When the New Year rolls around, the most popular resolution of Brazilians is to learn English. Twenty million Brazilians of all ages are currently learning the language of Shakespeare — and of international business — in over 3,000 registered English schools. Never have so many Brazilians attempted to learn a foreign language. Few of the students, however, find themselves at year's end with better English skills than they started.
"English is a hot potato in my mouth..." We are at the theater, watching a scene of the play Cinco Vezes Comédia (Five Times Comedy). In it, a woman, portrayed by the actress Débora Bloch, describes her attempts to learn the English language. "My English is so bad," Bloch's character tells the audience, "that when I got lost in [New York City's] Central Park and had to ask for help, I said 'Who am I?' instead of 'Where am I?' People ran away from me, thinking I was crazy."
Finally, after trying every kind of English class without success, Bloch's character decides to take one last chance. She begins a course called Sleeping Learning and takes English lessons in her sleep. Her dreams become populated with people named Peter, Paul, Mary, Bill and Joan, who get her involved in a mystery that would do Agatha Christie proud. Only in the last lesson, when she is accused of murder and sent to the electric chair, does the woman finally become fluent in English. However, it was not a dream.
This is an exaggeration, but Sleeping Learning does exist. It is a course of 13 tapes which should be listened to every night in the second half-hour after falling asleep. The tape recorder, which has a clock attached, turns on automatically. According to Sleeping Learning, students who faithfully follow directions for 70 consecutive nights will wake up well-versed in English. "Students learn more while they're asleep because their concentration is greater," Luís Carlos Arruda, director of Sleeping Learning, told Brazilian weekly newsmagazine Veja in an August 1996 article.
A study conducted by Rajendra Rangi Singh, a South African specialist in teaching foreign languages to Brazilian businesses, has shown that half the English schools in Brazil are of poor quality. These schools emphasize grammar instead of conversation and lack resource materials, such as labs, multimedia equipment and libraries. Their instructors are poorly paid and usually do not have college degrees (much less graduate degrees in teaching English as a second language). Some instructors are tourists from Anglophone countries who have resorted to illegally teaching English to prolong their stay in Brazil. It is no surprise that the turnover of the faculty in these English schools is quite high.
Another 35% of Brazilian English schools are somewhat better, but do not have enough money to buy many computers or reference books. Singh considers that only 15% of English schools in Brazil are of high quality. These schools not only have qualified, well-paid faculty, a low teacher-student ratio and large libraries. They also have ready access to language labs and up-to-date software that supplement the lessons.
Students in Brazilian high schools must take classes in at least one foreign language to graduate. But despite the popularity of English words (such as house, bus, delivery, big head, yeeeees!) in the slang of Brazil's young people, most of them continue to be functionally unilingual. Every year, about 120,000 Brazilian college-bound students take the English test of Fuvest as part of their vestibulares. On a scale of one to ten, the average for students taking the English test is a lowly 3.5. Alceu Gonçalves de Pinho, director of Fuvest, told Veja that the poor scores were even worse than they seemed, since "the test is very easy."
The use of English-language words in names of businesses has become more common in Brazil. Most of the stores are franchises of foreign establishments. The exotic names of the stores can even help business, according to Heloísa Paranhos, 45, an employee of the frozen yogurt store I Can't Believe It's Yogurt! "Lots of people don't know what we're selling and come in just out of curiosity," she told São Paulo newspaper O Estado de São Paulo.
A backlash has developed against this in some quarters. Maria do Carmo, a 26-year-old confectioner, does her best to avoid stores with Anglicized names. "As much as I can, I opt for the national one," she said. Besides, she sees the rage for foreign words as a superficial gimmick. "It's all marketing," she said, using the English expression.
Lexicographer Maria Lúcia Daflon, a member of the team that is currently preparing the third edition of the Dicionário Aurélio (whose English-language equivalent in prestige would be the Merriam-Webster Dictionary), has noticed the increasing number of foreign words in the Brazilian Portuguese vocabulary, especially in the technical field. Nevertheless, Daflon believes that the dictionary will not include computer-related neologisms like printar (to print) and deletar (to delete). "The tendency is that those words will disappear," she told O Estado de São Paulo.
Business executives and other people who have the time and money to learn English abroad have made it an increasingly popular option. In the past two years, the number of Brazilians who have gone to the US to study English has increased an average of 60%, according to Veja. In 1995 alone, an estimated 20,000 students of all ages left Brazil to learn English. According to Celso Luís Garcia, the operations director of the Brazilian Educational and Language Travel Association (Belta), a month-long English immersion course in an Anglophone country corresponds to an average year of English classes in Brazil.
Nevertheless, instructors in English as a Second Language recommend study abroad only for those who have a basic knowledge of English before they leave. "A student who doesn't know the language goes through so many difficulties that he ends up being traumatized," explained Irene Felman, of the Associação Alumni (Alumni Association), a learning and exchange center for Brazilians learning English.
Armando Ambrósio, a 47-year-old sales manager for Johnson & Johnson, is a typical example. Despite his position in a US-owned business, he spoke almost no English. After his superiors sent him to a week-long intensive English course in the US, Ambrósio took his wife to San Francisco to show off his new-found skills in the language. When they went to dinner at a restaurant, however, Ambrósio discovered that his fluency was nowhere near as profound as he had thought. To order a meal, he had to mimic the sounds of the animals he wanted to eat. "It was really humiliating!" he recalled. Ambrósio wanted to have shrimp, but he didn't know the English word. After some American customers tried to help him, Ambrósio found himself with a lobster dinner.