A scale to guide ENGLISH learning
How the English language tests to be applied by Pisa in 2025 can be a tool for improving public policies and practices for teaching the language in Brazil
Themes: Public education; English as a lingua franca; Assessment; Schools; High school
OBSERVATÓRIO ENSINO DA LÍNGUA INGLESA
May 30, 2021
The globalized world requires an education guided by objectives that go beyond national borders, which prepares citizens of a nation to interact with citizens of all nations. And, a fundamental condition to fulfill this objective, of course, is the mastery of additional languages, particularly English, the most widely spoken language on the planet, among native and non-native speakers. This is the starting point that led the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to include the English language assessment in the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), beginning in 2025. The English tests will be applied in countries where this language is not the main one used in school education, and Brazil is studying the participation in this unprecedented assessment.
Pisa exams are administered every three years to students from public and private schools aged 15 years. In the last edition, of 2018, in total, about 600 thousand students from 79 countries were evaluated in three areas of knowledge, already traditional — reading, science and mathematics. English will be the fourth area covered. The first test, in 2025, will focus on skills in reading, oral production (speaking) and comprehension of spoken texts (listening). The OECD is considering including the assessment of other skills, as well as other languages, in later editions.
The comparison of the English language proficiency of students from different countries will work as a statistical survey of the quality of the teaching of the additional language of each nation. And that doesn’t just matter for the future, but for today. After all, young people already live in a globalized world, which implies that they must understand the world as a whole and compete in an international labor market.
Diagnosis and public policies
Pisa will not only measure English language proficiency and build a ranking of countries, it will also take an X-ray of the way in which each country’s educational system organizes language teaching. As in the assessment of other areas of knowledge, reports based on questionnaires answered by education managers and teachers should expose the context in which teaching takes place, by analyzing local and national factors that influence learning — such as students’ socioeconomic characteristics, teaching practices, school infrastructure, teacher training and public or private funding, among others.
According to Catalina Covacevich, Pisa analyst at the OECD, ‘public policies in education may need to be revised and adapted to approaches that take into account the skills required of students as reality changes’. In this sense, the national diagnosis and the analysis of successful programmes and practices in other countries will point out strengths and weaknesses in the teaching of the additional languages, as well as discrepancies within the educational system itself. With this information, it is possible not only to improve the performance of students in general, but also to monitor other important results for society, such as equity in learning — for example, among students from public and private, urban and rural schools.
In the National Upper Secondary Education Exam (Enem, in portuguese), for example, Brazilian students from public schools have a lower average performance than those from private schools, and this difference is greater in the English test, when compared to other subjects, according to an analysis published in Folha de S. Paulo. According to Cintia Toth Gonçalves, senior manager for English at the British Council Brazil, ‘English is a social marker’. This difference in performance between students from public and private schools in the English language component may end up becoming a barrier to access to higher education, exacerbating inequalities and differences in opportunities among young people.
But how can this analysis help to improve resource utilization and classroom time more efficiently? And what resources are these that deserve to be adequate? Covacevich answers: ‘The analysis provides a support base in order to guarantee effective learning. Some nations invest in teacher training, others rely on teachers who have English as their native language; some systems focus on knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, while others prefer to incorporate the language in historical and cultural contexts. By comparing the performance of different nations with their practices, those responsible for defining public policies can reevaluate the scenario of their own country and choose the best path’.
Importance for Brazil
Brazil values Pisa as an external reference of international recognition. So that one of the goals of the National Education Plan (PNE), defined in 2014 by law, is to improve student performance in the exam. The country also has a history in this evaluation — it has participated in the programme since its creation, in 2000, and, with each edition, the sample of students involved in it increases. In 2018, there were about 10,700 Basic Education students enrolled in almost 600 public and private schools, both rural and urban, from the 27 units of the federation.
For Gladys Quevedo, professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Translation at the University of Brasília (UnB) and researcher in foreign language assessment, ‘Brazilian private schools are more concerned with responding to society’s demands. The public ones, on the other hand, depend more on State policies’. Thus, assessment and diagnosis based on international parameters — such as Pisa’s — are a particularly important compass for public schools (see another article from the Observatory on the topic).
Performance also depends on the target standard defined in these policies. ‘Some countries adopt as a parameter what Pisa considers as an intermediate range of proficiency, in which students are able to write simple texts on subjects of interest and talk about themselves and their experiences. The focus, at this level, is communication, not grammar and vocabulary accuracy. I think this level is attainable in Brazil. It would also be important to take into account the reality in which the school is located, that is, the inclusion of local themes, of interest to students and teachers’, says the researcher.
According to Quevedo, one of the particularly positive points of Pisa for Brazil is that the three components evaluated — reading, oral production and speech comprehension — coincide with three of the five axes defined for learning English in secondary school, at the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC, in portuguese). ‘We already have at BNCC the skills that should be worked on with students. The analysis of the results of an external and international evaluation, such as Pisa, raises reflections that can be translated into improvements’, says the researcher.
As for upper secondary school, a stage in which BNCC is less specific, it is up to each teacher and each school to translate specific competences and skills into English language learning objectives — that is, there is no national standard. Even so, Pisa already helps, indirectly, in the definition of a standard. ‘The announcement of the National Plan for Books and Didactic Material (PNLD) of 2021 points out as a parameter for the elaboration of materials for secondary education the criteria of proficiency in English defined in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), which will serve as the basis for classification by Pisa. Therefore, the simple adoption of these books already puts us in a more favorable scenario’, concludes Quevedo.
Brazil values Pisa as an external reference of international recognition. So that one of the goals of the National Education Plan (PNE), defined in 2014 by law, is to improve student performance in the exam. The country also has a history in this evaluation — it has participated in the programme since its creation, in 2000, and, with each edition, the sample of students involved in it increases. In 2018, there were about 10,700 Basic Education students enrolled in almost 600 public and private schools, both rural and urban, from the 27 units of the federation.
For Gladys Quevedo, professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Translation at the University of Brasília (UnB) and researcher in foreign language assessment, ‘Brazilian private schools are more concerned with responding to society’s demands. The public ones, on the other hand, depend more on State policies’. Thus, assessment and diagnosis based on international parameters — such as Pisa’s — are a particularly important compass for public schools (see another article from the Observatory on the topic).
Performance also depends on the target standard defined in these policies. ‘Some countries adopt as a parameter what Pisa considers as an intermediate range of proficiency, in which students are able to write simple texts on subjects of interest and talk about themselves and their experiences. The focus, at this level, is communication, not grammar and vocabulary accuracy. I think this level is attainable in Brazil. It would also be important to take into account the reality in which the school is located, that is, the inclusion of local themes, of interest to students and teachers’, says the researcher.
According to Quevedo, one of the particularly positive points of Pisa for Brazil is that the three components evaluated — reading, oral production and speech comprehension — coincide with three of the five axes defined for learning English in secondary school, at the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC, in portuguese). ‘We already have at BNCC the skills that should be worked on with students. The analysis of the results of an external and international evaluation, such as Pisa, raises reflections that can be translated into improvements’, says the researcher.
As for upper secondary school, a stage in which BNCC is less specific, it is up to each teacher and each school to translate specific competences and skills into English language learning objectives — that is, there is no national standard. Even so, Pisa already helps, indirectly, in the definition of a standard. ‘The announcement of the National Plan for Books and Didactic Material (PNLD) of 2021 points out as a parameter for the elaboration of materials for secondary education the criteria of proficiency in English defined in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), which will serve as the basis for classification by Pisa. Therefore, the simple adoption of these books already puts us in a more favorable scenario’, concludes Quevedo.
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