ECUADORIAN CURRICULUM

English Curriculum

The Ministry of Education of Ecuador developed an innovative curriculum that seeks to improve the learning of English as a secondary language in this multicultural country. It aims to connect students with the international community. The English as a Foreign Language curriculum aims to educate students and integrate them into a new globalized society so that students are responsible, self-respecting and community minded.

 Highlights Of English Curriculum

a) A new foreign language curriculum was created in Ecuador. 

b) The Ecuadorian population is composed of groups from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. 

c) The objective of this curriculum is to integrate students into the international communities of the 21st century. 

d) EFL curriculum has three main goals that seek to improve language education. 

e) This curriculum has four basic principles that focus on integrated language learning. 

f) This curriculum should be used by covering the 4c's within the five curricular tracks.

g) The EFL curriculum encourages students to act responsibly, respect themselves and the community. 

h) It also includes a series of curricular threads for learning English: 

- Communication and cultural awareness 

- Oral communication

- Reading - Writing 

- Language through the arts 

New Curriculum

The educational curriculum is the expression of a project in which the participants are students from all over Ecuador, involved in national and international activities in order to promote development and socialization through the English language. To make these intentions a reality and to verify that they have been effectively achieved, in 2008 the constitution guaranteed the right to learn the mother tongue and this curriculum encourages them to learn a new language through an encouraging teacher who teaches them to understand, comprehend and communicate through this foreign language.
In the new implementation of the curriculum, importance has been given to the subject of English, providing access to students to acquire knowledge of other cultures, in which they will develop personal, social and intellectual skills necessary to participate productively in an increasingly globalized world that operates in English, can be taken as an example that in this country where it contains a significant number of students of indigenous descent groups may have Spanish as a second language and English may be the third, so that teachers should be aware of the positive cultural influence on the learning of English in the lives of students.

In 1992 a new project called CRADLE was launched to promote the development of English learning. A book was proposed as the main tool called "Our world through English". The books had cultural characteristics of different places in Ecuador. The practice of exercises, grammar and vocabulary were implemented. In 2012, a new high school curriculum was proposed that consisted of 5 hours of compulsory English.
A curriculum for secondary education was proposed that established five
required hours of English. Teaching aims to develop communication skills in social contexts.
Ecuador over time has been changing the way of educating with respect to the English language, the steps it has taken are very important because it has sought ways to improve teaching in this area, the CRADLE project was one of the first ways of teaching in the English language, but this was not good enough to achieve a complete knowledge about the language, therefore, two curricula were created, one in 2012 and four years later it was changed and renewed, which works until today. This new curriculum focuses on teaching from grammar to vocabulary of the English language in order to improve knowledge, CLIL is part of the curricula, this is based on the teaching of English language through subjects.

Talking about the CLIL project, it was introduced with the objective of changing the way of teaching and learning since it presented two main characteristics which sought the integration of language and content as well as the search for new teaching methods on the part of the teacher so that the student can learn in a better way.

National Curriculum Guidelines

Established that the official approach in which ELT would be based was the CLT. It also was aligned to the Common European Framework of Reference using the Branching Approach to determine different exit profiles for each course.

Throughout their secondary education, learners were expected to start with an A1 level (8th and 9th), overcome it, get an A2 (10th and 1st Bach) and, finally get graduated with a B1.2 or a real B1 level (2nd and 3rd Bach). In addition, all this was supposed to be achieved with little or no English knowledge background from school and the historical process of evaluating the levels of domain of English of Ecuadorian teachers. In order to understand the path to be taken, the image below helps the reader to visualize the different levels of proficiency to be reached at the end of each grade:

This was justified mainly by the suggested amount of time to get a B1 level (400 hours) that at the end of secondary education for Ecuadorian students would be 480 hours of English (real time). Not only a level to be reached but also accompanied by specific objectives per language skill and communicative competence considering linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic (Ministerio de Educación del Ecuador, 2012). The first two years (8th and 9th) were supposed to settle the base of the smooth progression of the program. The three components of the Communicative Competence are part of each exit profile as shown in the tables.

In conclusion:

The Ecuadorian population has a low percentage of English level, people believe that they cannot learn another language, young students do not put effort and teachers try to encourage them to improve all together. Let's remember that everything is possible, we all have the ability to achieve each of the activities that life leaves us with obstacles. The students will achieve it! All the problems will be solved and if the population manages to undertake and get the children to start speaking two languages for the improvement of the Ecuadorian territory, we will stop being a third world country!

Bibliography:

Ministerio de Educación del Ecuador. (s. f.). Lengua Extranjera – Ministerio de Educación. Ministerio de Educación. Recuperado 19 de julio de 2021, de https://educacion.gob.ec/curriculo-lengua-extranjera/

Educación Ecuador. (2016, 8 diciembre). Curriculum de Inglés [Vídeo]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvFDCx9-Wsc&feature=youtu.be