APPI & IATEFL
Book – Current practices: a look at teaching English to children in Portugal
Publisher: APPI – Associação Portuguesa de Professores de Inglês
Editor: Sandie Mourão – APPI member no. B- 4337
Price: SOLD OUT
“The conference ‘Current practices: a look at teaching English to children in Portugal’, which took place at the Escola Superior de Educação de Lisboa, on November 9 and 10 2001, was the first international conference held in Portugal on that particular theme. As the first joint conference of the Associação Portuguesa de Professores de Inglês, APPI, and the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language, IATEFL, the conference was a natural development of the activities undertaken to that date by APPInep – APPI núcleo de ensino precoce – APPI’s equivalent to IATEFL’s Young Learners SIG. It took place at a time when every teacher of English of young learners in Portugal knew by experience that the primary education curricula had not yet included the initiation of a foreign language. Nothing has changed since then. Everything that has come out since 1989 (Decreto-Lei nº 286/89) is just a set of recommendations for the teaching of foreign languages in primary education, always in schools where resources are available. Leaving primary schools to their own resources might be challenging enough; however, knowing to what extent the vast majority of those are resource-depleted turns the statement into an act of gross negligence.
It is because APPI knows that our children are eager to learn and experiment with words and sounds that are around them and that follow them wherever they go; that our teachers are eager to teach kids who seem potentially promising learners who can capitalize on their early learning and so gain in the years-to-come, that APPI decided to organize the past conference with IATEFL’s expert co-operation and the contribution of distinguished speakers and materials designers, whose work is brought to readers in this Book of Proceedings.”
(in ‘Foreword’, p. 5)