Programa Ingles

Table
5 13 19 21 29 37 39
43 55 67

of contents

Presentation Introduction Purposes Curricular Standards English Teaching Approach Assessment Content organization
1 st grade Secondary school 2 nd grade Secondary school 3 rd grade Secondary school

79 85 91

Glossary Bibliography Teaching guidelines

P resentation

T

he legal principles established in Article third of theMexican 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 in Mexico. Within this framework andbased 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 of accessing 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 and efficiency among preschool, elementary and secondaryschool.

1 2

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

Ibidem, p. 24.

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”.3 Simultaneously, Unesco4 has indicated that educationalsystems 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 this perspective that the Secretariat of Basic Educationacknowledges the necessity to incorporate English as a subject to the curricula of preschool and elementary education, as well as to make suitable adjustments to the English subject curricula in secondary school, with the purpose of articulating the teaching of English in all three levels of Basic Education. By means of this articulation, it is expected that by the time students complete theirsecondary education, they will have developed the necessary plurilingual and pluricultural competencies to successfully face the communicative challenges of a globalized world, build a broader vision of the linguistic and cultural diversity of the world, and thus, respect their own culture as well as that of others. In order to carry out the actions that enable the articulation of English teaching, theSecretariat 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 of criteria for teacher training, theestablishment of guidelines for the design and evaluation of educational materials, as well as the certification of English language proficiency. As shown in the following chart, the NEPBE includes diverse in-class testing stages and phases of expansion for its generalization, which aim at collecting data that may offer valuable information regarding the pertinence of the approach, the contents...