Licenciada

Table

o f c ontents

5

Presentation

9

Introduction

13

National English Program in Basic Education. General observations

19

Purposes

23

Foundation

25

Language teaching approach

35

Content organization

39

Assessment

43

Educational materials

45

Bibliography

49

Teaching Guidelines

P resentation

T

he legal principlesestablished in Article third of the Mexican Constitution, the educational transformation encouraged by the 2007-2012 National Development Plan

(Plan Nacional de Desarrollo) and the objectives outlined in the 2007-2012 Education
Sector Program (Prosedu: Programa Sectorial de Educación) have established the leading basis to provide direction and sense to the actions in public education policies inMexico.
Within this framework and based on the attributions granted by the General Law of
Education (Ley General de Educación), the Secretariat of Public Education (Secretaría
de Educación Pública) proposed as one of Prosedu’s fundamental objectives to be
achieved by 2012 “to raise the quality of education so that students improve their level
of educational achievement, have a means ofaccessing to a better well-being and thus,
contribute to the national development”.1 The main strategy for attaining such objective

in Basic Education is “to carry out an integral reform in Basic Education, focused on
the adoption of an educational model based on competencies that corresponds to the
developmental needs of Mexico in the XXI century”,2 envisaging a greater articulation
andefficiency among preschool, elementary and secondary school.

1
2

(2007), Programa Sectorial de Educación, México, p. 11.
Ibidem, p. 24.

SEP

5

Prosedu has also established that “the criteria for quality improvement in education must be applied to teacher training, the updating of curricula and syllabus contents,
pedagogical approaches, teaching methods, and didactic resources”.3Simultaneously,
Unesco4 has indicated that educational systems are to prepare students in order to
face the new challenges of a globalized world, in which the contact among multiple
languages and cultures becomes more and more common every day. In this context,
the educational system is compelled to help students understand the diverse cultural
expressions in Mexico and the world.
It is from thisperspective that the Secretariat of Public Education acknowledges
the need to include English as a subject in the curricula of preschool and elementary
education, as well as to make the necessary changes to the Second Language: English subject curricula in secondary school. The articulation of the teaching of English
in all three levels of Basic Education has the aim to guarantee that, by thetime students complete their secondary education, they will have developed the necessary
multilingual and multicultural competencies to face the communicative challenges of
a globalized world successfully, to build a broader vision of the linguistic and cultural
diversity of the world, and thus, to respect their own and other cultures.
In order to carry out the actions that enable thearticulation of English teaching, the
Secretariat of Public Education has implemented the National English Program in Basic
Education (NEPBE, or PNIEB: Programa Nacional de Inglés en Educación Básica) from
which syllabuses for the three levels of Basic Education are derived. Such syllabuses
are devised based on the alignment and standardization of national and international
standards, the selection ofcriteria for teacher training, the establishment of guidelines
for the design and evaluation of educational materials, as well as for the certification of
English language proficiency.
As shown in the following chart, the NEPBE includes diverse in-class testing stages
and phases of expansion, which have the purpose of collecting data that may offer
valuable information regarding the...