area that has not
been a strength of the general population, they are
immediately accorded a certain status within
the context of the profession in general and
among teachers in particular. It implies mastery
of distinct academic skills and experiences that are
little shared.
As a result, English teachers are perhaps the best ex-
ample of the specialist teacher: their career is appre-
ciated and their personal efforts frequently stand out
because they are not one of the crowd. In their own
life stories, English teachers highlight their constantly
seeking to be better, to face and resolve challenges,
the favorable effects of their current dedica-
tion on their self-concepts, and confidence
in their own performance when faced with
future academic, professional, and personal
challenges (See, for example,Trejo and Mora, 2014).
On the other hand, the daily experiences they face
are not so easy. Precisely due to the fact that they
participate in the dynamic of each group of
students for only a few hours a week, they
rarely form significant ties with their students,
typically serving a large number of groups in order to
supplement their income, in the same school or even
in different schools far from each other. In reviewing
the data from the 2013 Census of Schools, Teachers,
and Students in Basic and Special Education (CEMABE,
for its acronym in Spanish), we find that thousands
of teachers each serve five or more student
groups a week; in other words, they have to
interact with one hundred or more students a
week. It becomes difficult, given these conditions, for
their interventions to adapt to the rhythm and learn-
ing style of each student, as is his right.
This same condition of limited time in the
school community seriously reduces their
chance to participate: they do not have the time
to develop common strategies with the rest of the
teachers in their subject, there are no periods set aside
to receive feedback from their more experienced col-
leagues in other schools or from classroom teachers
(who know the students better) in their own school;
they do not have time to build truly interdisciplinary
joint projects or activities, interacting with teachers
from other areas. Despite the fact that all of these are
explicit expectations in the approach of the 2011 Plan
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and its programs, as well as in the provisions issued
by the General Law of Professional Teaching Service,
in force since 2013; this simply does not happen. It is
very hard for English teachers to participate
in planning and celebrations, and time to co-
incide with parents is scarce. Their hit and run
condition also puts them, with disturbing frequency,
in a relatively weak position regarding demands from
principals or authorities at other levels in the system.
Added to these difficulties, there is a frequent charac-
teristic of second language teachers: their daily depen-
dence on an external factor, their disproportionate
deference towards the book. This is partly at-
tributable to professional training that does not com-
pletely develop them as the protagonists, designers, and
generators of learning situations, and it is partly due to
external pressure for uniform implementation that is
not sensitive to context typical of education
interventions decided at the top. Of the en-
tire profession in Mexico, English teachers are
perhaps the most dependent on the availability
and adaptation of teaching materials. If they
do not have materials or methods
to resort to, they often feel lost; they
tend to maintain a vision of their own
work as if it were almost exclusively cir-
cumscribed to mediation between the
teaching resources and their students,
in which, to make it worse, the first most often
prevail over the second.
A long, deplorable chain of mismatches follows, from
the worrisome, acritical deference to commercial ma-
terials shown by teachers themselves - with the dis-
turbing implication that the actual curriculum is driven
by the economic interests of a few powerful publish-
ing houses - to the constant requests for money from
parents in order to pay for photocopies of the exer-
cises without which - they claim - they cannot work.
Two examples illustrate this weakness. One, in field
interviews, teachers usually say that their teaching fol-
lows the book precisely (= the specific materials in
the collection from one commercial publishing house),
rather than showing their knowledge of the official cur-
riculum and handling the possibility for it to be adapted
to their local context so that it would be useful for
the teacher and significant for the students (Pamplon
and Ramirez, 2013). Two, even when they realize that
mexicanos primero
Public Policy for Learning English in Mexico
the teaching materials are not adequate for the real-
ity of their students, instead of directly dispensing with
them, teachers dedicate precious time and energy to
adapting them, which results in modest achievement
or simply confuses the learners.There is a substantive
ambiguity: they are specialists and, in that sense,
they are expected to act as experts, but that
conflicts with the practice of their becoming
simply commentators on and dispensers of the
book, so that the teaching resource then becomes, as
Foucault would say, the kings throne, while the teach-
ers themselves assume a subordinate role.
English teachers arrive at Mexican public schools either
because they have undergraduate degrees in some-
thing that explicitly involves English - from a specific
degree in lower secondary education with a specialty
in English teaching, studied in some Lower Secondary
Teacher Training College, to the elegant English
letters, studied in a faculty of humanities - or
else because they have undergraduate degrees
in other areas and their personal mastery of
the language led to them being selected to take
charge of the English classes.
With disturbing frequency, teachers were
also appointed simply because they
spoke English and, to give it a veneer
of legality, took a quick course in a pub-
lic institution to justify dispensing with
the profile. State coordination officials ac-
knowledge, off the record, that many of them
are friends, relatives, and acquaintances of union of-
ficials and representatives, and that others are for-
eign visitors who took root, informal workers that re-
turned after being deported from the United States,
or else their children, who did not complete their
education beyond high school on the other side; in
none of these cases were they people who had any
university education, much less any certified teaching
skills. Commenting on this type of situation, research-
ers warn that speedy training programs can rein-
force the idea that language teaching is a hobby for
native speakers or people who are looking for em-
ployment (Reyes, Murrieta, and Hernandez, 2012:188;
translation ours).
Although some states are much more organized than
others, a chronic deficit in planning makes the deploy-
ment of English teachers to schools unstable,
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Public Policy for Learning English in Mexico
typically delayed, and with frequent adjust-
ments once the school year has started. With
the old lower secondary school model as their princi-
pal referent, a good part of Mexicos English teachers
have part-time contracts, with postings for only a few
hours a week, and many still suffer from the situ-
ation of being casual workers, which not only
denies them job security and the desirable in-
come or benefits that come with a formal ca-
reer in public service, but also discourages the
development of sufficient roots in the schools.
Once again we find ambiguity: it is said that their con-
tribution to their students developing the expected
graduation profiles is vital, but they are treated as a
species of external providers, so anonymous and ge-
neric that they are interchangeable and, therefore, they
can be deployed from one school to another with few
consequences. In the 2014 Competitive Entrance
Exam for teachers, for example, there was not
even one full-time lower secondary school
posting for an English teacher, but only ap-
pointments by the hour.
3.2.2. Towards the future of teaching
The arrival of PNIEB, as the framework for teaching
English, brought with it a proposal of great importance
for the profile of English teachers: it established CEFR
level B1 as the goal for students upon graduation; logi-
cally, the level of teachers should correspond to
complete mastery, identified by CEFR level C1,
just as seen in the top portion of Figure 3.2.
Considering that it would be challenging to find sufficient
teachers who mastered the language at that level im-
mediately, PNIEB states that teachers should reach
at least the level directly above that which
they are responsible for developing in their
students. Hence, having marked B1 as the learning
standard that corresponds to graduation from lower
secondary school, the teachers of students at that level
should at least reach level B2 (as seen in the basic
teacher profile in Figure 3.2) and receive help to reach
level C1. Therefore, in the field assessment that
is presented in chapter 4 of this work, we also
applied the language proficiency instrument
to a sample of lower secondary school teach-
ers, expecting their complete mastery - and
even higher - of the level that their students
are supposed to reach.
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The new plan also indicated two more requirements
for eligible teachers, in addition to certifying their level
of proficiency in the language. One is to have an un-
dergraduate degree in teaching English, or else a
solid certificate of their English teaching skills with the
parameters already recognized in the field, like those
identified using the acronyms of TDC, ICELT, and TKT.
The second is to have work experience in the
grades and cycles they are going to teach, with
sufficient knowledge about the plans and programs for
basic education (Martinez, 2011).
Despite the fact that the National Program conceives
of a second language, as it was established in the
document on Curricular Foundations (SEP, 2010), in
the advanced terms that we already described in the
previous sections, without vigorously incorporating
teachers into a professional development process
that helps them to understand this new focus and ap-
proach, their strategies tend to reproduce the tradi-
tional practices they used before the curricular change.
This results from a detailed observation of classes by
specialists who wanted to verify the degree to which
the teaching methodology proposed by PNIEB was
being implemented:
an important amount of time in class was used
for students to copy words and phrases from the
blackboard, and they did other activities like dicta-
tion. Moreover, doing isolated exercises taken from
the textbooks affected the sequence and progress
of the lesson as a whole, especially in those cases
in which it was not clear which activities corre-
sponded to more global learning achievement in
the language and which to the expected products.
(Pamplon & Ramirez, 2013:4; translation ours)
Hence, the urgent need to support teachers is clear,
so that their level of expected proficiency
not only corresponds to that stipulated in
their current contracts, but rather so that
their roles as educators are fulfilled accord-
ing to the new guidelines, with teaching that
underlines student understanding, interac-
tion, and activity.Three types of efforts stand
out on the horizon for English teachers in Mexico:
A) the commitment to massive profession-
al development using cascade strategies,
B) the continuity of ongoing development
supported by external institutions, especially
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| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico | Public Policy for Learning English in Mexico

university language departments, and C) build-
ing and maintain networks of excellent teach-
ers, tutoring themselves and their co-workers
who have made less progress.
One example of the first type of effort is the proj-
ect undertaken by the the government of the State
of Mexico with support from the British Council to
train English teachers using a cascade model, adapting
a successful experience previously carried out in India.
A group of 350 teachers take a Diploma course, af-
ter which they are expected, in turn, to train another
17,000 facilitators, in other words, teachers who are
certified to reach the objectives of PNIEB in 2015
(British Council, 2014).
In the second type of strategy, the work of the FES-
Acatlan Language Teaching Center of UNAM, involved
in the drafting of the Curricular Foundations of PNIEB,
stands out (SEP, 2010), and also that of the Western
Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESO,
for its acronym in Spanish), responsible for the first
workshops to disseminate the reform among Basic
Education state teams. Besides these two institutions,
at least 15 public universities, with the Autonomous
University of Nuevo Leon and the University of
Veracruz among the most outstanding, have carried
out workshops and courses on implementing the new
program, as well as a gradual certification in language
proficiency directed towards current teachers.

Figure 3.2 Ideal and basic profiles of an english teacher according to pnieb

Ideal Teacher Profile

PRESCHOOL PRIMARY Lower secondary

Grade 3rd 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th 9th
CEFR A2 B1 B2 C1
Cambridge KET PET FCE CAE Proficiency
TOEFL --- --- 547 597 677
CENNI 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Basic Teacher Profile

PRESCHOOL PRIMARY Lower secondary

Grade 3rd 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th 9th
CEFR A1 A2 B1 B2
Cambridge --- KET PET FCE CAE Proficiency
TOEFL --- --- --- 547 597 677
CENNI 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Source: Martinez, 2011:17.

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Public Policy for Learning English in Mexico
The third type of strategy seeks to train teachers who
can be tutors for others because they have both excel-
lent mastery of the language and highly effective teach-
ing methods. Since 2007, Worldfund and Dartmouth
College have offered two courses one intensive and
the other a collaborative strategy - long before PNIEB
came into being. The added value of IAPE Teachers, as
they are known, is the high sense of professional collegi-
ality that teachers develop as participants in a network
that continues to work together after the classroom
courses.This helps them stay updated, motivated, con-
nected to new teaching resources, and constantly in
contact with the good practices of their peers. In 2011,
the program was independently assessed by the Inter-
American Development Bank, showing significant end
results in students who had IAPE teachers, from their
specific achievements in English proficiency to their
motivation or expectations regarding their academic
and professional development (Bando and Li, 2014).
The decision to prefer, for the big leap for-
ward in a national English policy, a specialist
teacher with demanding certifications poses
important questions in terms of the feasibility
and scalability of the model. At the same time that
Agreement 592 was issued, officials recorded 18,384
teachers participating in the 2011 phase of PNIEB
(Reyes, Murrieta, & Hernandez, 2012), and announced
that by 2012 they would incorporate 70,000 teachers.
There are no official published records to know wheth-
er that forecast was fulfilled; in fact, the information for
2012 and 2013 is almost nil, and when we asked the
federal officials who are currently responsible for the
program, we received no answer.
In the section entitled English teaching by the numbers,
using data from the CEMABE Census that we received
at Mexicanos Primero from the SEP - the delivery was
mandated by the Plenary of the Federal Institute for
Access to Information in December 2014, we counted
teachers identified as English teachers in the
fall of 2013, arriving at 50,724 English teach-
ers in public schools of basic education. That
represents approximately 20,000 less than
what was foreseen as the goal in PNIEB for
the previous year. The saturation is not surprising
then: around one out of every ten English teach-
ers currently serves more than ten groups of
children.
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If this is so, given the current deficit of teachers, we are
not only off course as a country regarding the foreseen
phases to implement PNIEB, but the correlations also
indicate tangles of problems that need urgent atten-
tion. With the data available from CEMABE, it turns
out that only 50% of lower secondary schools have
an English teacher at all; the same is true for 10% of
primary schools and 5% of preschools.This implies that
in Mexico we lack teachers to teach English in
one out of every two lower secondary schools,
nine out of every ten primary schools, and in
95 out of every 100 preschools.
At the time this paragraph was written, the demand
for English teachers for Basic Education in 2015
would at least reach a mark of 308,826 po-
tential vacancies. In an alarming disproportion, the
2014 Competitive Entrance Exam for Teaching
Posts included only 2,123 positions; only 945
competitors had results deemed to be adequate
for an English teacher.
Again, there is no published, accessible infor-
mation to allow us to confirm that the ideal
or basic profile for an English teacher in the
2011 Plan has been the referent for the test
that was given in the Competitive Entrance
Exam, or that either of the two profiles will
be used as the parameter to assess teachers
performance in 2015.
To close the circle of our analysis of public policies, let
us finally review how the design was thought out and
how English teaching management and coordination
has actually been implemented.
3.3 Structural conditions for teaching English in
Mexico
3.3.1. The risks of too much politics and too few policies
The decisions regarding learning English, as we sum-
marized in the first section, had their golden moments
in the visions of the first education ministers when the
SEP was originally formed, during the two periods when
Torres Bodet headed the SEP, with the re-launching
of the professionalization effort at the famous Eighth
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Meeting of Chetumal in 1975, and afterwards, in the
vision, strategic but embroidered with flights of fancy,
of some governors and their secretaries of education
in the early nineties.
Educational definitions in our country have
constantly suffered from the intervention of
political considerations, the capture and later
distribution of budgets or teaching positions,
politics, not policy. No public education system in
the world is a stranger to these influences, but the
Mexican case can be considered one of the sorriest
insofar as historic definitions have been postponed or
frustrated by considerations of temporary alliances
or the fact that entire programs have appeared
and disappeared, not for pedagogical reasons,
but rather due to the prestige or reprisals
of internal leaders.
For example, when the PRIs 2000 Presidential candi-
date, Francisco Labastida, included a promise of com-
puters and English in all public schools in his election
campaign, this was received with enormous hostility
by commentators and academics, although it aroused
sympathy in the general population. As Valencia (2011)
says when summarizing Simpata por el rating [Sympathy
for the rating] by Raul Trejo, candidate Labastida appar-
ently did not incorporate this component organically
into his platform, but rather following the advice of
marketing specialists with the tactical goal of being ac-
cepted in the campaign. Later he was unable to argue
in depth when faced by his critics and, as a result, did
not greatly convince the masses. As collateral damage
to the education process, the person who triumphed
in the elections, President Vicente Fox, and his later col-
laborators, avoided approaching that promise during
the first years of their regime as if it was taboo, and only
when they found their own brand, the Encyclemedia
program, did they bring attention back to both fac-
tors, once again with careless, flashy implementation.
In this example, like in many others, a recurrent pat-
tern appears: seeking prestige and benefits, a certain
hegemonic political group hears innovative proposals
for education policies. With true conviction in a
few cases, although most often superficially,
they adopt them as their own, and they start
mass implementation processes that imply
great changes in regulations and an important
mexicanos primero
Public Policy for Learning English in Mexico
re-assignment of funds. They begin
to have problems in choosing who will
conduct the project in its implementa-
tion phases, and they make promises,
mixing innovators with conservatives,
to the detriment of the consistency and
speed of the projects application.
In view of the resistance to change they en-
counter, decision makers agree to limit the
scope and cut back on the original goals, pre-
cisely because they did not get sufficiently involved in
the initial phases to take ownership of the arguments
and perspectives on the importance of the change that
was sought. They cut deals with the corruption
and negligence they encounter or that which
starts to grow out of their own circles; they
isolate or dismiss the experts that conceived of the
change in the first place; they end up adopting new
consultants who have external prestige, but who are
alien to or even against the original design.
The decision makers end their period - or are termi-
nated as officials - and their successors or opponents
do not study the previous commitments: the most they
do is to put them in a maintenance phase which im-
plies a slow death for the programs. More often the
new arrivals cancel and replace the innova-
tions, at great cost for the treasury, burying
the possibility of positive results, wasting the
lessons learned, discouraging teams in the field.
Hundreds of volumes could be written to illustrate this,
even very recent cases: Fernando Gonzlez disman-
tling the Encyclemedia program to favor the Digital
Skills for All program, which in turn was suspended
to open the way to deliver laptops and tablets; the
Chauyffet administration reviving the School Technical
Councils while limiting, on the other hand, the Social
Participation Councils because they were conceived
during Lujambios administration; Alba Martinezs team
extinguishing the Integral Strategy to Improve Education
Achievement (EIMLE) that was once brought from the
margins to the center by Francisco Ciscomanis team.
Such high turnaround and such little prepara-
tion of the higher-level officials at the SEP plac-
es the consistency of any educational program
at risk. In view of the hyper-accelerated implementa-
tion of new projects and the unceremonious uprooting
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Public Policy for Learning English in Mexico
of existing programs to which federal education of-
ficials have accustomed them, only well-prepared
state teams, supported or tolerated by their
respective political bosses, manage to halt or
request the reconsideration of these processes. Few
civil society organizations manage to ques-
tion official decisions - because they are seasoned
enough not to be frightened, independent enough not
to worry about having their consultancy work cut off
or their paid school-based programs suspended, or
expert enough in the topic in question not to be ig-
nored or discarded as irrelevant - and to have their
critiques resonate in public opinion, in the Legislative
Branch, with advisors of multilateral agencies or in other
areas of public administration, in order to mitigate the
effects of the stop and starts and direction changes of
the education system.
PNIEB suffers from this curse. It was conceived
and developed under the aegis of Undersecretary
Fernando Gonzlez, who, at the time, had almost un-
limited prestige and resources. Gonzlez and his team
managed to involve many valuable supporters, from the
Acatlan School of Graduate Studies to the Organization
of Ibero-American States (OEI, for its acronym in
Spanish).The National English Coordination office was
created precisely to lead the change; leaders from the
National Union of Education Workers (SNTE, for its
acronym in Spanish) voiced their support - even when
many of them had mocked Labastidas proposal - be-
cause for them Gonzlez represented the culmination
of the SEP/SNTE co-government. But that enthusiastic,
almost universal consensus turned into uncomfortable
silence when Gonzlez left. The Villalobos-Ciscomani
pair, as the Secretary and Undersecretary of Education,
respectively, edited the text of Curricular Foundations,
adding their names to the copyright page.
The arrival of new officials in 2012, currently
in office, brought an important halt to the
process foreseen by PNIEB for expanding
English teaching in Mexico. The National English
Coordination disappeared from the SEP, to be replaced
by decree by the current Directorate of Planning and
Technical Support, whose head, in fact, is the same of-
ficial who worked as the principal spokesman for the
benefits of PNIEB, Dr. Juan Manuel Martinez Garcia.The
readjustment is the result of an administrative decision
to merge four pre-existing programs (Promotion and
Encouragement of Books and Reading, National Reading
70
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
Program, Curricular Reform for Basic Education, and
PNIEB) to be administered and financed under the
umbrella of Program S246, Strengthening the Quality
of Basic Education (SEP, 2014).
Despite the fact that the decision went into force on
January 1st, 2013, the diagnosis that formed the basis
for the change was only published in August 2014 (SEP,
2014). In other words, the programs dimension
and operating rules were changed without the
opportunity being given to first independently
and objectively assess it. For example, changes of
this type must consider the minimum elements es-
tablished by the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit,
the Ministry of Public Administration, and the National
Council for Social Development. Hence, in 2013 and
2014, PNIEB functioned in a most confused way; the
very detailed plans for the programs progress marked
the stages to be covered year after year until 2019, but
as of today, it is almost impossible to know, from the
outside, exactly how the coordination, monitoring, and
financing of these efforts are carried out.
Although it is considered politically incorrect to defend
the work of a now disgraced official - the awkward
son-in-law, the educational merits of PNIEB should
be objectively acknowledged and valued in all their
potential. The cycle of changes in the education
systems administration, a wheel of fortune
that is sometimes up and sometimes down,
threatens to make the learning of English lose
its momentum and orientation. What was once
conceived of as national policy and a compulsory cur-
riculum for the entire country, seeking to favor equal
opportunity, is now at the discretion of state officials.
The possibility that the gaps between states
will never close is very high given the mentality
of competitive funds that currently prevails
in the administration of the guiding program.
With this long summary of the countrys main English
teaching program, a program that neither dies nor is
applied, it is clear that education policy in Mexico
will not be public policy, but rather merely
politics, until transparency, accountability, and
participation prevail. Today, we citizens have no
democratic control over the decisions of officials that
imply mass movements of resources and major chang-
es in regulations; the teaching and learning of English
demonstrates this in a paradigmatic way. There is no
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| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
published register of schools participating in PNIEB, nor
information about their respective stages of implemen-
tation or the results students have achieved in each
school. Tragically, neither citizens in general,
nor teachers, parents and even less students,
have the tiniest hope of being considered or
consulted about the current change in direc-
tion or those to come.This certainly demands
a structural reform.
3.3.2. What we have and what is missing
Despite the above, today, more than ever be-
fore, Mexico has resources to learn English:
material resources in the shape of financing,
teaching resources, time, creativity, and the
dedication of people who had not participated
as educators and planners before. The support
network, which, before 2008, was limited to lower
secondary school coordinators operating most often
in a routine, sleepy manner, has become energized.
The staggered pilot and implementation process of
PNIEB brought new stakeholders to the table: depart-
ment heads who were waiting for a chance to assume
academic leadership, fruitful collaboration between
language departments in institutions of higher educa-
tion and areas charged with continuous professional
development for basic education, renewed methods
and materials, the incorporation of young teachers
and consultants full of new ideas and overflowing with
eagerness to reach children and youth.
The official programs and curricular guidelines are all
available on the internet, as well as most of the mate-
rials used to train in-service teachers, as are the texts
used by students, which are especially directed towards
lower secondary school students.
The digital network has been used inten-
sively as a bridge and for mutual influence.
Coordinators have raided many Mexican and other
countries stores of information, uploading texts, ar-
ticles, and exercises to enrich their training of small
groups of teachers. One now finds class plans, videos
made by students or teachers, and a multitude of
transcribed songs on the digital web. The teachers
from the Mexican Association of Teachers of
English (MEXTESOL) have built an increasing-
ly prestigious professional association, becom-
ing more and more a mandatory reference.
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Public Policy for Learning English in Mexico
Some visionaries have created marvelous trilingual
experiences in Indigenous pre- and primary schools.
With an understandable and healthy concern,
many non-public-official stakeholders continue
to seek answers, as was evident in the recent forum
on English for Competitiveness and Social Mobility
held on November 21, 2014 (COMCE, 2014). The
presentations coincided in their recognition of: the
low demand, in proportional terms, from parents and
students; the urgent need based on an honest as-
sessment of the current state of both language and
language teaching proficiency to train teachers to
meet demand in Mexicos public schools; the impor-
tance of context and the learning environment; the
advantages of exchanging good practices with nations
having similar contexts, as presented by the represen-
tatives from Colombia, Panama, or Uruguay.
A review of current spending on English teaching and
learning is complicated due to ambiguities in the fi-
nancial classification system and reports, even after
taking into consideration that programs with published
rules of operation, like this one, are not as opaque
as others. In figure 3.3 we see the graphic outline of
what we mentioned in the previous section; limiting
ourselves to data available from the past 6-years bud-
gets, public financing for educational efforts in
English is like an inverted parabola, having its
peak in 2012.
The Undersecretariat of Basic Education has a lot to
explain, especially in terms of the Addendum to the
agreed-upon framework: does each state spend up to
65% of its funding on its English program, or not? Do
all the additional resources need to be used? (See the
table in SEB, 2014).The Secretarial Agreement outlining
the operating rules for 2015, yet to be published
in the Official Daily of the Federation as these
lines are being written, continues to be just
as confusing in allocating spending
(70%, although it is unclear from which
100% this fraction would come) and just
as lax in its performance indicators.
Without an institutional entity to
clearly take charge of English teach-
ing in the country, and having lost it
within just a few school cycles, it
is questionable whether we will
71
Public Policy for Learning English in Mexico | SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |

see effective coordination, follow-up, and momentum
provided to push forward the support network,
financing, and access to technology needed to learn
English.
Perceptively, a teacher from Zacatecas wonders what
objectives PNIEB might reach, having omitted, from its
very beginning, a factor crucial for its success: prop-
erly preparing teachers; it is worthwhile to quote him
at length:
The program has not been launched adequately,
reproducing once again one of our biggest flaws:
failing to prepare the necessary human resources
ahead of time.We have insufficient human resources
to teach English at least for Cycles 1 and 2 of the
Basic Education system. Would it not have been
wiser to select and prepare the personnel before
actually starting this ambitious program? Failure
can be prevented, especially if experience and re-
search tell us what must be done and how. There
is no form in which competencies will be
developed in the English class if incompe-
tent educators are in charge of teaching.
(Rodrguez, 2014:7-8; emphasis ours).
Of course, the most pressing question is: how could
sufficient numbers of English teachers be
trained in order to consider that the imple-
mentation of the 2011 Study Plan had been
generalized? Independent of their pedagogic ca-
pacity, you cannot improvise the mastery of a language.
The research presented in chapter 4 about whether
lower secondary school teachers reach the proficien-
cy level laid out in the Basic Teacher Profile is very
relevant for thinking about different alternatives for
teacher preparation.
We are faced with other major problems: besides their
frequent lack of cultural pertinence, English learning
materials frequently start from the mastery level as-
sumed in the curricular map. For example, students
are assumed to be at level A2 for their first classes in
lower secondary school, when in reality classes are
heterogeneous, with the most advanced students just
managing to reach A1; this is a common grievance of
state English coordinators, who continue to receive
supplies from headquarters inappropriate to local
student populations, while their complaints and re-
quests for alternatives go unheard.

Figure 3.3 Spending on the national english program in basic education (USD)

$48,427,845

$46,356,185
$35,929,693
$38,030,346

$24,050,357

$5,163,591

2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

Source: prepared by the authors with data from the Ministry of Finance and the
Federal Expense Budgets. The expenses for 2014 were obtained from
http://basica.sep.gob.mx/pba/index.html. New amounts for the English program
in 2014 from: http://basica.sep.gob.mx/pba/pdf/REF_EB_2014.pdf

72 mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico | Public Policy for Learning English in Mexico

Summing up: English has been taught little,
poorly, and late in Mexico. There are inspira-
tional stories of success on islands of excel-
lence and consistency. However, the viability
of a more generalized opportunity, one that
dawned in the shape of a national program
formulated between 2008 and 2012, is cur-
rently at risk. We turn now to the hard evidence
to identify whether, with the limitations on teaching
discussed here, come restrictions on learning. That is
the focus of the next chapter.

References

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Bassols, Narciso (1932). Discurso a los inspectores de escuelas primarias del

Distrito Federal [Speech given to primary school inspectors in the Federal
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British Council (2014). PNIEB Diploma Mexico. Available at: http://www.

britishcouncil.org.mx/asociaciones/historias-exitos/diploma-pnieb-mexico
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COMCE (2014). Ingls para la competitividad y movilidad social, presentacin [English for competitivity and
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CPEUM (2014). Constitucin Poltica de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, Artculo 4, Apartado B, Fraccin
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[consulted: December 2014].

DOF (2014). Decreto por el que se reforman y adicionan los artculos 7, 12 y 14 de la Ley General de
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Matters of the Use and Regulation of Technology in the National Education System], Official Daily of the
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ha=19/12/2014 [consulted: December 2014].

Dzul, Marisela, Funderburk, Rosa Maria, and Hidalgo, Hilda (2010). La enseanza del ingls en las
escuelas de tiempo completo en Hidalgo: anlisis de un caso [English teaching in full time schools
in Hidalgo: case analysis] in the Proceedings of the 6th International FEL Forum on Studying Languages,
Chetumal, Quintana Roo University, Language and Education Department. Available at: http://www.uaeh.
edu.mx/investigacion/icshu/LI_EnsLenguas/Hilda_Hidalgo/ensenanza.pdf [consulted: December 2014].

House of Representatives (2009). Dictamen de la Comisin de Educacin Public y Servicios Educativos, con
puntos de acuerdo por los que se desechan iniciativas que reforman diversas disposiciones de la Ley General de
Educacin, 17 de febrero de 2009. [Resolution of the Public Education and Education Services Commission,
with points of agreement by which the initiatives to reform different provisions in the General
Education Law are discarded, February 17, 2009]. Available at: http://sil.gobernacion.gob.mx/Archivos/
Documentos/2009/03/asun_2541246_20090318_1237398796.pdf [consulted: December 2014].

LGE (2013). Ley General de Educacin [General Education Law]. Available at: http://www.ordenjuridico.
gob.mx/leyes.php [consulted: December 2014].

Martinez, Juan Manuel (2011). Programa Nacional de Ingls en Educacin Bsica [National
English Program in Basic Education], presentation at the Twentieth Meeting on School Control,
Guanajuato, 2011. Available at http://www.controlescolar.sep.gob.mx/images/archivopdf_2013/
reunion11/05programanalingles.pdf [consulted: December 2014].

Mejia, Fernando and Francisco, Martinez Felix (2010). Un vistazo a Encyclemedia. Qu sabemos
del Programa Encyclemedia a cinco aos de su puesta en marcha en aulas de primaria? [A glance at
Encyclemedia. What do we know about the Encyclemedia Program five years after it was started in grade
school classrooms?], Mexico, Center for Education Studies/ Ministry of Education.

Pamplon, Elva Nora and Ramirez, Jose Luis (2013) The Implementation of the PNIEBs Language Teaching
Methodology in Schools in Sonora, MEXTESOL Journal, 37 (3), 2013. Available at: http://mextesol.net/
journal/public/files/bb674699bf7615b36c5a070f0684a528.pdf [consulted: December 2014].

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| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico | Public Policy for Learning English in Mexico

Ramirez, Jose Luis, Pamplon, Elva Nora and Cota, Sofia, (2012). The problem with English
teaching in Mexicos public grade schools: a first qualitative reading, Ibero-American Journal
of Education, 60(2), October 15, 2012, Organization of Ibero-American States for Education,
Science and Culture. Available at: http://www.rieoei.org/deloslectores/5020Ramirez.pdf
[consulted: December 2014].

Reyes, Maria del Rosario, Murrieta, Griselda, and Hernandez, Edith (2012). Polticas lingsticas
nacionales e internacionales sobre la enseanza del ingls en escuelas primarias [National and
international linguistic policies on English teaching in primary schools], Revista Pueblos y fronteras
digital, 6(2), December 2011-May 2012, Mexico, UNAM, pp.167-197. Available at: http://www.
pueblosyfronteras.unam.mx/a11n12/art_06.html [consulted: December 2014].

Rodriguez, Carlos (2014). Developing Competencies under the National English Program for
Basic Education in Mexico: Is It Possible?, MEXTESOL Journal, 38(2). Available at: http://mextesol.
net/journal/public/files/891120b87c61da036808cf2094e0fd23.pdf [consulted: December 2014].

Santos, Annete (1998). Historia de la Educacin Secundaria en Mxico [The History of

Lower Secondary School Education in Mexico], in Ynclan, Gabriela (compiler), Everything to do.
Some problems with Lower Secondary School. Anthology, Mexico, SNTE Board for Mexican Teacher
Culture, A.C.

SEB (2014). Tabla de distribucin de recursos a los programas con reglas de operacin. Ejercicio
Fiscal 2014 [Table with the distribution of resources to programs with operating rules. Fiscal Year
2014], Mexico, Undersecretariat of Basic Education. Available at: http://basica.sep.gob.mx/pba/
pdf/REF_EB_2014.pdf [consulted: December 2014].

SEP (2014). Diagnstico del Programa S246. Fortalecimiento de la Calidad en Educacin Bsica
[Diagnosis of the S246 Program. Strengthening Quality in Basic Education]. Available at: http://www.
sep.gob.mx/work/models/sep1/Resource/5016/1/images/diagnostico_del_programa_s246.pdf
[consulted: December 2014].

SEP (2011). Acuerdo nmero 592 por el que se establece la articulacin de la Educacin Bsica
[Agreement number 592 by which the articulation of Basic Education is established], Mexico,
Ministry of Education.

SEP (2010). Programa Nacional de Ingls en Educacin Bsica. Asignatura Estatal: lengua adicional
Ingls. Fundamentos curriculares. Preschool, primaria y secundaria. Etapa de prueba [National English
Program in Basic Education. State Subject: additional language, English. Curricular foundations. Pre-
school, primary school and lower secondary school. Testing stage], Mexico, Ministry of Education.

SEP (2006). Programa Encyclemedia. Libro Blanco [The Encyclemedia Program. White Book],
October 2006, Mexico, Ministry of Education. Available at: http://sic.conaculta.gob.mx/
centrodoc_documentos/523.pdf [consulted: December 2014].

Trejo, Nelly Paulina and Mora, Alberto (2014). Narrativas autobiogrficas de profesores de
lengua inglesa. Una mirada a la formacin de su identidad profesional [Autobiographical
narratives of English teachers. A look at how their professional identities were shaped], Mexican
Journal of Educational Research, 19(63), Oct-Dec 2014, Mexico, Mexican Council for Educational
Research, pp. 1245-1266. Available at: http://www.comie.org.mx/v1/revista/portal.php?idm=es&s
ec=SC03&&sub=SBB&criterio=ART63010 [consulted: December 2014].

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BY THE NUMBERS
THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH IN PUBLIC BASIC EDUCATION IN MEXICO

Level Grade Groups

How many groups Preschool 10,898

63,912
of girls and boys study 1st 9,711
English in Mexico? 2nd 9,905
Primary 3rd 10,160
4th 11,009
5th 11,267
6th 11,829
129,050

203,966
Lower 7th 44,824
Secondary 8th 43,106
9th 41,009
Special Ed. 106

How many schools have at least one

English teacher? 25,972
Lower
Preschool Primary Secondary Special Ed.
3,476 7,857 14,562 32

To what percentage of schools do English teachers arrive?

Lower
Preschool Primary Secondary
5% 10% 49%
Total Basic Education
14%
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Source: Census of Schools, Teachers, and Students in Basic and Special Education 2013
 Public Policy for Learning English in Mexico
50,274
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
How many English teachers are there?
Lower
Preschool Primary Secondary Special Ed.
4,738 13,399 32,746 47

In how many How many

schools do English groups do English
teachers teach? teachers teach?
Average Maximum Minimum Average Maximum Minimum

86% work in only one school 10% teach more than 10 groups of students

In search of English teachers: Competitive Entrance Exam for Teachers 2014

Posittions Qualified Levels A and B Supply-Demand
Level Available* Participants (number) (highest) Relation
Preschool 364
281 88 16 1,893 teachers needed
Primary 1,617
Lower Secondary 142 2,977 857 419 715 extra teachers

*Positions for pre- and primary school are full-time; lower secondary positions are hourly. Here we convert hours
into full-time positions to reflect the number of teachers needed.
Source: Prepared by the authors with state data on teacher vacancies and http://servicioprofesionaldocente.sep.gob.mx

Teacher Shortage

With the current trend, how many English teachers would we need
to get to 100% of the schools in basic education?

mexicanos primero
308,826 77
Public Policy for Learning English in Mexico
The slow road in teaching Indigenous languages
Fernando Ruiz Ruiz
fter more than 70 years of education
services directed towards the coun-
trys Indigenous peoples, and despite
legal, theoretical, political, and admin-
istrative advances in the last two decades, the Mexican
Government has been unable to guarantee Indigenous
peoples right to quality education in their native lan-
guage and culture.
It took too long to acknowledge that pre-Hispanic
peoples had the right to be educated in their own
languages, and the same is true of the steps taken
for the implementation of this right. More than a
century after our national independence, the gov-
ernment began to set up schools in the rural areas
where these populations were mostly found. The
first Indigenous schools were established during the
1930s and 40s, amidst the emergence of institutions
to promote their full development, but it was not
until the 1960s when the use of Indigenous languages
was accepted within school teaching. Two decades
later, the Constitution recognized the multicultural
nature of the nation and bilingual, intercultural edu-
cation, but it was only in the first decade of this cen-
tury that specific training of Indigenous teachers got
under way, the curriculum was adapted, and a State
multilingual policy established.
Today, when it will not be long until a century
has passed since we started to look towards our
Indigenous peoples, we are still far from paying our
historical debt with them and ensuring their right
to education.
78
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
Although at present there are 1.2 million pre- and
primary school children who are served in Indigenous
schools in 24 states as well as 276,000 children
from rural and Indigenous localities who are reached
through the community courses of the National
Council for Educational Development (CONAFE),
this has not guaranteed any respect for their linguistic
rights. Of the 68 officially recognized national languag-
es (INALI, 2008), only 51 are present in Indigenous
primary schools and 45 in preschools (SEP, 2011).The
Indigenous population living in cities and agricultural
areas do not have access to learning in their mother
tongue; although there is no precise information, it is
estimated that, as a consequence of internal migra-
tion, 4.6% corresponds to Indigenous populations
(Romo Viramontes, 2013). It was estimated that in
2010 there were more than 1.7 million Indigenous
peoples settled in urban and semi-urban areas (Tellez
Vazquez, 2013), where educational services do not
offer opportunities to learn in Indigenous languages.
According to the Ministry of Education (SEP), more
than 600,000 Indigenous children and youth in pre-,
primary, and lower secondary school are served in
general (non-Indigenous) basic education schools
(SEP, 2011).With respect to the migrant agricultural
population, only about 50,000 children are served
(CONEVAL, 2012) out of an estimated population
between 270,000 to 500,000 children under 14 years
old, of which an important part are also Indigenous
peoples (SEP, 2013c).
Another unpaid debt has to do with the efficiency
of the Indigenous education system. Up to now, we
did not have a national assessment system to allow
us to know how much children are learning in their
native languages. The results obtained in Spanish on
the ENLACE standardized achievement test by sixth
mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
grade students in Indigenous and CONAFE schools
bring us closer to reality: one out of every three
students in those education systems has an insuffi-
cient performance level. Likewise, the assessments
conducted by the National Institute for Educational
Assessment and Evaluation (INEE, for its acronym in
Spanish) has detected that students from Indigenous
schools obtain the lowest scores in Spanish, even
when comparing them to the results of rural schools
with similar socioeconomic conditions (INEE, 2007).
The research identifies teacher quality as the variable
that explains differences in learning.
The Achilles heel in Indigenous education has always
been the lack of sufficiently trained bilingual teach-
ers. Indigenous teacher training is extremely poor
(Carrillo Alvarez, 2012), and there are no defined
national standards for this system. Since the creation
of the former National Indigenous Institute in 1948,
academic preparation was omitted as a requirement
for teachers entering this educational area, and many
teachers only had basic oral knowledge of their na-
tive tongue. In the preparation that is now offered at
Teacher Training Schools, the possibility for Indigenous
teachers to receive an Undergraduate Degree in
Primary Education was just created in 2004, with a
specific focus on cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diver-
sity, although with only six additional hours a week
during their training and without any guarantee that
they would actually learn an Indigenous language
(SEP, 2004).
Although there is no publicly available information
on the results of assessments from the 25 teacher
training schools that offer undergraduate degrees
in bilingual, multicultural pre- and primary school
education, the global data reveal a general deficiency
(SEP, 2010; SEP, 2013). Likewise, the in-service training
for Indigenous teachers, carried out by the National
Pedagogic University, only serves a limited number of
teachers and principals, and there is no information
on the quality of the training provided by its local
affiliates.Added to the above, CONAFEs community
courses are operated by youth with neither teaching
nor professional training.
The absence of a complete training program for
Indigenous teachers has resulted in a chronic lack
mexicanos primero
Public Policy for Learning English in Mexico
of capacity to guarantee teachers proficient in the
maternal language of the children they serve. In 2006,
the INEE estimated that only 63% of Indigenous
third grade teachers spoke an Indigenous language; in
CONAFE community courses, it was less than 10%,
and in the other systems less than 2% (INEE, n.d.).
When the 2012-2013 school cycle began, in one out
of every ten Indigenous pre-schools and in one of
every 15 primary schools, the teachers did not speak
the communitys language (SEP, 2014).
With respect to the curriculum, Secretarial Agreement
592, valid since 2011, establishes that a second lan-
guage, which could be the mother tongue, a for-
eign language, or Spanish as a second language for
children whose mother tongue is an Indigenous lan-
guage, should be offered to every child in the coun-
try from the last year of preschool up to sixth grade
(SEP, 2011). In any case, it is mandatory that schools
dedicate 2.5 hours a week, for a total of 100 hours
per year, to learning the native language. In the case
of full-time schools, they must offer 5.5 hours a
week, or 220 hours per year (SEP, 2013a).
However, these curricular provisions are insufficient
if the corresponding curricular parameters and the
necessary linguistic standardization are not available.
In the last decade, we have seen the introduction of
curricular parameters for the Indigenous Language
course taught in Indigenous primary schools and
the preparation of specific study programs for each
language. In the linguistic area, progress has also re-
cently been made as the norms for writing in nine
Indigenous languages have been published, and six
Why English?
English opens the doors
to greater knowledge.
Father, Oaxaca
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others are awaiting publication (INALI, 2012). All
of the above will undoubtedly contribute towards
creating a framework of reference to evaluate the
teaching of native languages and permit the prepara-
tion of instruments to assess the competencies that
their speakers have reached in the classroom.
The sluggishness of the governments efforts to at-
tend to the linguistic needs of its citizens exacerbates
the already difficult socioeconomic conditions and
deficient educational infrastructure of Indigenous
schools.To date we do not have certainty about the
magnitude of the harm caused by decades of govern-
ment inaction in support of the development of com-
munication and learning skills of Indigenous children
and youth.The 2010 Population Census provides an
estimate of the size of the problem.That year, 9% of
the Indigenous population between the ages of 15
and 29 years was identified as illiterate (INEGI, 2011:
58); among the monolingual Indigenous population,
15% were between 10 and 14 years old (INEGI, 2011).
In the first case, inadequate coverage, high levels of
school abandonment, or ineffectiveness could be at
the root of the problem; the second situation, given
that 37% of all monolingual inhabitants fall within an
age range of five to nine years old, shows the systems
inefficiency: almost half of Indigenous young people
did not become bilingual. Both situations reflect the
serious problems in Indigenous education in the past
two decades and the challenges yet to come.
The preliminary results of the consultation carried out
by INEE in 2014 with Indigenous peoples and com-
munities highlight their demand for decent schools,
teachers trained in the communitys language and
culture, and assessment in line with their contexts
(INEE, 2014).
Without the commitment and participation of parents,
children, and youth from bilingual and monolingual
regions and localities so that they can be the ones to
decide their future, it will be challenging to banish the
ineffective institutional, school, and teacher practices
that do not acknowledge their contribution to the
world or guarantee young people can learn in both
their mother tongue and in Spanish.
A child-focused education not only requires actions,
but also tangible results. Therefore, it is not enough
for multicultural education to make important ad-
vances in preparing quality textbooks, recovering
literature in Indigenous languages, or incorporating
innovative teaching strategies, but also for children
and youth from our Indigenous peoples to deploy
their inherent skills to become citizens of the world.

References

Carrillo Alvarez, Jesus (2012). Necesidades de formacin docente para la educacin

intercultural bilinge en el contexto indgena del estado de Durango, Mxico. [The need
for teacher training in multicultural bilingual education within the Indigenous context in
the State of Durango, Mexico]. Doctoral Thesis, Complutense University of Madrid.

CONEVAL (2013). Informe de la evaluacin especfica del desempeo 2012-2013.

Programa de Educacin Bsica para Nios y Nias Jornaleras Agrcolas Migrantes
[2012-2013 performance assessment report. Basic Education Program for Migrant
Agricultural Laborer Boys and Girls]. Available at: http://www.coneval.gob.mx/
Informes/Evaluacion/Especificas_Desempeno2012/SEP/11_S111/11_S111_
Completo.pdf [consulted: December 2014].

80 mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico | Public Policy for Learning English in Mexico

INEGI (2011). Principales resultados del Censo de Poblacin y Vivienda 2010 [Principal
results of the 2010 Population and Housing Census], Mexico, 122 pp. Available at:
http://www.inegi.gob.mx/prod_serv/contenidos/espanol/bvinegi/productos/censos/
poblacion/2010/princi_result/cpv2010_principales_resultadosI.pdf [consulted:
December 2014]

INEGI (2011). Tabulados del Censo de Poblacin y Vivienda 2010. Cuestionario

bsico: Poblacin de 15 aos y ms que habla lengua indgena por entidad
federativa y grupos de edad segn condicin de alfabetismo y sexo [Tabulated
Data from the 2010 Population and Housing Census. Basic questionnaire: 15-year-
old Population speaking Indigenous languages by state and age groups according
to literacy status and sex]. Available at: http://www3.inegi.org.mx/sistemas/
tabuladosbasicos/default.aspx?c=27302&s=est [consulted: December 2014]

National Institute for Educational Assessment and Evaluation (INEE) (2014).

Comunicado de prensa sobre los resultados de la Consulta previa, libre e informada
a pueblos y comunidades indgenas sobre la evaluacin educativa [Press release
on the results of the free and informed Consultation with Indigenous peoples and
communities on the assessment of education]. Available at: http://www.inee.edu.mx/
[consulted: December 2014].

National Institute for Educational Assessment and Evaluation (INEE) (2007). La

educacin para la poblacin en contextos vulnerables [Education for populations in
vulnerable contexts], Mexico, 135 pp.

National Institute for Educational Assessment and Evaluation (INEE) (n.d.). Banco
de Indicadores Educativos: Indicador RS02 Caractersticas de los profesores de 3
de primaria [Education Indicators Bank: Indicator RS02, Characteristics of 3rd grade
teachers], Mexico. Available at: http://www.inee.edu.mx/index.php/bases-de-datos/
banco-de-indicadores-educativos [consulted: December 2014]

National Institute for Indigenous Languages (INALI) (2012). Informe de rendicin de

cuentas 2006-2012. Memoria documental. Normalizacin lingstica [Accountability
report for 2006-2012. Documentary report. Linguistic Standardization], Mexico, 48 pp.
Available at: http://site.inali.gob.mx/pdf/MD_NL.pdf [consulted: December 2014]

National Institute for Indigenous Languages (INALI) (2008). Catlogo de

las Lenguas Indgenas Nacionales: Variantes Lingsticas de Mxico con sus
autodenominaciones y referencias geoestadsticas [Catalogue of National Indigenous
Languages: Linguistic Variations in Mexico with their self-designations and geo-
statistical references], Mexico, Official Daily of the Federation, January 14, 2008.

Romo Viramontes, Raul, et al. (2013). Tendencias de la migracin interna en

Mxico en el periodo reciente, La situacin demogrfica de Mxico 2013
[Internal migration tendencies in Mexico in recent years. The demographic situation
in Mexico 2013], Mexico, National Population Council, p.83-106. Available at:
http://www.conapo.gob.mx/es/CONAPO/La_Situacion_Demografica_de_
Mexico_2013 [consulted: December 2014]

mexicanos primero 81
Public Policy for Learning English in Mexico | SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |

SEP (2014). Programa Especial de Educacin Intercultural 2014-2018 [Special

Intercultural Education Program 2014-2018], Mexico, Official Daily of the
Federation, April 28, 2014].

SEP (2013a). Lineamientos para la Organizacin y Funcionamiento de las Escuelas

de Tiempo Completo. [Guidelines for the Organization and Functioning of Full Time
Schools].

SEP (2013b). Estrategia para la construccin del Plan Integral para el Diagnstico,
Rediseo y Fortalecimiento del Sistema Pblico de Normales [Strategy to build a
Holistic Plan to Diagnose, Re-design and Strengthen the Public Teacher Training
System], Mexico, 44 pp. Available at: http://www.sev.gob.mx/educacion-media-
superior-y-superior/files/2013/11/Reforma-Educativa-Esc-Normales-05.pdf
[consulted: December 2014]

SEP (2013c). Acuerdo no. 657 por el que se emiten las Reglas de Operacin del
Programa de Educacin Bsica para Nios y Nias de Familias Jornaleras Agrcolas
Migrantes [Agreement No. 657 which issues the Operating Rules for the Basic
Education Program for Boys and Girls in Migrant Agricultural Laborer Families],
Mexico, Official Daily of the Federation, February 26, 2013.

SEP (2011a). Estadstica bsica de educacin indgena. Inicio y fin de cycle escolar
2009-2010 [Basic statistics on Indigenous education. Beginning and end of the 2009-
2010 school cycle], Mexico, 81 pp. Available at: http://basica.sep.gob.mx/dgei/pdf/
inicio/informacion/estadisticasDGEI0910.pdf [consulted: December 2014]

SEP (2011b). Acuerdo por el que se establece la articulacin de la educacin bsica

[Agreement that establishes the articulation for basic education], Mexico, Official
Daily of the Federation, August 19, 2011.

SEP (2010). Modelo curricular para la formacin profesional de los maestros de

educacin bsica [Curricular model for professional training of basic education
teachers], Mexico, Directorate General of Higher Education for Education
Professionals], 185 pp. Available at: http://ene.edu.mx/portal/archivos/reforma.pdf
[consulted: December 2014]

SEP (2004). Licenciatura en Educacin Primaria con Enfoque Intercultural Bilinge.

Plan de Estudios 1997 [Undergraduate Degree in Primary Education with an
Intercultural Bilingual Focus. Study Plan 1997], Mexico, 45 pp. Available at: http://
www.dgespe.sep.gob.mx/planes/leprib/descargar [consulted: December 2014]

Tellez Vazquez, Yolanda, et al. (2013). Presencia indgena, marginacin y condicin

de ubicacin geogrfica, La situacin demogrfica de Mxico 2013, [Indigenous
presence, marginalization, and geographic location. The demographic situation in
Mexico 2013], Mexico, National Population Council, p.125-140. Available at: http://
www.conapo.gob.mx/es/CONAPO/La_Situacion_Demografica_de_Mexico_2013
[consulted: December 2014]

82 mexicanos primero
 CHAPTER 4
The State of
English Language
Learning in Mexico
Miguel Szkely,
Jennifer L. ODonoghue
y Hortensia Prez
The State of English Language Learning in Mexico
he first element of the profile for
Basic Education graduates defined
by the Ministry of Education (SEP)
establishes that, upon graduation from
lower secondary school, every student should have
the basic tools to communicate in English (SEP, 2011a).
Towards this end, the current official study plan includes
English as a mandatory second language for all students
in the country from the age of five and establishes a
minimum of between 1,060 and 1,900 hours dedi-
cated to English language study from the third year of
preschool through the last grade of lower secondary
school (See Table 4.1).
Likewise, the National English Program in Basic
Education (PNIEB; SEP, 2011b) establishes that the
purpose of teaching English in lower secondary school
is for students to consolidate their mastery of English
in basic communicational situations and develop spe-
cific competencies in the social practice of the language,
using varied communicative situations in which they
understand and produce, in a general way, oral and
written texts on different topics (p. 25; translation and
Table 4.1 Hours of English in Basic Education
Level Schedule
Preschool (3rd year) All
Part time
Primary School
Extended school day
(1st to 6th grade)
Full time
Part time
Lower Secondary School
Extended school day
(7th to 9th grade)
Full time
Source: Prepared by authors with data from SEP, 2011a.
84
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
emphasis ours). More specifically, the program asserts
that students graduating from lower secondary school
will reach the equivalent of level B1 of the Common
European Framework of Reference for Languages
(CEFR), equivalent to being on the threshold as
an independent English user (See Table 4.2 for more
about the CEFR and 4.3 for a list of the competencies
expected at the B1 level).
As discussed in Chapter 2 of this report, reaching these
learning objectives is particularly relevant for Mexican
young people in the 21st century. However, in Mexico,
although we do not know with certainty the state of
English language learning, the indicators we do have
suggest that we are not reaching the established goals.
For eight years Education First (EF) has presented the
English Proficiency Index (EPI), a measurement of the
English competencies of more than 750,000 adults
over the age of 18 promoted as the worlds larg-
est ranking of English skills (Education First, 2014).
The fourth edition, published in 2014 with data from
2013, places Mexico in the low proficiency level, in
39th place out of a total of 63 countries, behind such
countries as Argentina, Spain, South Korea, Vietnam,
Peru, Russia, China, and Brazil.
The topic of English proficiency in Mexico has also
been taken up in various surveys. The CIDAC sur-
vey on human resources, for example, conducted in
March 2008 with a representative sample of the ur-
ban population between the ages of 14 and 55, found
Hours of English per Hours of English per
week (minimum) year (minimum)
Not specified 100
2.5 100
3 120
5 200
3 120
5 200
5 200
Total 1,060 a 1,900
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Table 4.2 the Common European Framework of Reference For Languages

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) is an essential part of the general linguistic
policy of the Council of Europe and has become an international standard to measure the level of oral and written
comprehension and expression in a language.

In general, it describes comprehensively what students must learn to be able to use a language to communicate, as
well as what knowledge and skills they need to develop to be able to act effectively in different cultural contexts
(Council of Europe, 2011).

The CEFR establishes a scale of six levels to organize language learning. In turn, users are classified
in three categories (basic, independent, and skilled) to describe their linguistic level, resulting in the
following matrix:

Basic education
User Level Descriptor grade (PNIEB)
A1 Access 4th grade
Basic
A2 Platform 7th grade
B1 Threshold 9th grade
Independent
B2 Advanced --
C1 Effective operational proficiency --
Skilled
C2 Mastery --

Source: Prepared by authors with data from the Council of Europe, 2011 and SEP, 2011b.

SORRY?

Table 4.3 Expected competencies in English upon completion of lower secondary (Level B1)

Grasp the main idea and some details of a va-
riety of brief oral and written texts, using ones
knowledge about the world.
Understand and use information from different sources.
Produce brief, standard texts that respond to personal,
creative, social, and academic needs.
Adapt ones language to unexpected communicative
needs.
Recognize and respect the differences between ones
own culture and the cultures of English-speaking
countries.
Express judgments and opinions regarding matters of
interest or related to ones daily reality.
Use language appropriate to a variety of communica-
tive situations.
Develop the linguistic resources to understand the
relation between parts of a statement or text.
Edit ones own texts or those of classmates.
Use conventional grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Intervene in formal communicative acts.
Maintain communication, recognize when it breaks
off, and use strategic resources to reestablish it when
necessary.

Source: National English Program in Basic Education, SEP, 2011b.

mexicanos primero 85
The State of English Language Learning in Mexico
that 23% of Mexicans reported that they speak or
understand English, while another 12% said that they
know at least a bit of the language (Estrada, 2008).
According to this survey, more than one out of ev-
ery three Mexicans in urban communities reported
that they knew English. A consultation carried out in
January of 2013 (Mitofsky, 2013), on the other hand,
found that less than 12% of the adult population indi-
cated that they spoke English. Although this percent-
age varied greatly from urban (14.5%) to rural (2.4%)
contexts and by region (22% in the north vs. 4% in
the southeast), the important discrepancies between
the Mitofsky and the CIDAC surveys are notable and
are indicative of the possible weaknesses of percep-
tion surveys. For example, if someone has studied
English and received good grades in his courses, they
will almost certainly respond that yes, they know the
language. However, as we will see in this chapter, the
fact that they invested time and resources does not
necessarily mean that they have learned. Moreover,
the EPI index and the surveys that have been done to
date have focused on adults, making it more difficult to
evaluate education system policies and practices. We
need a precise, representative measurement of English
language learning in basic education.
This study seeks to address this important gap in our
knowledge regarding the state of English learning in
basic public education in Mexico. It has two main ob-
jectives. First, to develop and apply a highly precise tool
to measure the level of English use and comprehension
achieved by students graduating from the countrys pub-
lic lower secondary schools. In that sense, the purpose
Figure 4.1 Percent of young people by level of English obtained
on the EUCIS English assessment
A0
Complete
lack of
knowledge
79%
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| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
is to assess students basic tools to communicate in
English, in accordance with the national and interna-
tional standards embodied in the objectives of the of-
ficial study plan for basic education.To this end, we de-
veloped the English Language Use and Comprehension
Exam for Lower Secondary School Graduates (EUCIS,
for its acronym in Spanish). (See the Methodological
Appendix at the end of this chapter for a more com-
plete discussion of the development of the instrument,
as well as its application and interpretation)
Second, this study seeks to understand a fundamen-
tal factor in teaching and learning English: the level of
proficiency in that language among English teachers.
We understand that the ideal teacher does not just
master the language, but also develops adequate com-
petencies (knowledge, abilities, and attitudes) to teach
it (Perez Lopez, Bellaton, and Emilsson, 2012). Hence, in
this study, we set ourselves to the task of understand-
ing how we are doing in the first component of this
equation; we measured the level of use and compre-
hension of the English language among teachers of this
subject in public lower secondary schools, using the
same instruments and criteria applied to their students.
4.1 The state of English language learning among
students
Almost none of the young people who participated
in this study 97% - reached the level established
by the SEP to graduate from lower secondary school
3%
A1 A2 B1
13% 5% Expected
level
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(See Figure 4.1). After at least 360 hours spent in
English classes in lower secondary (and quite possibly
hundreds of additional hours in primary school), four
out of every five students showed a complete lack of
knowledge of the language, corresponding to Level A0,
a level inexistent in the CEFR, but which was created
for the purposes of this study. A little over one out of
every ten reached the expected level for a 4th grade
student (A1), while one out of every twenty was found
to have the level expected for a 7th grade student (A2).
Only three out of every one hundred students
achieved the level set out in the objectives of
the national curriculum (B1).
To give an idea of what these results mean:
1 out of every 5 were unable to identify elements
in a text such as the authors name, telephone
number, address, or age.
1 out of every 7 answered the following ques-
tion incorrectly:
My name ___ Daniel Rojas.
a) am b) is c) are
7 out of every 10 could not
answer the following ques-
tion correctly:
Who is Kathy Smith?
a) Yes, she is.
b) Shes fine.
c) The director.
The results are conclusive: our youth finish basic edu-
cation far from having the basic tools to communi-
cate in English.
4.1.1 Unequal opportunities: English language learning by
socioeconomic level
An analysis of the levels of English achieved by youth
having different characteristics shows that there is not
a significant difference between boys and girls (See
Figure 4.2). Girls have slightly better results, 3.6% reach
the expected level (B1) compared to 3.0% of boys;
however, in both cases almost four out of every five
young people do not advance beyond level A0. The
lack of significant learning of English seems to affect
both young boys and girls equally.
When we break down the results by socioeconomic
level, however, important differences are observed
between students from families with more economic
advantages and those from families with lower incomes
(See Figure 4.3). Although in both cases the pattern
of results is the same, with the majority of students at
level A0 - complete lack of knowledge of the language
the probability that a young person in a vulnerable
situation will not learn English is higher than in the case
of youth from more advantaged backgrounds.This re-
sult, although not statistically significant, coincides with
the findings of Blanca Heredia and Daniela Rubio for
youth entering higher education (See Chapter 2.3):
the learning of English in Mexico is inequitable, in this
case, among youth in public schools.

Figure 4.2 Distribution of students by gender and level of English obtained

4% 3%
A0 A1 B1
A2
12% 13%
6% 5%

78% 79%

Female Male

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Likewise, when we analyze the results for gender by
socioeconomic level, we find that the interaction be-
tween family income and level of English achieved dif-
fers by gender. Specifically, the effect of socioeconomic
status seems to be stronger in young girls than in
young boys. More young girls from advantaged families
reach higher levels of English, while young girls from
families with less income have lower levels of achieve-
ment. If we consider category A0, for example, there
is a difference of 16 percentage points between the
most privileged and those from the more marginalized
classes (See Figure 4.4); among boys, this difference is
seven points. Moreover, differences in gender seem
to be greater among those in the high SES category.
For some reason, girls from more privileged families
have been able to take greater advantage of the re-
sources available to them to learn a bit more English
than other boys and girls.
4.1.2 Perfect simulation: English language learning and
school grades
There is not even a moderate correlation be-
tween the average grade obtained in English
during lower secondary school and the level
achieved on the test. If, for example, we con-
sider the distribution of students according
to their results on EUCIS, taking into account their

Figure 4.3 Proficiency in English by Socioeconomic Status (SES)

4% 2%
A0 A1 B1
A2
16% 11% 7% 3%

73% 84%

High SES (A, B) Low & very low SES (D, D+. E)

Figure 4.4 Percentage of youth in Levels A0 and B1 by Gender

and Socioeconomic Status (SES)

5% 4% 2% 2%

Female, Male, Male, Female,

SES A/B SES A/B SES D, D+, E SES D, D+, E

69%
76%
83% 85%

Level A0 Level B1

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average grade in the subject during the last year of to participate in this study): the better the grade, the
lower secondary school, we would expect something higher the level of English (See Figure 4.5). However,
like an upward trend starting more or less from 60% as we can see in Figure 4.5, the actual distribution is
correct answers (or a grade of 6, the minimum accepted far from meeting this expectation.

Figure 4.5 Distribution of students on EUCIS according to average

grade in English during lower secondary education

100

90
Expected
80 Tendency

70
% of correct answers

60

50
Actual
Tendency
40

30

20

10

0
6 6.5 7 7.5 8 8.5 9 9.5 10
Average grade in English in lower secondary

Figure 4.6 Level of English among students with an average grade above 9

11%

A0 A1 A2 B1
13%
24%

53%

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Getting a good grade in English does not guarantee
actually learning the language. In fact, more than one
out of every two youth with an average grade of 9 or
higher in English showed a complete lack of knowledge
of the language (See Figure 4.6). We also found the
opposite to be true; 2% of the students who had an
average grade below 7 reached level B1. However, it
is easier to imagine how someone who can communi-
cate in English does not get good grades (skipping class,
not doing the homework, not behaving well, getting
on the teachers bad side, etc.). But how is it possible
that more than half of the students receiving a grade
of 9 or more show a complete lack of knowledge of
the language? This is deceiving students and their par-
ents, who probably have the impression that they are
learning something, that they are good in English; in
reality, English grades in school are simply an indica-
tor of the simulation rampant in an education system
that rewards many things, but not necessarily learning.
4.1.3 The importance of exposure: Other factors that
influence the learning of English
Around 15% of the youth in our sample reported hav-
ing taken an extracurricular English course. Participation
in these courses seems to have a slight influence on the

Figure 4.7 Level of English by participation In extra-curricular courses

A2 1% 4% 3%
A0 A1 B1
3% 7% 5%
16% 14% 12%

80% 76% 79%

Free Paid No extra classes

Figure 4.8 Level of English by travel to an English-speaking country

6% 3%
A2
A0 A1 B1
9% 5%
16% 12%

69%
80%

Has travelled Has not travelled

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level of English obtained, but this depends on whether
the course was free or paid (see Figure 4.7).Youth who
paid for an English course achieved slightly better re-
sults, while those who took free extra classes showed
achievement very similar to that of young people not
taking any extra courses; in fact, the lowest percent-
age of students reaching the expected level of B1 was
found among those who had taken free courses.
Another factor we analyzed is related to students di-
rect exposure to the use of the language, for example,
though travel to an English-speaking country. Most of
the youth reported that they had not traveled to an
English-speaking country; only one out of every 10
young people had this experience, although this per-
centage varied by socioeconomic level. Among more
privileged youth, one out of every four reported that
they had spent time in an English-speaking country,
compared to only three out of every 100 among those
from lower income families. Those who had traveled
showed better results in the level of English obtained,
as seen in Figure 4.8.
Moreover, it seems that the effect of having traveled
or not is stronger among youth from families with
less income, specifically among boys from low-income
families (See Table 4.4).
4.1.4 English use and comprehension
The EUCIS exam measures proficiency in five different
areas of English: listening comprehension, reading com-
prehension, vocabulary, grammar, and multimodal. If we
consider the results by area of use and comprehension,
we see similar patterns at every level. In no area or level
did the average of correct answers surpass 64% (See
Figure 4.9). This suggests that the deficiencies are
generalized.
Although this varied by level, in general, young people
showed greater achievement in reading and listening
comprehension and less on grammar and multimodal
Why English?
We should do something every day
at the least do something in English
every day - start the day reading
a book in English, a song,
or whatever interests us.
Student, 9th grade,
Guanajuato

Table 4.4 Percentage of Youth at Level A0 according to SES, gender,

and travel to an English-speaking country

Has Has not Bonus of having traveled

traveled traveled (percentage points)
High 69% 73% +4%
SES
Low 59% 85% +16%
Female 71% 79% +8%
Gender
Male 67% 81% +14%
Female + High SES 68% 69% +1%
Female + Low SES 83% 85% +2%
Gender + SES
Male + High SES 71% 78% +7%
Male + Low SES 45% 85% +40%

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Figure 4.9 Average of correct answers by level of QUESTIONS and area of proficiency

61% 64%

55% 55%
50%
46%
41% 42%
37% 37% 37% 38% 38% 37% 36%
30% 31%
28%

Listening Reading Vocabulary Grammar Multimodal total

Comprehension Comprehension

A1 A2 B1

Table 4.6 Examples of Multimodal questions

How are your classes? Its cold in here

a. Soon. a. Close the window.
Level A1
b. Fine. b. Call the doctor.
c. Math and English. c. Open the window.

Where is she going? Im going to take a trip this summer.

a. Now. a. Im glad you enjoyed it.
Level A2
b. To the library. b. Where did you go?
c.Yesterday c That sounds exciting!

Do you want to work with us on this project? Wheres Rosa? I havent seen her lately.
Yes, Im very _______________ in it. a. Shes always late.
Level B1 a. interested b. Shes visiting her family in Mexico.
b. interesting c. She will be visited by her family
c. boring

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| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
questions, those that measure understanding of an in-
teraction or natural use of the language (See Table 4.6
for examples). These results are worrisome because,
on average, students could only answer three out of
nine questions of this type correctly, even questions
corresponding to more basic levels.These results seem
to reflect teaching based on understanding, but not
responding, on receiving, but not putting ones learn-
ing into practice.
4.2 The state of learning English among English
teachers
In the case of English teachers, more than half of
the participants recorded a level below that
which their students are expected to achieve
(Level B1). One out of every four teachers only reached
level A1, that expected for a 4th grade student, and
12% level A2, that expected for a 7th grade student.
Perhaps the most disturbing result was that one out
of every seven English teachers demonstrated
a complete lack of knowledge of the language.
As in the case of students, there are no notable dif-
ferences by gender, but variations in English level are
observed based on teachers socioeconomic levels
Figure 4.10 Level of English obtained by English teachers
according to socioeconomic status (SES)
A0 A1
12%
22% 22%
28%
Middle SES (C-, C, C+)
mexicanos primero
The State of English Language Learning in Mexico
(See Figure 4.10). While half of middle SES teachers
reached a level of B1, only about a third of teachers
with lower incomes reached this level. Likewise, the fact
that more than one out of every five low-SES English
teachers shows a complete lack of knowledge of the
language is disturbing. As seen among young people,
it seems that socioeconomic situation plays a deter-
mining role in the development of teachers linguistic
skills in English.
Participation in some type of training to accredit them
as English teachers was another factor that seems to
have influenced results. Nearly three out of every four
teachers in the sample reported having taken some kind
of training: two-thirds of them in a public institution or
program.When we compare the teachers who had been
exposed to training related to their professional work
with those who had not, we see important differences,
above all at the extremes - in levels A0 and B1 (See
Figure 4.11). More than half of the teachers who had
some type of training reached Level B1, while only 39%
of those without training reached that level. However,
these same results reflect a disappointing situation: al-
most half of those who had participated in training did
not reach the level expected of their students; as in the
case of student grades, this serves as an indicator of
the poor quality and the simulation also present in the
training opportunities available for teachers.
52%
37%
A2 B1
14% 13%
Low & very low SES (D, D+. E)
93
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Figure 4.11 Results obtained by English teachers

according to participation in training

51%
39%

A0 A1 A2 B1
11% 13% 14%
23% 24% 24%

With Training Without Training

4.3 Conclusions expected.Teachers have the right to quality continuous

professional development (DOF, 2013); the evidence
The results of this study lead us to conclude that the from this study casts doubt upon whether the State
system for teaching English in Mexico has failed. We is fulfilling this responsibility.
do not offer significant learning opportunities to our
girls, boys and youth. After finishing their basic edu- It is urgent that we develop solutions to the cur-
cation, after dedicating at least 360 hours to English rent situation of simulation: a national education
classes, they cannot put what they have learned into policy that suppor ts local strategies to guaran-
practice, even in simple communications. Instead, the tee that Mexican youth not only pass a subject, but
results show the simulation of a system that hands out also develop the skills to communicate adequately,
passing grades and diplomas, but does not guarantee participate with the world, and continue to learn
actual learning. A system where family characteristics in and with English.
and the opportunities offered to children outside of
school have more influence on what is learned than
the school itself. On the subject of learning English, the
education system clearly is not meeting its obligation Why English?
to promote the right to quality education, the maxi-
mum achievement of learning.
English is useful for all kinds of benefits,
Further, the results show that a considerable part of to get better paid jobs, to be able
the problem may stem from almost half of those who to travel without problems,
are in charge of teaching the language not even reach- to know other cultures.
ing the level of use and comprehension expected of
their students. Twenty-eight percent of teachers have
not received any kind of training, and of those who
Mother, Jalisco
have had access to this kind of support, at least half
of them finished with results below the minimum

94 mexicanos primero
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References

Council of Europe (2011). Common European Framework of Reference for

Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. Available at: http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/
linguistic/Source/Framework_EN.pdf [consulted: September 2014]

Consulta Mitofsky (2013). Mexicanos y los Idiomas Extranjeros. Encuesta Nacional

en Viviendas. Enero [Mexicans and Foreign Languages. National Household Survey.
January]. Available at: http://consulta.mx/web/index.php/estudios-e-investigaciones/
mexico-opina/473-mexicanos-y-los-idiomas-extranjeros.
[consulted: November 2014]

Education First (2014). English Proficiency Index (EPI). Available at: http://www.
ef.com/epi/ [consulted: November 2014]

Estrada, R. (2008). Turn it on, factores asociados al dominio del ingls y la

computacin en Mexico[Turn it on, factors associated with proficiency in English
and computer science in Mexico], Este Pas, 213 (December), pp. 24-27. Available
at: http://estepais.com/inicio/historicos/213/7_encuesta_estrada.pdf
[consulted: November 2014]

Official Daily of the Federation (2013). Decreto por el que se expide la

Ley General del Servicio Profesional Docente, publicado el 11 de septiembre
de 2013 [Decree by which the General Law for Teacher Professional Service
is issued, published on September 11, 2013]. Available at:
http://www.dof.gob.mx/nota_detalle.php?codigo=5313843&fecha=11/09/2013.
[consulted: September 2014]

Perez Lopez, Maria Soledad, Bellaton, Patricia, and Emilsson, Elin (2012). La
ensenanza de lenguas en Mxico. Hacia un enfoque plurilingue [Language
teaching in Mexico. Towards a multilingual approach], Hecho en casa, 10. Available
at: http://educa.upn.mx/hecho-en-casa/num-10/92-la-ensenanza-de-lenguas-en-
mexicohacia-un- enfoque-plurilinguee [consulted: November 2014]

SEP (2011a). Plan de Estudios 2011. Educacin Bsica. [2011 Study Plan. Basic
Education] Available at: http://basica.sep.gob.mx/dgdc/sitio/pdf/PlanEdu2011.pdf
[consulted: November 2014]

SEP (2011b). Programa Nacional de Ingls en Educacin Bsica. Segunda Lengua:

Ingls. Fundamentos Curriculares. Preschool. Primaria. Secundaria. Fase de Expansin
[National English Program in Basic Education. Second Language: English. Curricular
Foundations. Preschool. Primary School. Lower Secondary School. Expansion
Phase]. Available at: http://www.curriculobasica.sep.gob.mx/pdf/pnieb/pnieb_
fundamentos.pdf [consulted: November 2014]

mexicanos primero 95
The State of English Language Learning in Mexico
Methodological appendix
Four components are needed to achieve a highly pre-
cise assessment: a well-designed, suitable instrument,
a relevant, representative group to which to apply it,
application under ideal conditions, and a suitable meth-
odology for interpreting the results. In this section we
briefly present these components.
1) Instrument Design
For the purposes of this study, an instrument was
developed to measure the level of use and compre-
hension of the English language of students who had
graduated from lower secondary schools in Mexico.
The instrument is called the English Language Use
and Comprehension Exam for Lower Secondary School
Graduates (EUCIS, for its acronym in Spanish). The
purpose of the EUCIS is to identify the level of English
proficiency in basic communicative situations that im-
ply the social practice of the language in daily and sur-
vival contexts, in line with that established in the Basic
Education program.
The EUCIS was developed in the following 4 stages:
Stage 1: Development of Reference Framework
The Common European Framework used by
the SEP was taken as a reference, in which stu-
dents are classified in 3 levels of English use and
comprehension:
Level A1, the lowest level of language use, in
which a student can interact in a simple, basic
manner, making simple statements in areas of
immediate need;
Level A2, in which students can participate more
actively in a conversation, although with a bit of
help and having to correct the message and find
some words to make themselves understood;
Level B1 in which students are expected to
develop the skills presented in Table 4.1.
Stage 2: Development of Item Bank
A group was formed with academic experts
from the Autonomous University of the State of
96
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
Mexico, the Mexican Society for Evaluation and
Development of Upper Secondary Education, and
the Center for Education and Social Studies, who
participated in a collegial body (academic design
committee) to design a bank of 450 items - 150
questions for each of the three levels A1, A2,
and B1 - aligned with the Reference Framework.
Stage 3: Validation
To validate and select the items to be incorpo-
rated into the exam, a group was formed of 22
subject experts recognized by the National Center
of Evaluation for Higher Education (CENEVAL),
who proceeded to review whether the questions
complied with the profile and the specifications
of the exam.
Stage 4: Assembly
A final selection was made of 75 questions cover-
ing the areas of listening comprehension, reading
comprehension, vocabulary, grammar, and multi-
modal in each of the reference levels (25 ques-
tions corresponding to level A1, 25 corresponding
to level A2, and 25 corresponding to level B1).
2a) Definition of the sample: Students
One of the objectives of the selection process was to
incorporate students into the sample who faced rela-
tively favorable conditions and who, therefore, would
be expected to achieve the objectives outlined in the
official study plan for those graduating from lower sec-
ondary school.The target population for the study was
students having graduated from public lower secondary
schools in the 2013-2014 school year who entered
upper secondary school in the 2014-2015 cycle. The
sample was limited to urban areas in order to focus
the measurement on students with greater possibili-
ties of having been exposed to English and with higher
socioeconomic levels, once again with the objective
of focusing the measurement on students with better
conditions and academic achievement levels.
We selected 11 cities in Mexico in which a represen-
tative total of 4,727 graduates from public lower sec-
ondary schools were identified who were currently in
upper secondary school (See Table 4.A1). Although the
only requirement to take the test was to have passed
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Table 4.A1 The student sample

Average grade
Nielsen Area City Distribution above 8.0
Tijuana 420 9% 52%
Pacific Area
Culiacan 418 9% 50%
Monterrey 491 10% 59%
Northern Area
Saltillo 401 9% 50%
Guadalajara 437 9% 47%
Bajio Area
Leon 446 9% 52%
Toluca 420 9% 51%
Central Area
Puebla 406 9% 49%
Merida 441 9% 55%
Southeastern Area
Tuxtla Gutierrez 410 9% 51%
Mexico Valley Mexico City 437 9% 54%

Total 11 cities 4,727 100% 52%

Table 4.A2 Teacher sample

English in lower secondary school (with a grade of 6 or
higher), we ensured that at least half of participants had
an average above 8 in the last year of lower secondary
Total 504 100%
school in order to focus the sample on students with
better academic achievement in the subject of English Mexico City 265 53%
2b) Definition of the sample:Teachers Guadalajara 78 15%

Since one of the most important factors for learn- Merida 62 13%
ing the English language can be the role of teachers,
we also applied the exam to a sample of teachers. A Tuxtla Gutierrez 51 10%
sample of 504 active teachers who currently teach the
subject of English in public lower secondary schools Leon 22 4%
in the same urban areas was defined (See Table 4.A2).
Toluca 11 2%
3) Exam application
Monterrey 10 2%
After conducting a pilot exam to refine the question- Culiacan 5 1%
naire and the testing process, the EUCIS was applied to
young people in 20 public upper secondary schools in

mexicanos primero 97
The State of English Language Learning in Mexico | SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |

Why English? The teachers exam was applied individually in an en-

Learning English gave
me personal satisfaction,
because I felt that I had
achieved something.
vironment other than their workplace, with similar
incentives offered: five movie tickets for a complete
test, a laptop for the teacher with the highest result,
and 10 tablets for the next best results.
4) Interpretation of exam results

After having carried out the field operations, the ex-

Student, 9th grade,
Mexico City
the 11 selected urban centers in a controlled environ-
ment, supervised by professional personnel, during the
period from October 7 - 31, 2014. The participating
students were given incentives to guarantee their ef-
fort when taking the exam: five movie tickets for each
participating student who finished the test, a laptop
for the student with the best results per city, and ten
electronic tablets for the students with the next best
performance on the test, also by city.
perts from the Autonomous University of the State
of Mexico, the Mexican Society for Evaluation and
Development of Upper Secondary Education, and the
Center for Education and Social Studies proceeded to
code the results, classifying participants in the differ-
ent levels, A1, A2, and B1. Additionally, due to the fact
that a significant proportion did not reach Level A1, a
classification level of A0 was defined to include those
cases in which participants showed a complete lack
of knowledge of the English language.
Each participants level was determined using the clas-
sification system in Table 4.A3.

Table 4.A3 Classification system for determining English level on EUCIS.

A0
Does not correctly answer 70%
of the questions for level A1,
A2, or B1

A1
Correctly answers 70% or more
of A1 questions, but less than
70% of A2 or B1

A2 Correctly answers 70% or more

of A2 questions, but less than
70% of B1

B1 Correctly answers 70% or more

of B1 questions

98 mexicanos primero
 CHAPTER 5
Good Practices
for Teaching and
Learning Languages
Lilia Julieta Guzmn Acevedo
Good Practices for Teaching and Learning Languages
n education, the term good prac-
tice is used to show, propose, and
illustrate good teaching practices,
effective schools and teachers, as
well as public policies, resources, conditions, and pro-
cesses that facilitate the task of teaching. The objec-
tive in identifying and disseminating these practices
is to encourage reflection and improvement
through exchanging education models and experiences
that have demonstrated good results.
Good practices are useful insofar as they encourage the
creativity of the people who implement them, increase
understanding of the processes implicit in teaching, and
encourage making the most of the resources offered
within a given context in order to support students
full development. A good practice is not simply
one that encourages a certain style of teach-
ing, or whose purpose is to facilitate school ad-
ministrative processes; it is that which fosters
the maximum achievement of learning for all.
In Mexicanos Primero, we maintain that there is no
good practice that is applicable to every context with
the same results. We know that practices are suscep-
tible to at least three factors: 1) the people who carry
them out, 2) the series of processes that are imple-
mented, and 3) the context. With respect to teaching
and learning another language, we seek to recover
those practices that, even though they may
have been developed in other contexts, allow
us to imagine alternatives to face the challenges
that we face as a country in the different environments
of our education system, from the creation of public
policies to the development of teaching practices.
We wished to present the cases in a way that would
give our readers a comprehensive perspective, from
the macro to the micro level, of practices that have
been useful for learning another language internation-
ally as well as in Mexico.Through brief descriptions, we
present the elements - public policies, implementation
100
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Why English?
If you do not know
English, you are left behind.
Student, 8th grade,
Morelia
plans, access to information, citizen participation, teacher
development, information and communication tech-
nologies, and teaching strategies - that in our opinion
are determining factors for consolidating plurilingual
societies.
The exploration involved in preparing this chapter
allowed us to identify an approach in which lan-
guage is not reduced simply to providing stu-
dents with a technical tool or to reaching a certain
level established in the Common European Framework
of Reference for Languages (CEFR). Instead, the poli-
cies and practices we present here conceive of the
learning of another language as the basis for ho-
listic development, in which communication,
intercultural dialogue, and access to informa-
tion play a fundamental role in exercising the
right to learn.
5.1 Good Practice 1: The importance of having a clear
national policy
Although several countries, among them Mexico, have
at different times had a national English policy or pro-
gram, we have chosen to highlight the experiences of
Singapore and the Basque region as cases where
a clear national policy, in the mid- and long-
term, has guided the decisions made and the
actions taken at different levels in the system, with
extremely positive results in terms of the teaching
and learning of languages. In both cases, we see how
these societies, beginning with their education systems,
have managed to consolidate themselves as
truly plurilingual, intercultural communities,
mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
preserving their local languages at the same
time they develop high competencies in other
national languages as well as in English.
5.1.1 Singapore: The construction of an intercultural society.
Located in the southeast of the Asian continent,
throughout its history, Singapore has been a meeting
point of several ethnic groups. Since its origin in 1819,
Chinese, Malays, Indians, and Europeans have lived to-
gether in this territory, which was an English colony until
1963 when it gained independence, although as a part
of Malaysia. At that time, the Malay Government - with
the objective of addressing the challenge of linguistic
diversity and guarantee that no ethnic group would be
favored over another - declared Mandarin, Malay,Tamil,
and English the official languages of the new country.
In 1965, when Singapore became independent from
Malaysia, it kept and deepened this linguistic policy. In
order to provide a lingua franca for communication
between its inhabitants, over several decades, the
Singapore government implemented a series of poli-
cies that established guidelines for: 1) communication
within ethnic groups in which there were different lin-
guistic variations, like the Chinese; 2) communication
between different ethnic groups; and 3) communica-
tion with the rest of the world using English. Since the
1980s, English has been used in primary and second-
ary schools (ten years) to teach such subjects as
mathematics, history, science, and arts, at the
same time that it is studied separately as its
own subject. All students learn in English and in their
mother tongue (Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil) at school.
These efforts have borne fruit. At present, the great
majority of its population of almost 5.5 million people,
of whom 74% are Chinese, 13% Malay, 9% Indian, and
3% Eurasians and Asians, are plurilingual. According to
data from the 2010 population census (Low, 2014),
80% of the literate population fifteen years of age or
older can write and speak English, and 70.5% can com-
municate in one or more additional languages.
As the base of its plurilingual education system,
Singapore has developed a rigorous training
program for English teachers. It starts by selecting
candidates who must prove their capacity to commu-
nicate in English both orally and in written form. This
is followed by a training program in which teachers
mexicanos primero
Good Practices for Teaching and Learning Languages
develop the necessary skills both to teach English and to
teach in English. Finally, when they start working, teach-
ers are supported by a system offering them different
development opportunities based on their strengths,
preferences, and professional trajectories. Plurilingual
support for teachers has meant that, as part of their
ongoing professional development, teachers have had
access to relevant information on teaching, curricular
development, school administration, and educational
leadership, published in English (Low, 2014).
After several decades of concerted, consistent efforts,
this type of education seems to have not only contrib-
uted towards developing its populations skills in English,
but also in building one of the most successful educa-
tion systems in the world today. Singapore tops the list
of countries with the best results in the Program for
International Student Assessment (PISA; OECD, 2013),
the Trends in International Mathematics and Science
Study (TIMSS; Mullis, Martin, Foy, and Arora, 2011) and
the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study
(PIRLS; Mullis, Martin, Foy, and Arora, 2011). As the
Director-General of Education in Singapore states (Asia
Society, 2012), the plurilingual program in Singapore
has had an effect on raising the cognitive competen-
cies of their students (See Chapter 2.5 for more on
plurilingualism and brain development).
In short, Singapore has traveled a nearly fifty-
year-long path to consolidate, more than pluri-
lingual education, an intercultural community,
in which the use of English as the lingua franca does not
threaten cultural heritage linked to the mother tongue
whose use is maintained as a matter of national policy.
5.1.2 The Basque Country: From repression to
plurilingualism.
Located in Western Europe, the Basque Country
has been an autonomous region of Spain since
1979. Previously, and especially during the regime
of Francisco Franco, it suffered the consequences of an
anti-regional-language public policy (both in and out of
school) characterized by efforts to eliminate any cultural
trace, symbol, or characteristic that differed from the
official one (Etxeberria, 2004). In view of this situation,
the ikastolas (schools, in Basque) emerged, supported
by parents determined to defend their grandparents
language, and covertly began to cultivate the Basque
language and culture.
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Good Practices for Teaching and Learning Languages
When the Spanish government approved the Statute
of Autonomy in 1979, the region gained its autono-
my and, with it, control over its education system. At
the beginning of the 1980s, the Basque government
prompted a series of policies designed to offer
quality teaching in the Basque language that
would contribute towards its use and prevent
its extinction, among these was the Decree on
Bilingualism, the Law on the Standardization and Use
of Euskera (Basque), and the Decree to Regularize
the Use of Official Languages (Exteberria, 2004). With
these measures in place, Basque language and culture
were no longer the exclusive heritage of the Ikastola;
from then on they would become part of students
heritage in the rest of the schools, both public and
private, in the Basque region.
To implement these decrees, they ordered teaching be
carried out using four linguistic models whose objective
was to offer different channels and rhythms for girls
and boys from different linguistic origins to learn the
Basque language, as well as Spanish (Etxeberria, 2004).
Since this time, education in the Basque region has
been taught using these four models giving parents
the opportunity to choose the language they
want emphasized in their childrens education.
Table 5.1 presents the current distribution of students
according to these linguistic models.
Likewise, the education policies set the directives
for the training and minimum requirements
that teachers of the Basque language had to
meet. It was not going to be a short- or even mid-
term process. By 2011, twenty-eight years after the four
linguistic models were first implemented, the Basque
regions education system had managed to increase
Table 5.1 Student distribution according to linguistic model in the Basque Country
Model Linguistic Distribution
A More Spanish
B Half Spanish-Half Basque
D More Basque
X Only Spanish
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| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
the percentage of teachers qualified to teach in the
Basque language from 5% to 80% (Gorter and Cenoz,
2011). The strategies used to achieve this consisted,
first, in recruiting exclusively bilingual teachers and,
second, a language-training program for teachers al-
ready in service.
Besides the significant advance achieved in bilingual
education, the Basque education system has shown
itself to be effective at developing skills in the English
language as well. At the beginning of the 1990s, due
to the increasing use of English as the lingua franca for
international communication, but above all as a result
of parent demand, the Education Department of the
Basque region started a plurilingual program that
incorporates English in schools from the age
of four to sixteen (Etxeberria, 2004).
Implementing the program meant training and advis-
ing teachers, preparing materials and developing a sys-
tem to periodically evaluate the results. These actions
were carried out with collaboration from a team of
representatives from different European universities,
taking into account principles for language learning
and childrens evolving psychologies, in addition to in-
corporating an intercultural perspective on education
(Etxeberria, 2004).
The effectiveness of the English program can be ob-
served in the Basque Countrys scores on the English
Proficiency Index (EPI) developed by Education First. In
contrast with the mediocre results for Spain as a whole
(average level, 20th place), the Basque Country is one
of only two regions in that country that reached a high
proficiency level in the use of English (Education First,
2014). In addition, although we do not have evidence of
Student Distribution
15%
19%
65%
1%
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the direct impact that the Basque regions plurilingual
education system has had on learning achievement
more broadly, it should be mentioned that this system
stands out in Spain, and its performance is above the
world average (OCED, 2013).
What the Basque Country has achieved is one ex-
ample of how a minority language can become
part of a countrys cultural heritage and how
the lessons learned in implementing bilingual
education can be used to advance the develop-
ment of plurilingual education by incorporating
the teaching of an international language.
5.2 Good Practice 2: A comprehensive implementation
strategy
Establishing a national policy is an essential step toward
building a plurilingual society, but it is not sufficient
simply to identify where we want to go; we
have to think about how to get there. In the
case of Mexico, for example, we have seen that hav-
ing a national program with objectives specified on
paper has not led to the effective implementation of
that policy, nor to the desired results. A holistic imple-
mentation strategy is necessary, one that defines the
characteristics, needs, and resources (social, cultural, and
economic) of the target population. A comprehensive
strategy involves a high level of articulation between
the actions of different sectors working toward objec-
tives that have been defined in different areas and at
multiple levels in the short-, medium-, and long-term.
Without a comprehensive implementation
strategy, any public policy will be of low im-
pact (Durlak, 2013).
Several countries in Latin American, are currently im-
plementing policies and programs to promote teach-
ing of the English language.The Chilean Governments
2014-2030 National English Strategy offers one ex-
ample of a comprehensive implementation strategy.
Based on a diagnosis of the level of proficiency in
English in the country, the program seeks to develop
and strengthen the Chilean populations competencies
in the English language in order to speed up Chiles
insertion into the global world and improve its com-
petitiveness (Chilean government, 2014; translation
ours). The government has established four strategic
mexicanos primero
Good Practices for Teaching and Learning Languages
areas (family and society; schools and students; initial
and continuous training for English teachers; and English
for specific purposes), each of which has objectives set
out in the short-, medium-, and long-term, as well as a
set of articulated actions to be carried out by
different stakeholders and sectors.
Having an institution responsible for reaching the strat-
egys objectives can help to develop complementarity
and synergy between the different stakeholders and
their actions. The Chilean Government, for example,
created the English Unit for Competitiveness, an inter-
ministerial committee that convenes the various insti-
tutions involved in the National English Strategy as well
as the Ministries of Education, Economy, Development
and Tourism, and Labor and Social Security (Chilean
Government, 2014).
Short-, medium-, and long-term actions are defined
taking into account the strategys objectives and goals,
and building off of the actions that are currently being
taken with respect to learning English in the four dif-
ferent areas. Short-term actions are planned so
as to create the conditions in which medium-
and long-term strategies will be possible. For
example, the country needs to develop basic educa-
tion teachers proficiency in the language and provide
training on how to teach it so that, within ten years, the
Chilean government can make the teaching of math-
ematics and science in English compulsory (Chilean
Government, 2014).
Why English?
Several times we proposed that
they give them more English, but they
say that we had better take them to
(private) English classes because the
school does not have time to give
them more subjects.
Parent, Mexico City
103
Good Practices for Teaching and Learning Languages
Why English?
We just barely start to concentrate when
the bell rings and they do not let us do any more.
Yes, its 50 minutes, but without counting the time it takes us
to sit down and get quiet, and if the teacher comes late, that
means 20-30 minutes and the teacher tries to explain, but he
has to do it so fast that sometimes we cannot understand him
and in the next class there is another topic, but
the previous one wasnt very clear for us.
Student, 7th grade, Guanajuato
5.3 Good Practice 3: Access to information
Research is fundamental to the development of public
policies. Reliable, public, high quality informa-
tion must form the basis of any policy, from
diagnosis and problem definition to the pos-
sible ways of solving it; research-based evidence
helps us understand contexts and stakeholders, pre-
pare comprehensive implementation strategies, moni-
tor their progress, and evaluate the scope of their im-
pact. This research can be generated by academic or
government institutions, by civil society organizations
or international agencies, or through a collaboration
of these groups.
The work carried out by the British Council provides a
good example of the contribution research on teach-
ing and learning of English can make. In its 2013 study
on English in India, prepared in collaboration with the
ACER Foundation and the non-governmental organi-
zation Pratham (Berry, 2013), the British Council of-
fers important information on the education system
in India that improves understanding of how English
teaching can be improved in the region. Similarly, re-
search is useful in following-up on the implementation
of public policies and assessing their impact; in addition
to presenting results, this type of information allows us
to identify areas of opportunity and propose strategies
to improve them, as we saw in the case of the Chilean
Governments 2014-2030 National English Strategy.
Another example comes from the National Education
Ministry in Colombia.Thanks to the results of a diagno-
sis conducted in 2009 on teachers English proficiency
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levels, the government learned that only 10% of English
teachers reached level B2 or higher (according to the
Common European Framework of Reference for
Languages, CEFR).This information served as the foun-
dation for the establishment, as part of the National
Program for Bilingualism, of a specific line of work dedi-
cated to providing teacher training based on the actual
and specific needs of teachers (Colombia Learns, 2014).
5.4 Good Practice 4: Citizen participation
Citizen participation is crucial to identifying problems
and gathering together affected actors who can, in turn,
participate in an organized way in defining priorities
and implementing strategies to resolve them. Citizens
are also key actors in the processes of implementa-
tion, follow-up, and accountability.
In this chapter, we highlight the work of parents, whose
participation is extremely important in the exercise of
young peoples right to learn (Wilder, 2013). In learn-
ing another language, this participation takes
two main paths: demanding quality education
from authorities and supporting learning pro-
cesses per se. In the Basque Country, for example,
parents were the fundamental force driving authori-
ties decisions to implement actions for bilingual and
plurilingual education.
The state coalition Californians Together provides an-
other example of the importance of parent participa-
tion in language policy.This group allies parents, teach-
ers, defenders of education, and civil rights groups
who are committed to guaranteeing equal access to
education for all children. Founded in 1998 after ap-
proval of Proposition 227 in California established
English as the official language of instruction in public
schools, effectively forbidding bilingual education, the
objective of Californians Together is to foster full dem-
ocratic participation through quality education for
children and parents from marginalized communities.
One of its main achievements has been to foster the
additive bilingual teaching model in which girls, boys
and youth learn another language without risking the
loss of their mother tongue. At present, they
are working to force the state to offer bilingual
or plurilingual education to all young people in
California. This type of citizen coalition can
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| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
be fundamental in creating social pressure in
support of a national policy.
5.5 Good Practice 5: The importance of teachers
In order for the teaching-learning relationship to work
effectively, we need qualified teachers. A qualified teach-
er is one who has the appropriate abilities and knowl-
edge, has had access to high-quality initial training and
continuous development, has attitudes and values that
promote learning for all, and knows not only how to
use the technology and teaching materials available
in their school, but also integrates these into their
teaching practice, the curriculum and the local context
(ODonoghue, 2013; translation ours).
One clear lesson from the cases of Singapore and
the Basque Country is that the success of a pub-
lic policy for learning another language or
plurilingual education depends largely on the
suitability of teachers.The first step that should be
considered is a diagnosis of the teaching staff in order
to design a development strategy that will serve the
needs of in-service teachers, as we saw in the examples
of Chile and Colombia.
In addition, rigorous selection and training strat-
egies for future teachers must be prepared. Both
should go beyond certifying teachers proficien-
cy in the language they will teach to guarantee-
ing that they will have the necessary teaching
competencies to teach in that language and, in
the case of bilingual teaching, that they have the neces-
sary knowledge to teach other subjects in that language.
In Mexico, for example, the state of Guanajuato has
established both language proficiency and experience
in teaching the language as part of the basic criteria
for its English teachers; the state then provides teach-
ers with ongoing support, from in-class observations
and specific feedback to monthly group training ses-
sions (personal communication with the Guanajuato
Department of English).
One example of effective in-service teacher training is
offered by the Inter-American Partnership for Education
(IAPE).This initiative, carried out by Worldfund in col-
laboration with the Rassias Center for World Languages
and Cultures at Dartmouth College, began operations
in 2007 with the goal of transforming English
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Good Practices for Teaching and Learning Languages
teaching in the most marginalized public
schools in Mexico. The proposal consists of train-
ing, empowering, and supporting a network of English
teachers and thus achieving enduring, sustainable chang-
es in classrooms (Worldfund, 2014).
IAPE offers three kinds of training programs. The first
is for teachers with an intermediate level of proficien-
cy in English (IAPE Intensive English), the second and
third are for teachers with an advanced level of profi-
ciency in English (IAPE Teachers Collaborative Mexico
and IAPE Teachers Collaborative USA). The first two
are offered in Mexico and the third takes place at
Dartmouth College in the United States. The three
programs provide a training component in teaching
techniques as well as ongoing support for teachers.
Teacher training consists of learning the Rassias Method,
a rigorous, interactive and highly effective system for
teaching languages that banishes inhibitions and fosters
authentic communication (Rassias Center for World
Languages and Cultures, 2014). The basic premise of
this model is that students speak to learn rather than
learn to speak. IAPEs structure is designed so that
teachers, as they advance in their training, act as facili-
tators and later as trainers in the training programs.
This fosters the creation of a collaborative net-
work among teachers. Teachers trained by IAPE
commit themselves to applying what they have learned
in Mexican public schools for at least three years, to
be actively involved in the IAPE Virtual Community,
and to provide advice and support to their colleagues
(Worldfund, 2014).
An important aspect of the IAPE initiative is its efforts
to evaluate the impact of IAPE training on teachers
English skills, teaching practices, and student learning. An
evaluation carried out in 2012, for example, found that
teachers trained by IAPE spoke in English 14% more
than their untrained peers (Bando and Li, 2014); this
becomes more important when we consider that, on
average, English teachers in the control group
only spoke English 28% of the time in their
classes. Likewise, teachers from IAPE used more class
time for dynamic games, they used didactic materials
more frequently, and they spent more time listening
to and talking with students. As for the students, the
evaluation found that, with trained teachers, their
interest in learning English increased, they felt
more secure regarding their academic and
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Good Practices for Teaching and Learning Languages
professional future, and they advanced the
equivalent of ten additional weeks within the
official English program.
The importance of teachers is demonstrated most
clearly when the actions implemented in their favor -
from initial preparation to opportunities for continu-
ous development - empower them as the primary
agents in the exercise of the right of girls, boys, and
youth to learn.
5.6 Good Practice 6: Incorporating technology
The advance in Information and Communication
Technologies (ICT) has changed our way of life. In to-
days society, girls, boys and youth have access, through
different means, to information that they used to ac-
quire at school through their teachers. One of the
most common roles of a teacher used to be that of
information transmitter, distributing human knowl-
edge to the next generations; this role has now been
replaced by that of teaching students how to teach
themselves (Bergmann and Sams, 2014). ICT can
be an important support tool for teachers
and students in this task. In this section we want to
highlight the role of ICT in the process of teach-
ing and learning a second language.
In 2007, Uruguay began implementation of the Ceibal
Plan, a social and technology inclusion strategy imple-
mented through the education system (Valliant, 2013).
Inspired by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, the
Ceibal Plan consists of providing a laptop to each child
to promote digital inclusion,in order to reduce the digi-
tal gap both with respect to other countries and among
Why English?
It is also important
because all jobs now ask
you for another language.
Student, 7th grade,
Guerrero
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the citizens in Uruguay, in order for greater and better
access to education and culture to be possible (Ceibal
Plan, 2014; translation ours). The Plan is comprised
of three components: 1) an education component,
whose objective is to improve the quality of education;
2) a social component, whose objective is inclusion and
equity; and 3) a technological component, which seeks
to achieve telecommunication infrastructure that will
enable adequate connectivity and software develop-
ment (Rivoir and Lamschetein, 2012).
Within the Ceibal Plans framework, as a solution
to the lack of English teachers in Uruguay, the Ceibal in
English program emerged in 2012, designed to teach
English to children and their teachers in the fourth, fifth,
and sixth grades.The project started with a pilot phase in
20 public schools; after a detailed evaluation, the program
was extended in 2013 and 2014, to reach more
than 50,000 children in 400 schools throughout
the countr y, equivalent to 16.5% of the total
student population (National Statistics Institute
of the Eastern Republic of Uruguay, 2014; Ceibal Plan,
2014).
A new teaching model was developed in order to
carry out the project, consisting of combined class-
room and distance teaching, provided in the form of
three 45-minute-long English classes a week - A, B,
and C. The model adopts an innovative use of video-
conferencing technology that, according to its design-
ers, allows distance teaching in real time without losing
the benefits of the communicational methodology of
language teaching (Ceibal Plan, 2014).
Class A is taught by a Remote Teacher (RT) via vid-
eoconference; the Classroom Teacher (CT) plays an
active role in facilitating learning, besides taking charge
of handling the group. Classes B and C are taught by
the CT through highly detailed class plans that in-
clude reviewing and recycling what is taught in Class
A (Ceibal Plan, 2014).
Collaborative work is at the center of the
program. The teaching pair, composed of the RT
and the CT meet - online - every week to plan and
agree upon the classroom dynamic. The RT - usually
a foreigner - has a level C1 or higher of English ac-
cording to the CEFR and a minimum level of B1 in
Spanish to guarantee communication and coordina-
tion with the CT. Likewise, he or she has the teaching
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competencies to teach English as a second language.
The CT usually has a low level in English, but knows
the Uruguayan education system, the school, and the
students, and agrees to start an individual process to
learn English outside of school (Ceibal Plan, 2014).The
technical team currently collaborates with the British
Council, which functions as a partner providing sup-
port and assistance, contracting RTs as well as training
and certifying CTs.
The program is designed to take students, after three
years and 200 hours of learning English, from level A0 to
A2, according to the CEFR. Student learning is assessed
at the end of each work unit (10 to 12 weeks) and at
the end of the school cycle (Ceibal Plan, 2014). In fact,
one exemplary component of the program is
its inclusion of an impact evaluation. After giv-
ing an online reading comprehension and writing test
to 7,707 students in fourth, fifth, and sixth grades in
different sociocultural contexts, they found a positive
relation between the time young people participated
in the program and their learning results; the more
time in the program, the greater the learning (Statistics
Institute, Monitoring and Evaluation Department and
English Department, 2014).
The model implemented in Uruguay, besides be-
ing an example of innovative use of ICT, is
an example of how States can confront dif-
ficult problems through the creative use of
resources.
5.7 Good Practice 7: Effective teaching strategies
The ways in which languages are taught constantly
change and can vary considerably from one context
to another. Much depends on the prevailing concept of
language, teaching models, and the function that is as-
signed to the language that is taught (UNESCO,
2003). Language is one of the most universal
and diverse ways to express human culture, and
it is central to such matters as iden-
tity, memory, and knowledge trans-
mission (UNESCO, 2006). We must
foster a way of teaching that
encourages learning other languages
as a means to achieve a more com-
plete understanding of other cultures
as well as our own, that is not limited to
mexicanos primero
Good Practices for Teaching and Learning Languages
simple linguistic exercises, but rather promotes reflec-
tion about other ways of life, other perspectives, and
other customs.
One teaching model that has proven to be effective
in the learning of another language is known as double
immersion. It is characterized by teaching academic con-
tent in two separate languages. This model falls under
the category of additive bilingualism, which refers to
the teaching of a second language without risk of losing
the mother tongue (Reese and Feltes, 2014). Its goal
is to develop high levels of bilingualism and biliteracy,
in other words, for students to master both languages
so that they can communicate both orally and written
(Reese and Feltes, 2014).
One example of this model is provided by the Guerrero
50-50 Project, the first double immersion program in-
volving Indigenous teachers and students in Mexico.The
project began thanks to the intervention of education
researchers in the community who, besides calling at-
tention to the high quality of teaching offered in the
mother tongue (the omndaa language), pointed out
the importance of fostering a balanced bilingualism in
which students could learn to speak Spanish as well.
Aware of the importance for girls, boys and youth of
learning in their native language and learning Spanish,
the principal, together with local teachers, initiated the
processes necessary to receive the support of authori-
ties for the implementation of the project.
The project, which started in the 2011-2012 school
cycle, was implemented in 21 Indigenous schools in
Xochistlahuaca, Guerrero. It has two main compo-
nents: ongoing teacher training and bilingual
teaching. The purpose of continuous professional
development is to support teachers in developing
their plans, which in many cases cover several grades,
as well as specific teaching strategies for the double
immersion program (Reese and Feltes, 2014).
Bilingual teaching consists of teaching half of school
subjects in Spanish and half in the omndaa
language. Throughout the projects implementa-
tion (three school cycles) teachers have identified
which subjects will be taught in Spanish and which in
omndaa.This has enriched the curriculum and, there-
fore, students education; subjects that did not exist in
the national curriculum - such as ethnic mathemat-
ics, community geography and history, and omndaa
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Good Practices for Teaching and Learning Languages
knowledge - but which, in the teachers opinion, are
necessary to offer the students a complete bilingual
education have been integrated into the school day
(Reese and Feltes, 2014).
The project has managed to involve mothers, fa-
thers, grandparents, and other members of the
community such as healers, farmers, and community
authorities in teaching topics of culture, identity and the
environment. However, the most significant achieve-
ment has been the benefit received by the students
who - after a year and a half of the projects imple-
mentation - had increased their confidence and oral
proficiency in both languages. From an early age, they
learn that there are many ways of looking at the world
and different points of view (Reese and Feltes, 2014).
Plurilingual models with an additive approach, such
as what we see in the schools of Singapore,
the Basque region, and Xochistlahuaca,
seem very promising, not only for
students linguistic development,
but also for more holistic de-
velopment. It is critical that
we continue to identify
other teaching strategies,
such as that being imple-
mented in Guerrero, that
are effective in different
contexts.
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5.8 Conclusion
Learning another language goes beyond being certified
in that language. It allows us to know other cultures,
practice respect, and have an intercultural dialogue.To
achieve this we must: a) define a public policy that is
based on the needs of the population, taking advantage
of all the resources offered by the context; b) design
an integral strategy for its implementation; c) make
collaboration agreements with international agencies,
institutions of higher education and/or civil society orga-
nizations to implement, follow-up, and assess the public
policies that are developed with respect to learning a
second language; d) have a rigorous program to train
and select teachers; and e) develop teaching practices
in which the teaching methodology fosters students
ability to communicate both orally and written, and
supports learning another language as a means
to understand other cultures.
We need to act now. Learning
another language will open the
way towards providing equita-
ble opportunities so that each
of our girls, boys and youth
can effectively exercise their
right to learn.
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| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico | Good Practices for Teaching and Learning Languages

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asiasociety.org/education/learning-world/singapores-global-schools-global-society
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Bando, Rosangela and Li, Xia (2014). The Effect of In-Service Teacher Training on Student Learning
of English as a Second Language, IDB Working Paper No. IDB-WP-529. Available at: http://
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Bergmann, Jonathan and Sams, Aaron (2014). Pon tu aula de cabeza [Turn your
classroom upside down], Mexico, SM (biblioteca innovacin educativa [education
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Berry, Vivian (2013). English Impact Report: Investigating English language learning
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report_2013.pdf [consulted: December 2014].

Rassias Center for World Languages and Cultures at Dartmouth College. The
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Colombia Aprende. Programa Nacional de Bilingismo [Colombia Learns. National

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productos/1685/article-158720.html#h2_2 [consulted: December 2014].

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Etxeberria, Felix (2004). 40 aos de educacin bilinge en el Pas del Euskara

[40 years of bilingual education in the Basque Country], Revista De Educacin, 334.
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Chilean Government (2014). Estrategia Nacional de Ingls 2014-2030 [2014-2030

National English Strategy]. Available at: http://gestion2010-2014.cumplimiento.gob.
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[consulted: December 2014].

Gorter, Durk and Cenoz, Jasone (2011). Multilingual education for European
minority languages: The Basque Country and Friesland, International
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Statistics Institute, Monitoring and Evaluation Department and English

Department (2014). Programa Ceibal en Ingls 2014. Evaluacin de aprendizajes.
Resumen ejecutivo. [Ceibal English Program 2014. Learning assessment. Executive
summary]. Available at: http://www.ceibal.edu.uy/Documents/Evaluacion_
aprendizajes_Ceibal_Ingles_Resumen_Ejecutivo.pdf [consulted: December 2014].

National Statistics Institute of the Eastern Republic of Uruguay. Enseanza

[Teaching]. Available at: http://www.ine.gub.uy/socio-demograficos/
ensenanza2008.asp [consulted: December 2014].

Low, Ee Ling (2014). Singapores English Language Policy and Language Teacher
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Mullis, Ina V.S., Martin, Michael O., Foy, Pierre, and Arora, Alka (2011). TIMSS
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downloads/P11_IR_FullBook.pdf [consulted: December 2014].

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they can do with what they know. Paris, OECD Publishing. Available at: http://
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ODonoghue, Jennifer (2013). El sentido del gasto educativo: garanta del

derecho a aprender [The meaning of spending on education: guaranteeing the right
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Available at: http://www.sinectica.iteso.mx/?seccion=articulo&lang=es&id=643_la_

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 ENGLISH IN THE WORLD
Good Practices for Teaching and Learning Languages | SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |

Is English important? Just think about ...

Where you would like to go
English is the official language in 6 of the 12
most populated countries:
India
United States
Pakistan
Nigeria
Bangladesh
Phillipines
ENGLISH IS THE OFFICIAL LANGUAGE It is the official language of at least
OF 2 OF EVERY 5 COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD one country per continent

To whom you would like to speak

An estimated 2 billion people in 138 countries speak English
Nearly 400 million speak English as a first language +800 million as a second language.
And up to a billion have some knowledge of English or are studying it.
The majority of English speakers are not native speakers.

More than 50% of the population of the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Israel, Singapore, Austria, Cyprus,
Finland, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, the Philippines, Nigeria, and Greece speak English as a second language.

In China, more than 10 milion people speak English

regularly and 300 million are learning it.

ish and What you would like to learn

With Spane could
English, w nearly
speak witht 56% of the content available on the Internet is in English - 5% in Spanish.1
Ou
of Between 87% and 97% of scientific works are published in English.2
every
people in
1n 2013, more than 523,000 books were published in English 1 out of
the world every 4 books published worldwide that year.3
http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_language/all
Garca Delgado,Alonso y Jimnez, 2013
112 http://www.internationalpublishers.org/images/stories/news/AnnualReport.pdf
mexicanos primero
 CHAPTER 6
Conclusions and
Recommendations
David Caldern
Conclusions and Recommendations
6.1 Conclusions
efore beginning this research, we as-
sumed that English learning achieve-
ment in Mexico was low; what we
never imagined was just how
low it was, how deteriorated - in practice -
this dimension of public education is, and the
terrible risk we are running, in the next months
and years, of abandoning a public policy that was just
beginning to take shape.
Our first and principal conclusion is that in order
to change, we have to understand. We have
to understand: we cannot make substantial
improvement in English learning in Mexico
while a simplistic vision regarding its mastery
persists, as if it could be accomplished by quickly au-
thorizing a few hours of classes or buying a package
of educational materials from a commercial publisher.
Significant learning is even less likely if the prejudic-
es against teaching English formally, intensive-
ly, and universally as part of the national cur-
riculum prevail. Sadly, this prejudice often begins
with the principal education officials themselves, who
are neither educators nor do they tend to listen to
experts in teaching. As long as such shortsightedness
persists, the learning of English will be a peripheral
topic that will not receive sufficient attention either in
public conversations or in official decisions.
We have serious faults and omissions not only in dif-
ferent areas of schooling in Mexico, but in our ed-
ucational efforts more generally. Discrimination
against groups who have less voice and agen-
cy has caused inequity so offensive that it hin-
ders any attempt at a prospective strategy.
How can we design Mexicos educational future if one
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| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
out of every ten work centers as our schools are
called - are veritable pigsties that endanger the health
of the children and teachers who attend them? What
can we do when illiteracy continues to creep along,
never seriously addressed by the series of poorly de-
signed programs announced every six years? How can
we accept that the so-called indigenous education is
a sincere effort when it is limited to printing materials
in native languages, while teachers in this modality are
even less prepared than most of their colleagues, have
less support, and receive the worst salaries? How can
we not be outraged when efforts at inclusion reach
less than 10% of the younger generation with any kind
of handicap, are carried out in an improvised, negligent
manner, and continue to be based on commiseration
rather than on human rights?
Real solutions are not successive, but rather
simultaneous. Just as there is no national health sys-
tem that can concentrate solely on the most basic
malnutrition and transmissible diseases, putting aside
other preparations, attention, and preventions for peo-
ples health, the national education system can-
not wait until we have succeeded in provid-
ing basic infrastructure or serving our diverse
population to, only then, begin to address the
meaning and value of learning itself. Hence, it
is not excessive, and much less a luxury, to expect
that at the end of their compulsory education, ev-
ery Mexican would be able to properly write an es-
say, present a demand in the judicial system, organize
statistical data on a trend graph, distribute shipments
according to urgency, distance and available means, or
substantiate and plan an intervention for the ecologi-
cal protection of her community. It is not a luxury to
be able to read a political opinion article in English,
prepare a request for information in that language
from a United Nations agency, or hold a conversation
in real time with another student in China.
If we do not understand the value of English
as the lingua franca and, therefore, its close
link with the right to learn throughout our en-
tire lives, we will not have the determination
to fundamentally change the way it has his-
torically been offered to Mexican girls, boys,
and youth. If we persist in dragging along the ri-
diculous, authoritarian, and populist nationalism that
characterized the 1950s and 60s, we will not have
the vision to establish a national intercultural and
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Why English?
Because it is a language already
spoken all over the world, to be able
to socialize or, also, if you are going
to study overseas, you need
to know the language.
Student, 7th grade,
Guanajuato
plurilingual policy. These attitudes must be unmasked
because they advance an abstract idea of cultural mix-
ing (el mestizo) that disowns our true diversity, a
national pride based on centralism, that celebrates
dead Indians - in museums of anthropology and in mu-
rals - while living indigenous people are disregarded,
both in their communities of origin and when they
migrate to big cities, agricultural fields or the north-
ern border. This is the same attitude that, with grow-
ing frequency, affects thousands of repatriated children
and youth: their teachers discriminate against them
and their classmates mock them because their skills in
English are not valued, while their pronunciation and
construction in Spanish cause derision. On the other
hand, the bad faith of those who reject more solid
teaching of English is obvious; we must challenge the
flocks of officials at every level to see if they can find
one single Nhuatl or Maya speaking teacher who is
against the learning of English.
It is also necessary to illustrate, with sufficient depth,
the vision of those who appreciate teaching English,
but who consider it as a kind of complement to the
curriculum. Languages are not like other aspects of our
educational efforts that admit an occasional, discontin-
ued approach, a type of workshop from which one
only expects abstract benefits within a certain disci-
pline or a tiny expansion in culture. Even compared
to something with enormous virtue like chess, which
favors quick thinking and strengthens ones character,
English or any other language is a radically different
field of learning due to its cultural and communica-
tive density. For these reasons, while appreciating the
mexicanos primero
Conclusions and Recommendations
progress achieved so far, it must be understood
that disperse, narrow actions are not enough
now, nor will they be in the future, to make
a significant difference, except for a very lim-
ited minority of girls, boys and youth.
A job market as unsophisticated as ours in Mexico
produces a vicious circle: companies, accustomed to
quick and easy earnings, do not favor contracting peo-
ple with more highly developed profiles; they prefer
continuous turnaround and piecework by masses of
semi-prepared young people. An employment system
based on personal and family recommendations, cor-
ruption in the shape of payments to introduce can-
didates, and diplomas used as signs of compatibility
rather than merit (employers favor people who have
graduated from their own universities and schools,
without establishing demanding measures that could
show objective differences between those competing
for a job), in general, does not directly award being
proficient in English, as it should, with better salaries
or positions. Mexican companies do not grow or di-
versify enough, among other things, due to their in-
ability to participate as a competitive open market
option in the global context; instead, they remain a
niche for cheap materials or manufacturing with low
cost labor, precisely because they lack sufficient lead-
ers fluent in English or teams that can navigate with
ease in intercultural and plurilingual contexts. Although
it is true, as reported in this study, especially in chap-
ter 2.4, that proficiency in English favors employability,
in the case of Mexico, to date, that occurs only on a
modest scale due to the buddy system that char-
acterizes our productive sector. For this reason, the
economic case is still not very attractive as the core
argument in support of learning English.To unleash its
economic potential, proficiency in English has to be at
a high enough level and spread more widely through-
out the population.
The efforts made by private and social institu-
tions to foment local initiatives are very mer-
itorious, but they only cover half of a good
policy: they multiply supply, but do not qualify
the demand. Mexican parents not only have a vague
idea of why it would be valuable for their children to
learn English, but they are also unfamiliar with objec-
tive parameters of achievement. In other words, they
do not have the basic information to judge the quality
of what is offered to their children, whether it be in a
115
Conclusions and Recommendations
Why English?
To socialize, to
communicate with
other people.
Student, 9th grade,
Hidalgo
public school, a private school, or in additional courses.
Without a vigorous wave of public opinion, and with-
out the coordination of efforts in the productive and
social sectors, the multitude of low quality courses
we currently have will continue to prosper, sheltered
by the slogan that something is better than nothing,
and we will be unable to objectively appraise their
contribution.
Even with what is done well, with quality, we run the
risk of widening gaps and polarizing society
even more because we lack a clear national
policy.This will happen not only because some fami-
lies will be favored in the lottery or according to their
purchasing power, but also due to the states investing
competitive funds for English in different ways (see
chapter 3, in which we outlined how a change in oper-
ating rules results in current discretionary power over
the S246 program); this will allow some students to
learn English starting in pre-school under a ten-contin-
uous-years plan, while others will have their first con-
tact at twelve years old. As a teacher from the Center
for Teacher Training in the state of Zacatecas affirms:
Ten years of schooling in English is aimed at em-
powering our people, but not being able to cover
all the population at the end will empower many,
but disempower the least favored sector of our
society even more, and the result will inevitably
be more polarization of the society (Rodriguez-
Ramirez, 2014:7).
Let us be clear, we need to change our approach;
therefore, from the earliest conceptualization of Sorry,
116
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
and in order to assess how we are doing with English
in Mexico, we did not want to start with what
had or had not been taught, but rather with
why it is necessary to learn.
Let us now recap our conclusions:
a) It is important and valuable to learn English be-
cause - like any second language, but more than
any other at present - it allows us to learn more
and to continue learning.
b) It is part of our established right to learn; it is
learning for our time and our world.
c) Protecting the heritage of minority peoples and
acknowledging plurilingualism as such are min-
imal conditions, but they are not yet national
education projects. To be intercultural and pluri-
lingual is part of the necessary profile of citizens
today.
d) The relevance and pertinence of learn-
ing English must always be cared for. They are
the best ways to refute those views in which
English has been considered a simple tool
or an obstacle for learning other things.
e) Learning English in todays contemporary world
bears a special relation to expanding democratic
participation and the fight for our own rights.
f) In Mexico, learning English is a powerful mech-
anism for equity, leveling opportunities for the
younger generations, as we can see in their ac-
cess to higher and graduate education both na-
tionally and overseas.
g) Learning English is associated with important
economic benefits in our personal rate of re-
turn (a greater probability of higher than average
income) and, above all, a path towards improving
our national productivity.
h) Learning English has a positive impact on peo-
ples neurological development, especially if it
starts at an early age. Growing up with pluri-
lingual contributions, favors not only peoples
higher epistemological skills, such as selective fo-
cus or expanding their working memory, but
mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
also such attitudes as empathy and voluntary col-
laboration (Grosjean, 2010:221).
i) Public policy for learning English in Mexico has
been, after a praiseworthy start at the begin-
ning of the 20th century, intermittent and con-
fusing. After the important decision, in 1926, to
incorporate English into lower secondary school,
there were no other national approaches of note
until 2009. In the nineties, when some states tried
to incorporate English earlier and more inten-
sively, the SEP did little to support them in their
search for alternatives. A new stage started as of
2009, with the first National English Program in
Basic Education, which has formed part of the
national curriculum, embodied in Agreement
592, since 2011. By 2012, the momentum had
been lost; the change in administration resulted
in an institutional and financial makeover that was
contrary to the programs expansion. Today, it is
maintained in a simulated form and with a very
serious lack of definition: English is compulsory
from the third year of pre-school (age 5), but no
one supervises its implementation or requires
total compliance; financing is supposed to be de-
fined by the schools, but in reality is defined by
state administrators; there is no functional na-
tional support team; very few states evaluate
whether their teachers comply with certification
criteria or not, nor is there any reliable infor-
mation published by authorities about whether
students reach the level indicated in the national
curriculum.
j) Lacking reliable public information, we designed
and applied an English proficiency exam that cor-
responded to the level expected upon comple-
tion of basic education. With a nationally repre-
sentative sample, and using an instrument that
responds precisely to the current school cur-
riculum, the EUCIS, we discovered that 97%
of students lack the proficiency foreseen in
the current plan of study, level B1. All the stu-
dents who were tested were in their first se-
mester of upper secondary school education -
in other words, with passing grades in all their
basic education schooling and properly admit-
ted into the national upper secondary school
cycle, but 80% do not have any recordable pro-
ficiency in the language (A0). 10% reached the
mexicanos primero
Conclusions and Recommendations
level foreseen for the fourth grade of prima-
ry school (A1), and 5% the level expected for
the first year of lower secondary school (A2).
k) The irresponsibility of the authorities is great.
53% of young people receiving a grade higher
than 9 (out of 10) on their report cards did not
demonstrate any identifiable proficiency in the
language on the EUCIS test. How is that possible?
Because the application of policies and regula-
tions are not taken seriously at all. The results
of English teachers expose a devastating level
of negligence: less than half reached B1, the lev-
el they are supposed to help their students at-
tain. 13% were at A2, and 24% at A1; and, at the
height of the tragedy, 15% remained in A0, in
other words, without any identifiable element of
proficiency in the language. Our English teaching
system in Mexico is failing; diplomas and titles
cannot be taken seriously.
l) We can identify good practices we can learn
from at several levels. At the top, we find that
systems that are successful take an explicit posi-
tion in favor of interculturalism and plurilingual-
ism, with rigorous implementation and follow-
up. There is also success to be found when you
multiply the participation of different institutions
and sectors, especially managing to intensively
involve parents, students themselves, and all the
surrounding community. Without doubt, teach-
er training and selection stands out among the
most important elements; they are key agents in
facilitating the acquisition of the language. Other
good practices that should be considered include
the implementation of active, experiential, dou-
ble immersion teaching strategies supported by
technological resources to multiply their scope
and variety.
6.2 Recommendations
Our recommendation is to change in order to un-
derstand. The presence of English has grown to such
an extent, in the form of commercial titles, brands,
loose terms and casual colloquial expressions, that we
can lose sight of the main point: It is not important
to have some English classes, but rather to be
able to understand and communicate in this
117
 ENGLISH FOR ALL?
Conclusions and Recommendations | SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |

In Mexico, there are 50,274 teachers of English in public education

1 teacher Of these:
for every 2 out of every 3 work at the lower secondary level.

419
7 out of 10 work in general or technical education.
Only 1 out of 4 works in a Telesecundaria (distance learning).
students. Fewer than 1 out of every 200 work in an Indigenous school.

In Mexico, there are 179,505 public schools in basic education.

Only 1 out of 7 schools

has an English teacher And at the lower
1 out of every 20 preschools secondary level,
where English is
1 out of 10 primary schools MANDATORY,
And only 1out of every 100
Indigenous primary schools 1 out of every 2 schools
DOES NOT HAVE
even 1 English teacher.

Nearly 1 out of 2 public schools in Mexico City has an English teacher ...
But in Tabasco and Veracruz this figure is less than 1 in 10.

The probability that a student in a private school will study English is 4 times greater
than that of a student in a public school.
In preschool, a private school is 9 times more likely to have an English teacher.
At the lower secondary level, 9 of every 10 private schools have English teachers.

The great majority of students in the current education system

DO NOT HAVE ACCESS to an English teacher.

It is a privilege few can enjoy.

118 mexicanos primero
Source: 2013 Census of Schools, Teachers and Students in Basic and Special Education
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
language. Proficiency is not simply recognizing some
vocabulary, but a social practice, as acknowledged in
the current national curriculum, the ability to relate to
other people thanks to language. Our application of
the EUCIS test made one thing very clear: only three
out of every one hundred students, at the age
of fifteen, are on the foreseen path, one that
would enable them to continue learning with
English, not just studying some language con-
tent. When reviewing PISA results in Spanish, mathe-
matics, and science, Rodrguez asks himself, what must
English learning look like given that it is not even con-
sidered a priority like these three domains: In the end,
students are not able to communicate in English in any
form. In general, a great number of adolescent learn-
ers can barely comprehend or produce conventional
written or oral English, often not even at a very basic
level (Rodriguez-Ramirez, 2014:6).
As our diagnosis makes clear, our many ills accumulate:
after several decades of resounding omission, a pro-
gram of ambitious scope, well-oriented in its approach,
fails due to careless implementation, which neglects
teacher training, so that, from the beginning, it is un-
dermined by a scarcity of educators with ideal pro-
files.The political situation leaves the initiative without
anyone to promote it, a situation that becomes even
more dire when it is merged (confused) with other
programs, in a limbo where no one assesses nor is as-
sessed, support is incidental and weak, and the states
are once again left to their own fates and inventiveness
to finance their efforts and design scalable strategies.
What can we propose so that the learning of English,
whose relevance is already recognized in theory, is
Why English?
Sometimes we dont do
anything [in English class],
we only copy. I, for example,
would like to do something
Espacio para icono Voz
to reaffirm, to apply what
we have learned.
Student, 7th grade,
Guanajuato
mexicanos primero
Conclusions and Recommendations
addressed with pertinence in practice? How can we
move ahead to construct a plan that is at once sen-
sible and demanding in its progression along a route
to real learning?
First: We need a high level, national policy, not
just a school-based one, that includes the rec-
ognition of Mexicos multiculturalism as a fact
and Mexicos interculturalism as a goal. The
State must commit itself to constructing the proper
legal instruments so that the protectionist vision ap-
plied currently to minorities evolves to ensure that the
right of all Mexicans to cultural diversity be included
in a broader framework. As Article 5 of the Universal
Declaration of Cultural Diversity declares:
Everyone must have the chance to express her-
self, to create and disseminate works in what-
ever language she chooses, particularly in her
mother tongue; everyone has the right to qual-
ity education and training that fully respects her
cultural identity; everyone must have the chance
to participate in the cultural life she chooses and
to conform to the practices of her own culture
within the limits imposed by respect for human
rights and fundamental liberties. (UNESCO,
2001; translation ours)
Interculturalism is thus a developmental feature; mas-
tering a second language, or more, extends peoples
liberty, beyond simple survival or convenience. Not
speaking English makes us easier prey to outside in-
ternational interests, and not the other way around.
We develop, as has already been said, empathy, citi-
zenship, social unity, and access to information, and we
are enriched by interculturalism and plurilingualism. A
country that does not acknowledge this is curbing its
own development.
Second: As part of our national policy, plurilingual-
ism must be recognized as a goal that goes
beyond our six-year political system; it is in-
tersectoral and inter-ministerial. We must leave
behind the stages in which multilingualism was seen
as an obstacle to be overcome (Bassols idea to teach
Spanish to the Indigenous people to redeem them)
or a peculiarity to be tolerated (generating educa-
tional materials in indigenous languages as a mag-
nanimous effort); we now need to cross into a third
phase, one that actively favors plurilingualism, just as
119
Conclusions and Recommendations
the Basque region did or as Panama recently proposed
(as reported in the meeting in Tlatelolco in 2014).
People being able to communicate using several lin-
guistic codes (Perez, Bellaton, and Emilsson, 2012) is
a challenge that must involve the entire country and
requires joining efforts, from the SEP to the National
Commission on Human Rights, from the Judicial
Branch to the Ministries of Tourism, Economy, and the
Interior, because the statement that in Mexico there is
no national linguistic plan is still valid (Reyes, Murrieta,
and Hernandez, 2012). The program in Singapore is
exemplary because it defines why English should be
taught, the learning philosophy, the teachers role, and
the methodology to be used every day in different
grades and levels.
Third: Recover and realign the National English
Program in Basic Education (PNIEB). As citi-
zens, we should not tolerate the explicit national cur-
riculum being managed with such laxity, to the point
that National Program Coordinators simply appear
and disappear. If it is not the full-time job of a re-
sponsible official, we will not have even the minimum
elements necessary to implement our first and sec-
ond recommendations. The efforts in conceptualiza-
tion already invested in PNIEB need not be started
all over again, but rather the program should be up-
dated based on a real, reliable diagnosis of the current
situation. Nor can we accept that seven new cycles
of English (or any subject) be introduced into the of-
ficial curricular map only to have decisions about their
compulsory nature left to the changing criteria of the
moment or the person in charge. In order for its im-
plementation to be corrected or reactivated, we must
have identifiable people in charge and, therefore, this
operational recommendation is of great relevance. In
addition, financing for this effort must be sufficient, eq-
uitable, transparent, and efficient, which absolutely can-
not be said about what has happened up to this point.
With the necessary adjustments, PNIEB will be one of
the best cost/benefit investments in history. Its over-
sight cannot, therefore, be a simple internal adminis-
trative exercise; the SEP, the states, and the Ministry
of Finance must be summoned to render accounts
before the people, and CONEVAL, INEE, the Federal
Auditing Office, and the Judicial Branch must be called
to confirm their commitment to serve, showing that
their responsibility is to the people and not to the of-
ficials of any given administration, and carry out the
pertinent assessments and evaluations. An updated,
120
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
Why English?
For me it is very important to
be bilingual because everything
comes in English. Everything
I am interested in comes
in English.
Director, Teacher Training School
accessible information system containing key indica-
tors on coverage, access, equity, learning, investment,
goals, and teacher professional development will be
needed, as as we saw in chapter 5 in India, Chile, and
Colombia, along with the development, implementa-
tion, and publishing of the results of periodic assess-
ments of students and teachers.
Fourth: Form a national alliance for learning
English. As has already begun in the meeting at
Tlatelolco, which gathered a diverse group of special-
ists and social groups under the umbrella of the slogan
English for competitiveness and social mobility, we
need to expand collaboration between international
agencies, institutes of higher education, and civil soci-
ety organizations to implement, monitor and evaluate
public policies developed with respect to learning a
second language. The bitter experience of the loss of
momentum in PNIEB with the change in administra-
tion shows the crucial importance of having organized
social auditing of educational goals and programs; in
addition to providing specific, legitimate support with
respect to the status of knowledge, it is also the best
guarantee that a change of officials will not do away
with continuity in public policies. It is an important les-
son that we should learn once and for all: in most cases
in Mexico, decision-making about education usually is
unconnected to either an objective assessment or an
articulation of societal aspirations; organized citizens
have the job of demanding both.
Fifth: Design implementation strategies to
move toward double immersion in a few
years time. We have seen the problem with not
mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
having enough time to learn, the disarticulation be-
tween levels, inadequate materials, the focus on trans-
lations and almost no oral or written productions
from students, in short, the lack of attitude on the
part of officials, principals and teachers - to propose
a truly plurilingual system. We need complex assess-
ments and impact studies; outside of large national
aggregates, the current structural conditions and func-
tioning of the support network is unclear: is there or
is there not an institutional home for English learning,
or are the coordinators simply murky officials who lack
the capacity to innovate or lead in terms of education?
How are financing, coordination, and use of technol-
ogy in practice, and how do we need to change them?
We urgently need to move away from anecdotes and
make research-based evidence about the education
system public in order to design the future.
Pedagogues worldwide increasingly acknowledge that
putting up barriers between languages and subjects
is not suitable. Studying English separately from a
specific content-based subject is the main cause of
failures in pertinence, which leads to the disappoint-
ing results we see in this study, even after many hours
of instruction. As we stated earlier, as never before,
our young generation in Mexico has an intuitive, play-
ful propensity to learn English for their personal and
group interests, but this willingness in youth can only
be capitalized upon in favor of mastering the language
if there is an explicit teaching design that consolidates
and empowers that will. Hence, English learning must
start from the first encounters with school, as agree-
ment 592 already advocates:
As preschool students are characterized by their
elasticity and receptivity for learning languages
at an early age, it is essential that those who
are responsible for the subjects linked to teach-
ing the language (Spanish, Indigenous Language,
and English) convert the classroom into a meet-
ing place between the languages and their cul-
tures: in other words, encourage an intercultural
bilingual or trilingual (in the case of Indigenous
schools) context that is used and exploited for
the students linguistic and cultural learning. (SEP,
2011:38; translation ours)
But in the strict sense, we cannot limit ourselves
to doing something better than what has been
done so far, but rather, to doing something
mexicanos primero
Conclusions and Recommendations
different.The 1,060 hours proposed by PNIEB and
which, in actual practice, has yet to be completed by
any public school student - will not be enough to mas-
ter communication in English. What can really change
the trend is an additive plurilingual approach: mak-
ing the decision that part of school life - some full
days, like two or three days a week, or some subjects,
like science or mathematics - will be taught in English,
with learning activities in English, student teams com-
municating with each other, writing and questioning
in English, teachers presenting, answering, and giving
feedback in English. English cannot be learned if
you do not learn in English.
This change in perspective has important consequenc-
es: instead of the repetitive, fanciful, and childish ma-
terials usually contained in todays English textbooks
and workbooks, students would be using English texts
in different subjects. They would build off the enor-
mous experience accumulated by systems that already
implement this approach of an inverted classroom
like what is happening in Quebec, New Zealand,
Singapore, or the dual education provided in the pub-
lic school system in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the
Amigos School (see http://amigos.cpsd.us). Likewise,
the role of technology in the classroom and for the
classroom can change, becoming a huge repository of
learning opportunities (there are thousands of sites
with resources for teachers and students in English, in
geometrically increasing proportion to what is avail-
able in Spanish). In one bold example, the education
system of Uruguay combines the support of class-
room teachers with weekly connections in real time
to distance teachers who are fully proficient in the
English language; using two local classes for review
and work, a teacher from the Philippines, Argentina,
Mexico, or Colombia is available to Uruguayan stu-
dents via internet for another weekly class, with posi-
tive results (see Brovetto, 2013). Likewise, we could
think about activating, more rigorously and with a real
educational evaluation, such alternatives as that which
was fleetingly tried with the Encyclemedia program;
making use of all kinds of resources for teachers and
students to learn together is something that should
not be discarded.
Sixth: Prepare and select qualified teachers to
learn English.This recommendation is the most im-
mediately operable of all, and the one that makes it
most possible, or not, to capitalize on the benefits
121
Conclusions and Recommendations
offered by the other five. At Mexicanos Primero we
have always maintained that only people educate peo-
ple, and that there is no education policy, program, or
material that can replace the contribution of a real
professional teacher. As we described in other parts
of this book, training teachers to take charge of English
in basic education has been very limited, fragile, and
simulated. In order for there to be learning, we can-
not ignore the presence and deployment of qualified
teachers (based on their profiles, training, selection,
and payment) who are experts in the appropriate
classroom strategies, capable of giving students, par-
ents and the entire system feedback thanks to assess-
ments, and skilled in accessing and adapting materials,
and even in preparing their own.The conclusion is im-
posed by itself when we think of the possibilities for
success that a strategy like PNIEB had without having
resolved the qualifications of teachers:
In the near past, many speakers of English took
teaching positions in secondary schools despite
being poorly trained in that language and not
trained at all in the methodology of the teach-
ing of foreign languages. The results have led
to obvious disappointments. [] The program
has not been launched adequately, reproducing
once again one of our biggest flaws: failing to
prepare the necessary human resources ahead
of time. [] Would it not have been wiser to
select and prepare the personnel before actually
starting this ambitious program? Failure can be
prevented, especially if experience and research
tell us what must be done and how. There is no
form in which competencies will be developed
in the English class if incompetent educators
are in charge of teaching. (Rodriguez-Ramirez,
2014:6-7)
This is the most difficult part of the matter: not only
must we aspire to have English teachers who fully
meet the requirements (as we said, for basic edu-
cation, the minimum acceptable marked by todays
regulations is level B2, with the intention of moving to
C1 or higher), but rather, intensively recruit teachers
already at that level of proficiency. Moreover, in order
for the next generations not to resort to special-
ized teachers, as English teachers have been called
in the official jargon, classroom teachers themselves
must be the ones who can take charge of English,
122
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
teaching designated topics and subjects in this lan-
guage so that their students experience double im-
mersion.The fourth grade teacher, for example, would
conduct her class in Spanish (or in a native language,
like Nhuatl) for some subjects and would do the
same in English for others.
What should we do about the massive challenge im-
plied by this reorganization of teaching staff? The worst
would be to resign ourselves, simulate change, or re-
peat the mistakes of the past. In our opinion, all of
the following actions should be implemented in
an articulated plan, reviewing the contextual strengths
and weaknesses in each state, without putting aside a
national policy that respects everyones right to learn:
Demand that INEE demonstrate that its assess-
ment parameters for both admission to the
teaching profession and the mandatory perfor-
mance assessment - strictly follow the language lev-
el requirements for teachers delineated in PNIEB.
Review the on-the-job training policy, so that
all teachers, in pre-, primary and lower second-
ary school, who are currently in the zone of
proximal development, in other words, about to
reach level B2, continue with the training effort;
but for those who are not, wait for the perfor-
mance assessment to either put them in manda-
tory training or relieve them from duty. Cascade
training makes sense when teachers are close to
the goal; otherwise, it is a deviation of resources
spent on moderately raising the level of adults,
at the cost of not investing in the development
of students, who are the holders of the right to
free, equitable and quality education.
Confirm that those training to be teachers spe-
cializing in a foreign language are developing at
the expected level and, in turn, have suitable
teachers to support them.
Verify compliance with and substantially increase
the course load of English in the curriculum of
teacher training schools and programs.
English, and expected levels of proficiency, has
only been included in teacher training schools
since 2012; with four hours a week over five
mexicanos primero
| SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |
semesters, every budding teacher is expected
to reach level B2, but this plan is very suspicious
(for example, students are expected to jump
from level B1 to B2 from the 6th to the 7th
semester, which is difficult and would require
teacher training staff to have excellent teaching
skills and highly conducive materials).The change
will definitively come when admission standards
to teacher training programs ask candidates to
demonstrate a proficiency level of B2, so that
this would be the minimum starting point; in this
way, there would be hope for significant learn-
ing in English during basic education; if Teacher
Training Schools do not reflect upon and
achieve plurilingualism, pre- or primary
schools never will.
In the meantime, to bring students closer to the
language, introduce a broader adaptation of a
learning together system, as the Encyclemedia
program did, and/or a strategy with distance
teachers and conversations, as is done in
Uruguay. Perhaps the learning achieved, with
enthusiasm and honesty, in these programs, will
show us that they can be something more than
emergency solutions; perhaps the suitability
of some teachers lies not in their current
mexicanos primero
Conclusions and Recommendations
language proficiency, but rather in their
capacity to inspire and make the most
of opportunities to learn together with
their students.
The core recommendation is to move towards learn-
ing in English, implying such learning would not take
place with specialized teachers or for just a few hours
a week or within an area program; to learn in English
implies bilingual teachers with a sufficient calendar load
- practically half of it - and with a proficiency program
in several subjects, not only in just one separate one.
We will never achieve significant learning, distributed
equitably, if we do not open the way for that crucial
change.
Education policy must change its objective: English
should not be reduced to a job-related skill, which
is more or less supplementary; we should assume
an objective of bilingual learning. Mexicans, girls,
boys and youth, as well as their parents, need to know
what they have the right to learn, the worlds of op-
portunities that open up to them with English, how
it empowers their critical, creative, and collaborative
abilities. It is time to stop feeling sorry for them
and ensure that everyone is able to say: Im
not sorry, Im proud.
123
Conclusions and Recommendations | SORRY | Learning English in Mexico |

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