words per minute
8
PradeepBohat
00:00
Speed
In times of economic austerity the Arts and Humanities are usually the first ones to come under the axe. There seems to be a commonsensical understanding among those deciding where taxpayers money should go that these are areas that do not bring immediate practical benefits to society and should, therefore, have their budgets reduced in order to invest public money in productive sectors, defense and, in terms of education, in the hard sciences. Such an approach could be considered misguided to say the least. As Gopal 2010 points out in a recent article in The Guardian, The humanities will neither bring an end to wars nor prevent chronic hunger, even if literature, history and art have much to teach us about why these miseries persist. The humanities will not save the world has business studies but neither are they a solitary activity of no social consequence. Education, culture and society are like the oceans, an ecosystem. Plundering and draining one area degrades the larger environment. 2010 online Cuts in the teaching of AH and Education in universities in Britain will mean that history and linguistics will become, once again, the preserve of a leisure class able to afford to learn languages, study paintings and quote poetry Gopal, 2010 online. One may wonder why such issues should be raised in the introduction of a collection of papers written by Brazilian English language educators, most of them working in their own country. First of all, the phenomenon described above is not restricted to Britain on the contrary, unfortunately, there seem to be national variations on the same theme all over the world. AH and Higher Education are apparently not highly favoured when governments have to tighten the purse strings. Secondly, the British Council and the Hornby Trust have also been affected by the recent economic crisis and forced to reduce the number of scholarships available to English language teachers coming from developing countries to study in the UK. It is important to remember that without the financial support of the British Council and the Hornby Trust none of the contributors to this collection would have been able to take their Masters Degrees at British Universities. Without this support, none of the publications and educational projects generated by the advancement in the education of these individuals would have been possible. The larger ecosystem of English language teaching in Brazil would have been plundered and degraded. One of the objectives of this publication is to bring to light the considerable body of knowledge that was amassed by some Brazilian Hornby Scholars between 2002 and 2009. Their studies here take the tangible form of papers based on their final dissertations or other assignments written in the course of their studies. This publication renders their findings public and makes available to many the knowledge and expertise acquired by few. This publication is a way for contributors to return to the larger community of English language teachers in
Brazil the investment made in their professional development by taxpayers, via the British Council, and donors, via the Hornby Trust. It is a way of demonstrating that investing in AH and Education can bring concrete benefits to the advancement of particular communities and the society as a whole since the many hours spent studying, reading and writing generated the practical outcomes and projects which are presented in this collection. Chapter one is an account of the implementation and development of the Tocantins English Project, which was possible at the time due to the vision of the Secretary of Education of the Brazilian State of Tocantins, as well as the support and experience of the British Council and other international institutions. In this paper, Sara Walker tells us about some common problems faced by public school English language teachers in Tocantins and how this initiative sought to address them. Hers is a story of professional and personal involvement, of commitment to the profession and devotion to the cause of developing EFL professionals in Brazil, in both linguistic and methodological terms. Chapter Two is the first in this collection written by a Hornby Scholar, Analucy Oliveira, who was also intimately connected with the Tocantins Project since she was one of the participating tutors. Her paper is a shortened version of her dissertation and her main concern is how to develop an ethos of collegiality among English language teachers, from initial teacher education courses to continuing professional development programmes. She proposes a peer mentoring programme to be implemented with trainee English teachers.