Syllabus 2012

National English Program
in Basic Education
Second Language: English

Syllabus 2010 Cycle 1 3 Preschool
rd

1st and 2nd Elementary school

Phase of expansion

T able
5 11 17 19 25 33 35
39 51 63

of conTenTs

Presentation Introduction Purposes Curricular Standards English Teaching Approach Assessment Content organization
3 rd grade Preschool 1 st grade Elementary school 2 ndgrade Elementary school

75

Bibliography

81

Teaching guidelines

P resenTaTion

(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 sense and direction to the actions in public education policies in Mexico. Within this framework and based on theattributions 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 to achieve better standards of well-being and thuscontribute to 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 secondary school.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,

T

he legal principles established in Article 3 of the Mexican Constitution, the educational transformation encouraged by the 2007-2012 National Development Plan

1 2

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

Ibidem, p. 24.

5

pedagogical approaches, teaching methods, and didactic resources”.3 Simultaneously, Unesco4 has indicated that educational systems are to prepare students in order for them to face the new challenges of a globalized world, in which contact among multiple languages and cultures is increasingly common. In this context, the educational system is compelled to helpstudents understand the diverse cultural expressions existing in Mexico and the world. It is from this perspective that the Secretariat of Basic 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 English subject curricula in secondary school. The articulation of the teaching of Englishin all three levels of Basic Education has the aim to guarantee that, by the time 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 andother cultures. In order to carry out the actions that enable the articulation 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 andstandardization of national and international standards, the selection of criteria 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 for its generalization, which have the...