Deivis D. Pothin

Second day in Essen and Monday was a very busy day with too many presentations to choose from. Sometimes you just wished you could be in more than one place at the same time.

One of the presentations I found very interesting was the one presented by Ariovaldo Pereira, a lecturer at the Universidade Estadual de Goias, in central Brasil. He showed how conservative and prejudicial Brazilian EFL textbooks are. They very often present families that are ideal and unrealistic (conventional mother-father-children constitution vs single-parents or alternative models), stereotyped image of the woman as uneducated, and issues that are not relevant to the books’ audience – teenagers and pre-teenagers.

Another highlight of the day was the keynote of Jim Cummins, from the University of Toronto, where he addressed the importance of valuing multilingualism and diverse backgrounds in the classroom rather than pathologizing immigrant students’ home language as a cause of underachievement. He also pointed out the importance of language policy in respecting and promoting these community languages.