Job Discussion Forums

[Tinman]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/29/international/americas/29letter.html?8hpib

Is this article realistic? It seems they would be screaming for native speakers at this point.

[Weona]

Tinman - Do you think you could copy and paste the article? One must be a NY Times subscriber to read it. Thank you!

[moonraven]

You can subscribe for free online.

[Don Alan]

Interesting article but I think most of the public sector teaching jobs go to Chileans. I haven�t seen any information about the Chilean government wanting to hire foreign teachers. Maybe somone else has.

All said and done, despite all this talk of demand I don�t think it's that easy to find work in Santiago and for all the hype, there are virtually no academies which offer reasonable pay and conditions such as health insurance. If that is the kind of market and incentives that Chile is going to offer, it doesn't really deserve more teachers until someone catches on that to get good teachers who want to do more than stick around a few months experiencing another country, one has to offer decent pay and conditions that make them believe they can really have some quality of life in the country, materially speaking.

After all, to get to Chile means an expensive air fare and to be very far from one�s own country but there are hardly any academies which offer travel expenses even if you see out a one year contract.

The Chilean government needs to get its act together because these dreams of a bi-lingual Chile require serious incentives for would be teachers unless they only want a legion of inexperienced teachers passing through.

[Weona]

[Tinman]

Learn English, Says Chile, Thinking Upwardly Global
By LARRY ROHTER

Published: December 29, 2004

SANTIAGO, Chile - In many parts of Latin America, resistance to cultural domination by the United States is often synonymous with a reluctance to learn or speak English. But here, where Salvador Allende was once a beacon for the left, the current Socialist-led national government has begun a sweeping effort to make this country bilingual.

Advertisement

Chile already has the most open, market-friendly economy in Latin America, and the language plan is seen as advancing that process. The government has negotiated free trade agreements with the United States, Canada, the European Union and South Korea in recent years, is in talks with New Zealand and Singapore, and this fall was host to the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference, with President Bush among the leaders of 21 nations in attendance.

"We have some of the most advanced commercial accords in the world, but that is not enough," Sergio Bitar, the minister of education, said in an interview here. "We know our lives are linked more than ever to an international presence, and if you can't speak English, you can't sell and you can't learn."

The initial phase of the 18-month-old program, officially known as "English Opens Doors," calls for all Chilean elementary and high school students to be able to pass a standardized listening and reading test a decade from now. But the more ambitious long-term goal is to make all 15 million of Chile's people fluent in English within a generation.

"It took the Swedes 40 years" to get to that point, said Mr. Bitar, adding that he sees the Nordic countries and Southeast Asian nations like Malaysia as models for Chile. "It's going to take us decades too, but we're on the right track."

In any other Latin American country, a campaign to make English universal and obligatory would inevitably arouse protests about the destruction of the nation's sovereignty and cultural identity. In Brazil, for example, legislation has been proposed to prohibit the use of English in the names of stores or in advertisements and to create new Portuguese-language verbs to designate basic computer operations.

Here, in contrast, what little criticism there is of the plan has focused on the argument that schools should teach children to speak Spanish better before they try to learn English. Only a very small number of groups have opposed the program on ideological grounds.

"We're quite worried about this because it takes an economic hegemony and translates it into a cultural hegemony," said Sara Larra�n, a leader of the Chilean Social Forum, a coalition opposed to corporate-led globalization. "Chile's insertion ought to be into the world at large, not into the U.S. empire. These are not Roman times, when Latin was the universal language."

But the Chilean government has presented the English initiative as an eminently democratic measure, in Mr. Bitar's words "an instrument of equality for all children" in Chile. That argument seems to resonate deeply with working-class families eager to see their children prosper in an increasingly competitive and demanding job market.

"This kind of program didn't exist when I was in school, which meant that only the rich kids in the private schools got to study English," said Fabiola Coli, whose daughter is now learning English at the Benjamin Vicu�a MacKenna Elementary School here. "If you couldn't afford to pay, and I couldn't, you were left out. This is better because everyone can benefit."

At the school, kindergarten pupils are learning to count to 20 in both English and Spanish , and can already address a visitor in English: "My name is Araceli. What is yours?" The principal's office has a sign in English announcing itself as such, and various items in the classrooms are labeled in English "window," "emergency exit" and other things.

At the college level, some universities are already requiring that all their students study English. Others are also beginning to teach courses in some majors, like foreign trade and hotel management, in English, and have plans to extend the use of English to math and science courses.

"More than a choice, it's a necessity," said Patricia Cabello, rector of the University of the Americas, one of Chile's largest. "Our mission is to train professionals for an internationalized world, and this is the only way for this country to develop the way it wants."

Though the main focus of the program is young students, the government has also sought to reach adults by encouraging businesses to offer English courses to employees. As part of the program, tax credits are to be offered to companies, and Rodrigo Fabrega, director of the effort, talks of "flooding the country with English-Spanish dictionaries and English-language textbooks."

President Ricardo Lagos, himself a former minister of education, has done his part to set an example. Unlike the presidents of some neighboring countries, who insist on sticking to Spanish or Portuguese, he makes a point of speaking at least some English in public whenever he meets with Mr. Bush or Tony Blair or the foreign press.

"We spoke about the English language and how important it is to be able to foster through our ministries the learning of English," Mr. Lagos said at a news conference last month after a meeting with Mr. Bush. "As a country, we want to be a bridge and a platform for flows of international trade and in the Asia-Pacific region."

Government officials say that their biggest problem now is a lack of qualified teachers. But they hope to recruit volunteers from English-speaking countries to come here, and are also sending Chilean teachers to places like California and Delaware.

"The first thing we have to do is train an army of English teachers," said Mr. Fabrega. The quality of the English that will eventually be spoken here may not rival Shakespeare's, he conceded, but he said that did not matter. "We'll speak English Chilean-style, because the important thing is to understand English and to be able to use it as a tool in our favor."