English Open Doors Program

Ingrid López

Hellen Quintana

Cristian Sandoval

María Jesús Villa

"La educación es la riqueza de Chile y el inglés abre puertas para aumentar esa riqueza"

Sergio Bitar, Ministro de Educación

English Open Doors Program (EODP) is, be worth the redundance, a program that has been created by the Minister Of Education to improve teaching and learning English in Chile to increase the most important fortune of the country, that is its people's education. The English Opens Doors (EOD) program was launched in 2003 to improve the quality and availability of English language teaching in Chile with the aim of enabling Chilean citizens to communicate in English.

Nowadays, English is an importan part of education, because it is a language that open doors in order that our young people may surf easily on the Internet, follow a better education or technical bachelor's degree, obtaining better jobs and earning better salaries.

The "English Open Doors Program" is the motto of the plan of the Minister Of Education to intensify the English learning in order that Chilean students may have better opportunities in the present-day world. The aim of the program is, in long terms, that all the 15 million citizens of Chile can be bilingual.

Four lines of action have been circumscribed in the program to encourage the English in the next decade: defining learning standards, professional teaching development, support learning at school and support the creation of jobs.

1. Defining learning standards

It is about the use of International Standards because it has been recognized for many countries that is a very effective way to assure the quality of learning English. At the same time national proofs are going to be elaborated with the aim to measure the achievement of learnings of the English Sub-Sector.

2. Professional teaching development

The idea of this, is to guarantee that the 6,000 teachers that teach English have the international standard that is "First Certificate of English (FCE)", and for that, long-distance courses will be offered.

3. Support learning at school

Additional support will offer to the school to improve its didactic resources, like school texts, radios, computers and educational softwares.

During the year 2004, a program of Foreign volunteers whose native language is English, was initiated with the aim of help teachers and develop initiatives that motivate students. Also, new school texts are delivered to seventh and eighth students in primary Education.

4. Support the creation of jobs

Courses of English will be offered to improve the options of job and the capability of doing business in micro and small businessmen, through the united work with Chile Califica, PROCHILE, SENCE, CORFO and other entities.

You can realize, the program is an ample, long-term initiative and with also far-reaching goals, that will require the support of various sectors of the population for its implementation and success.

ENGLISH OPEN DOORS PROGRAM Goals

2007 Around 1,500 teachers that teach English in primary schools must have the international certification equivalent to Preliminary English Test ( PET )

2008 English language skills will be tested for the first time in schools nationwide.

2011 Deadline for all EFL teachers to be certified at a minimum level of English equivalent to ALTE 3.

2013 Students will have achieved the following language proficiency levels:

8th graders: equivalent to ALTE 1

12th graders: equivalent to ALTE 2

Advantages	Disadvantages
Teachers participating in EOD have access to a number of opportunities according to their language skill level.	The order of importance of the skills should be Speaking and Listening, THEN Reading and Writing.
Every student raise the English level with the aim to amplify the future works opportunities.	Learning a foreign language should starts in pre-school years bot in 5th grade (middle school)
International Certifications for English teachers, to show Effectiveness and Quality at the time to learn	Comparison with other countries is not good because Chile is very different in all the possible aspects
1500 English Primary Teachers will obtained the PET level	Foreign university students probably don't have the teaching experience or the pedagogical training
6000 English Teachers will raise International Standards FCE	The EODP wants that Chilean citizens can be able to communicate in English, but if students do not performance, what do they learn?
In the year 2013 students will have KET and PET levels	All the schools do not have teachers of english.
The additional support, radios, texts, didactics resources, computers, new software.	Some teachers do not do classes in english, it means, they do not practice the speaking area
The offer of English courses	In the curricular plan, english subject have 2 hours only to teach this language and it is not enough to do a good job.

There is no doubt that education is a priority and English is now part of it, and the efforts have been centered in achieve a big coverage and continuous improvement, it is not an easy task if we think that the standards are every time more demanding.

We agreed that the English Open Doors Program is a very interesting program with very good ideas and objectives but unfortunately, we can not get wonderful results in an short period of time, because education is a long road that we have to know and improve slowly. Besides, if we want to get bilingual persons, we have to start in pre-school years, where children are open to receive all the information and specially because children apparently have an inherent ability to form words and sentences independent of the capacity they have to imitate the language they hear.