Chapter 15

Language policy and language teaching

This study focuses on the teaching of English in Brazil and how language policy is handled by public school teachers; it also offers some reflections on adaptability (Mey 2009). Given the current status of English as a lingua franca, the study seeks to understand its influence in the classroom, both in relation to the official regulation of such practice and to the individual choices made by teachers. The project contained a proposal for action research with a group of teachers in the state school system in Ponta Grossa, Paraná, Brazil. The research was developed through meetings in the Text Studies Laboratory at the State University of Ponta Grossa every fortnight. The teaching material was analyzed in discussions with the teachers, and by using their diaries, based on the lessons taught. The results identified the participants’ difficulties to see language as a social practice and their struggle to translate the documents into their daily practice. Additionally, teacher-centered practices focusing on the structural aspects of the language, with the concomitant difficulties of joining practice to theory, were observed. The emphasis on adaptability in the process of teaching language through the medium of diverse social practices seems to be a challenge still to be worked out in the context of teaching English as a foreign language in Brazil.