Current Issues in Language Planning

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The English in public elementary schools program

of a Mexican state: a critical, exploratory study

Moisés Damián Perales Escudero , María del Rosario Reyes Cruz & Griselda
Murrieta Loyo

To cite this article: Moisés Damián Perales Escudero , María del Rosario Reyes Cruz &
Griselda Murrieta Loyo (2012) The English in public elementary schools program of a Mexican
state: a critical, exploratory study, Current Issues in Language Planning, 13:4, 267-283, DOI:
10.1080/14664208.2012.722599

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14664208.2012.722599

Published online: 04 Oct 2012.

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Current Issues in Language Planning, 2012
Vol. 13, No. 4, 267–283, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14664208.2012.722599

The English in public elementary schools program of a Mexican

state: a critical, exploratory study
Moisés Damián Perales Escudero*, María del Rosario Reyes Cruz and
Griselda Murrieta Loyo

Department of Language and Education, Universidad de Quintana Roo, Chetumal, Quintana

Roo, C.P. 77019, México
(Received 18 June 2012; final version received 17 August 2012)

The quality of English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) instruction in elementary schools

worldwide is an issue of concern for language policy and planning (LPP) scholars, as
are examinations of power and ideologies operating in policy creation and
implementation. This critical, exploratory study blends these two strands of inquiry
by examining critically interview data on the implementation of a public elementary
school EFL program in a Mexican state. Program staff and parents were interviewed
in an attempt to identify instances of power struggle and ideology that would yield an
initial description and data for further research. The results illustrate a number of
trends in EFL teaching in Mexico that reflect and reproduce neoliberal ideologies.
They also reveal the complexity of power dynamics within different government
agents and how they affect language policy. It is suggested that a focus on these
dynamics, which we call meso-policy, can yield useful data for LPP scholars to
engage in actions tending toward the development of community policy.
Keywords: Mexican language policy; English-as-a-foreign-language; elementary
schools; critical ethnography; governmentality; ideology and power; community policy

Introduction
Studies of language policy implementation have increasingly tended to emphasize the role
of the local in policy enactment and creation (Ahmad & Palwasha, 2011; Hornberger &
Cassels, 2007; Omoniyi, 2007; Yu, 2001). This move has been a result of calls in the
field for studies that focus on the micro-political dimensions of policy as instantiated in
the actions of local agents, rather than the macro-political dimension instantiated in
policy texts (Ramanathan & Morgan, 2007; Ricento & Hornberger, 1996; Sutton & Levin-
son, 2001). Specifically, increased attention has been paid to language policies focusing on
spreading English throughout the educational systems of expanding circle countries
(Kachru, 1985) due to the fact that, in recent decades, many of those countries have
implemented reforms to teach English-as-a-foreign-language in public elementary
schools and even pre-schools (Tılfarlıoğlu & Öztürk, 2007; the studies in Enever, Moon,
& Raman, 2009; Hamid, 2010; Kizildag, 2009). As many scholars have noted, governments
have engaged in this move due to pressures exerted by a range of phenomena variously
grouped under the label of globalization or imperialism (Hamel, 2005), particularly,
linguistic imperialism (Phillipson, 1999). The very role of English-language education as

*Corresponding author. Email: moisesd@umich.edu

© 2012 Taylor & Francis

268 M.D. Perales Escudero et al.

a tool for further oppression or as a linguistic human right has been a matter of debate
(Bunyi, 1999; Cleghorn & Rollnick, 2002). Nonetheless, a consensus appears to exist
that any discussion of these language policy and planning (LPP) issues need to take into
account the contextualized histories, power structures, and language ecologies of specific
settings such as countries, regions, or even school districts.
As of 2012, Mexico, an expanding circle country, is implementing a massive
educational reform to add English teaching to the elementary school curriculum nation-
wide. This Federal-level initiative, called ‘Programa Nacional de Inglés en Educación
Básica’ (PNIEB) or National Program of English in Elementary Schools, hereafter
NPEES) was preceded by pilot programs in several Mexican states, the older of which
has been operating since 1992 (Castañedo & Davies, 2004). One such pilot program, the
Program of English is Elementary Schools (NPEES) of a southern Mexican state,1 is the
focus of this article.
These recent initiatives make Mexico an interesting site for critical LPP research,
especially in light of the issues regarding ‘English for everyone’ policies raised by
Baldauf, Kaplan, and Kamwangamalu (2010) and Hamid (2010) among others. Yet, as
Kaplan (1987) has pointed out, LPP research and discussions in this country have tended
to focus almost exclusively on indigenous languages and bilingual (i.e. Spanish-indigenous
languages) education (Terborg, García Landa, & Moore 2006). There has also been some
LPP research on the role of Spanish in nation-making (Cifuentes, 1992). However,
English-focused LPP research in Mexico is scarce. In addition, none of the existing
Mexican studies has investigated the new elementary school initiative, nor have
they taken a critical angle that we believe is warranted by the features of the Mexican
context.
This article presents what is, to the best of our knowledge, the first LPP research study
of the NPEES program. Thus, the article fills an important gap in Mexican LPP research
and adds to the growing literature characterizing LPP initiatives across the globe. The
article is the first to take a governmentality focus (Foucault, 1991) in this context. Con-
cretely, we used interview data to explore how power is distributed, wielded, and nego-
tiated, and how ideologies are manifest, in the unfolding implementation of the NPEES.
Our data reveal how local agents both fall prey to and resist ideological impositions while
negotiating power with more global agents such as international publishing companies.
These data also show that school principals and school district supervisors are powerful
agents in this context, both creating policy and determining aspects of the actual enact-
ments of macro-policy. Other participants, such as the NPEES’s coordinator and class-
room teachers, attempt to transform what can be called an aesthetics of care (Vann,
Bruna, & Perales Escudero, 2006) on the part of the government into an ethics of care;
that is, they try to do their best to teach English sensibly in the face of very challenging
circumstances related to insufficient funding and support. The article also shows how
existing educational structures unrelated to the teaching of English end up having an
important impact on English LPP, thus, contributing to the study of non-policy policy
(Ramanathan, 2005).
A further contribution of the article is a proposal for adding an analytic level, that of
meso-policy, to Kaplan and Baldauf’s (1997) division between macro- and micro-policy
phenomena. Based on our methods and findings, we believe that a number of phenomena
occur in the analytic layer standing between the policy decisions of top-level government
bureaucrats and those of lower level bureaucrats that are more directly in charge of policy
interpretation, (re)creation, and enactment. We suggest that adding this analytic construct
may help to focus on the complex dynamics of actors, actions, and ideologies mediating
 Current Issues in Language Planning 269

between policy intent and implementation (Davis, 1994) and pedagogical practices. The
results of applying this level as a heuristic tool to the study of policy implementation
may help researchers, policy-makers, and activists to identify specific local agents that
can serve as catalysts to bring about desired changes in language policy implementation.

The research context and macro-policy

English has been taught in the public Mexican educational system since the nineteenth
century (Velázquez, 1992). However, until the second half of the twentieth century, such
teaching was restricted to a handful of prestigious universities in Mexico’s major cities,
and was second to the teaching of French (Hamel, 2003). In the second half of the twentieth
century, English began to be taught in Mexico’s secondary schools (Castañedo & Davies,
2004). However, according to Lengeling (2010), the quality of the curricula and teaching
was and is very poor. Students are exposed to the same basic contents time and again,
most teachers are poor speakers of English themselves and/or lack any English-Language
Teaching (ELT) credentials, and schools face many shortcomings in infrastructure and
equipments.
At the same time, the wealthier classes have access to high quality English-instruction
since preschool. A number of private preschools and K-12 schools exist that effectively
offer bilingual, English-Spanish education to affluent Mexicans. Teachers in these
schools are both competent speakers of the language – many are native speakers – and pro-
fessionally qualified. This situation has been characterized as a dual system of education
(Bamgbose, 2003) and is typical of many Latin American countries (cf. McGuire, 1996).
Indeed, this dual system can be considered as a feature of the internal colonialism that
characterizes many countries in the region (Galeano, 1971; Mignolo, 2003) and Mexico
(Bonfil-Batalla, 1991; González Casanova, 1965, 2003).
The Mexican government has made efforts to increase the professionalization of
English teachers in Mexico by promoting collaborations between the British Council and
Mexican universities so that their teachers can become credentialized with the Certificate
for Overseas Teachers of English (COTE, now CELTA) offered by the University of Cam-
bridge (Lengeling, 2010). According to Lengeling, while this initiative has indeed increased
the numbers of credentialized teachers, its impact on English teaching in public secondary
schools has been minimal as most COTE graduates work in universities (public or private)
and private K-12 schools. Yet, another instance of English-focused LPP has been the cre-
ation of ELT BA degrees by Mexican universities in the last 25 years. At the same time,
more and more Mexican universities require their undergraduate and graduate students to
demonstrate command of English by passing international or in-house examinations both
as an admissions and graduation requirement. Mexican academics are increasingly under
pressure to publish in English (Englander, 2010; García, 2006). We think that there is
also a widespread perception that English is necessary for social mobility. However, as
in Brazil (Pagliarini & De Assis-Peterson, 1999) and Puerto Rico (Pousada, 1996),
English is rejected in some academic quarters because it is perceived as imperialist,
which causes the marginalization of English teachers.
In the state of southern Mexico, a BA in English has existed at the University of
Southern Mexico since 1991. This program is the second in enrollment at the state univer-
sity. Graduates of this BA make up the majority of NPEES teachers. The NPEES began in
2005. Its introductory document (Polanco & Valdez, 2006) presents English as ‘a basic tool
for all professionals’. It justifies the introduction of English in elementary schools by stating
that it will help children to achieve higher command of the language in secondary schooling
270 M.D. Perales Escudero et al.

and it will also help to comply with the goals set forth by the Secondary School Reform. It
intends for participating children to achieve the A2 level of the Common European Frame-
work for Languages and to be certified with the Cambridge FLYERS exam. English is, thus,
presented as a ‘neutral’ tool (Pennycook, 1994) with potentially beneficial effects in the
context of a neoliberal discourse. There is no critical discussion of the role of English in
Mexican culture or identity, perhaps owing to the insufficient academic preparation of
the document’s designers, whom we know personally. Thus, the program falls under a dif-
fusion of English paradigm (Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas, 1996; Tsuda, 1994) and an
integrative discourse (Pagliarini & De Assis-Peterson, 1999), that is, one where English
is aligned with neoliberal values of individual economic advancement.
NPEES implementation occurs in a context of increased devolution of educational
decisions to states, but also one where funding remains centrally controlled. In parallel
to this process, the Federal-level National Teachers’ Union (SNTE in Spanish) has
gained enormous power due to its alliance with the right-wing party currently in power,
the ‘Partido Acción Nacional’ (National Action Party). This situation is compounded by
the existence of a rebellious teachers’ union, the National Teachers’ Central (CNTE in
Spanish), which has maintained strong conflicts with SNTE. As a result, many power struc-
tures are centralized and controlled by one of the unions, others are in Federal hands, and
yet others are controlled by state authorities. As this article will show, this creates an
environment where policy-making initiated by a group of authorities/agents needs to be
negotiated as it enters the sphere of influence of a different group of authorities/agents.
Because NPEES teachers are not unionized and work without contracts, they have the
least power of all players.

Methods
We come at this study with a critical angle. This critical perspective is warranted by elements
in our context such as the dual education system we referred to above, which contributes to the
perpetuation of elites. We view access to English as a linguistic human right and also a form of
cultural capital that is the focus of class struggle. In our view, the elites of Mexico, who are
also its policy-makers, benefit from a system that accords differential access to this kind of
cultural capital. Therefore, implementations of seemingly benign policies, such as NPEES,
need to be scrutinized from a critical perspective, lest they become instances of ‘policy
rhetoric’ (Zappa-Hollman, Ramanathan, & Morgan, 2007) or ‘posturing’ (Phillipson &
Skutnabb-Kangas, 1996), that is, policies whose implementation is not well provided for
and thus enact an aesthetics of care (Vann et al., 2006), without effectively redressing
inequalities in access to cultural capital. Such policies masquerade as attempts to achieve
some form of social justice but do not change the conditions of the poor and the lower
middle class, who constitute the majority of the student population in Mexican public
schools. As professors of language education, we are members of a kind of elite ourselves.
However, we are painfully aware of the fact that Mexican policy-makers do not consult
academics in matters of language, perhaps because they do not think that decision-making
in language issues requires any kind of specialized knowledge. In cases where ‘experts’ are
consulted, these experts tend to be representatives of international ELT publishing companies.
The impetus for this study was provided by anecdotal conversations with NPEES
teachers and its coordinator, with whom one of the authors has a personal connection.
We could notice that the NPEES was the site for power struggles that evinced a measure
of the policy rhetoric we referenced above. Because no prior research existed in this
setting, we decided to conduct an exploratory, qualitative study using an ethnographic
 Current Issues in Language Planning 271

tool, interviews. While this study is by no means a full ethnography, it follows a critical
ethnography approach (Canagarajah, 1993, 2006; Carspecken, 1996). We believe this
focus is appropriate as our goal is ‘to bring out conflicts between diverse social institutions
in different levels of planning and implementation’ which is indeed a goal of critical ethno-
graphers (Canagarajah, 2006, p. 161).
Because we were interested in having multiple perspectives, we interviewed teachers,
parents, and administrators. Access to administrators and teachers was facilitated by the
fact that the NPEES coordinator is friends with two of us. NPEES teachers were solicited
for interviews and five of them agreed to talk to us. We solicited interviews from parents at
three schools in the capital of the state of southern Mexico, and were able to talk with three
of them. Our interviews were semi-structured. In all of them, we asked questions about
areas where the interviewees perceived problems or conflicts in NPEES implementation.
With administrators, we were also interested in learning more about the history and oper-
ation of the program and the kinds of power negotiation amongst various stakeholders
that it involved. All these names used in this article are pseudonyms.
To code and analyze our data, we followed a directed qualitative analysis approach
(Hsieh & Shannon, 2005). Our first pass at the data included looking for instances of pos-
turing, power struggles, and ideological impositions, which are phenomenological aspects
typically zeroed in by critical approaches (Tollefson, 2006). As the coding progressed, we
identified emergent properties and dimensions in the manifestation of those broad themes in
the data. Such properties and dimensions included aspects such as the curriculum, negotiat-
ing NPEES entry into schools, teachers’ working conditions, and perceptions of NPEES by
parents and non-NPEES teachers. We then further analyzed the segments identified as rel-
evant from a critical perspective. An obvious weakness of the study is the lack of obser-
vation data to contrast the comments of interviewees and account for the ‘niceness’ and
researcher influence effects that are typical of qualitative interviews and have to do with
face-saving and control strategies (Silverman, 1993). Our sample of parents is also very
small and unrepresentative. We have taken care to incorporate awareness of these limit-
ations into our discussion and conclusions, but readers should be aware of their potential
effects on our findings. Because our study is exploratory, our claims are tentative and are
intended to provide a basis for future studies. The section below presents and discusses
the results of our analysis.

Results and discussion

Funding issues
The interview with one NPEES administrator, Megan, reveals something we suspected:
NPEES operates with minimal funding and its coordinator has to struggle to obtain and
allocate resources2:

Hay estados que tienen un gran capital como los del norte y otros estados sobrevivimos de lo
que tomamos por aquí y por allá (.) ahora hay un recurso federal que está llegando a los
estados (.) aunque no es mucho (.) pero es algo.
There are states with a lot of funding, like the northern states, and the programs of other states
like ours survive by grabbing bits and pieces from here and there (.) now there is a federal
allocation that is getting to the states (.) it’s not a lot (.)but it’s something.

Megan alludes to the fact that NPEES was created without having specific funds allo-
cated to it in the state budget. We infer from her comment ‘by grabbing bits and pieces from
272 M.D. Perales Escudero et al.

here and there’ that it was funded with left-over moneys from other programs. This is
confirmed by the comment below:
Nosotros ni en ese momento ni ahora tenemos presupuesto estatal
We don’t have any state funding neither then nor now.

The ‘then’ Megan mentions is the year 2005, when NPEES began to operate. Since
2009, however, federal funds have been allocated to the program. Nevertheless, these
funds are limited and complicated to handle:

De repente sabemos que llega un dinero y se preguntan (.) bueno (.) ¿eso para qué es? Llega el
dinero y las reglas de operación pueden tardar hasta seis meses y no sabes para qué lo van a
ocupar (.) y bueno cuando necesitas ocuparlo te das cuenta de que las reglas de operación
dicen otras cosas y además el tiempo ya es muy corto.
All of a sudden we know the money’s arrived and they wonder (.) well (.) what is that for? The
money gets here and the operation rules take up to six more months and you don’t know what
they’ll use it for (.) and well when you need to use it you realize the operation rules say some-
thing else and the time is too short.

Megan’s comments highlight a common problem in Mexican government budgeting:

there is a long delay between the arrival of federal funds to state institutions and the
issuing of the regulations that dictate how the money is to be spent. By the time the regu-
lations are issued, there is very little time left to spend the funds. As a result, state officials
like this coordinator cannot spend these moneys efficiently. Furthermore, the funds are very
limited, and 95% of the money is consumed by teacher and supervisor salaries:

El noventa y cinco por ciento es exclusivamente para pagos (.) maestros y supervisores y los
demás se trabaja con un rango de cuarenta mil para medios y funcionamientos.
Ninety-five per cent is for salary payments (.) teachers and supervisors and the rest we work
with about forty thousand for the day-to-day functioning of the program.

As Megan explains, after teacher and teacher supervisor payments, the program is left
with 40,000 Mexican pesos a year, or, approximately, 3600 USD in 2012, to operate. This
situation hinders the ability to run the program effectively. As Megan says below, some-
times she is led to believe that support will be available for a certain action; she then
makes a commitment toward that action only to find out later that support is not available
in the end:

Le hemos dado seriedad hasta donde se ha podido(.) porque esto también no sólo depende de
uno hay muchas cosas que no hemos estado a la altura porque finalmente trabajar en gobierno
es muy diferente de trabajar en la universidad … tienes que aprender a trabajar con las reglas
del juego y sí aprendí muchas cosas como que del plato a la boca se cae la sopa y se me ha
caído muchísimas veces y dices bueno qué onda(.) si me dicen que sí voy y pongo mi cara y
para que luego la cara.
We have tried to be as serious as possible (.) because this is not only up to me there are many
things were we haven’t been up to par because in the end working for the government is very
different from working at the university … you have to play with their rules and I did learn
many things like sometimes you make a plan and it doesn’t work and that has happened
many times and you do wonder what’s going on (.) if they tell me they’ll back me up and I
commit and then I lose face because they won’t back me up.

What these comments highlight is the degree to which the government is not a hom-
ogenous entity but a site with its own power struggles between more powerful and less
 Current Issues in Language Planning 273

powerful agents, with the less powerful agents being the ones that are closer to actual policy
implementation, for example, Megan. They also show what we had already suspected:
NPEES implementation can be characterized, to some extent, as an instance of posturing
as it was not provided for since its inception, and it continues to be ill-provided for.

The curriculum and pedagogical issues

A striking feature of the NPEES is the fact that the curriculum and teacher training are
largely controlled by an international ELT publishing company (IPC, a pseudonym).
More striking is the manner in which IPC positioned itself as a national- and state-level pro-
vider of textbooks and teacher training. According to Megan, IPC organized a national
meeting of administrators of elementary school English programs:

Las editoriales huelen lo que está pasando (.) se hizo una reunión nacional (.) y curiosamente
una editorial organizó todo e invitó a los coordinadores.
The publishing companies smell what’s going on (.) there was a national meeting (.) and funny
enough a publishing company organized everything and invited all the coordinators.

According to Megan, the ‘hook’ (her words) IPC used to sell its textbooks was to
provide free teacher training. This was very attractive to state officials given the budgetary
restrictions they face. Megan’s boss thus instructed him to work with IPC. However, Megan
reports resisting IPC’s attempts to impose its general, one-size-fits-all training:

Al principio querían vendernos los cursos que ya tenían listos y yo dije que no (.) que íbamos a
escoger los cursos basados en el perfil de los maestros decidiríamos los cursos sobre conte-
nidos y sobre metodología.
At the beginning they wanted to sell us their ready-made courses and I refused (.) I told them
we’d choose the courses based on the teachers’ profiles we would decide on the content and
methods courses.

IPC provides only initial, pre-service training, however. In-service training is offered by
NPEES supervisors. Nevertheless, this training is problematic for reasons having to do with
the academic training, or lack thereof, of teacher supervisors.

Son dos supervisores (.) que se encargan de visitar una vez al mes al maestro y se dan cuenta de
en qué están fallando (.) son gente de mucha experiencia (.) que no tiene una formación aca-
démica fuerte (.) pero tienen una experiencia de veinticinco años dando inglés (.) y son muy
sensibles y tienen buenas propuestas.
There are two supervisors (.) who are in charge of visiting the teachers once a month and note
what’s not working (.) they are very experienced people (.) without a solid academic back-
ground (.) but they’ve been teaching English for twenty-five years (.) and they are very sensi-
tive and had good ideas.

Megan explains that the two supervisors visit teachers once a month; they are very
experienced, sensitive people with great ideas but little academic training. However, the
rosy picture that Megan paints of the supervisors belies the representation of supervisor
capacities and teacher–supervisor relationships made by two other teachers, Deyanira
and Marco. Below is what Deyanira had to say about supervisors when she was asked
about her teacher evaluations.

A veces en la administración en mi temporada no fue muy buen trato … este (.) uh (.) los admin-
istrativos (.) los supervisores no muy buen (.) no era bueno el trato … ellos decían que sí había
274 M.D. Perales Escudero et al.

muy buen trato … las personas que ascendían para ser supervisores eran personas que ni
siquiera hablaban inglés (.) este … que no se desempeñaban muy bien en el grupo (.) entonces
desmotivaba a los que sí le echábamos ganas(.) entonces yo por ejemplo me desmo-
tivé … entonces ya no ascendían el que destacará más sino el que se llevara mejor con los
administrativos.
The administration didn’t treat us very well at the time I was there … this (.) uh (.) the admin-
istrators (.) the supervisors the way they treated us wasn’t (.) very good … they said it was
good … the people that rose from the ranks to become supervisors were people that didn’t
even speak English (.) uh … that didn’t perform very well as teachers (.) this had a negative
effect on the motivation of those of us who did work hard (.) I for one grew jaded … it
wasn’t the hard workers who were promoted but the administrators’ friends.

Deyanira complains of bad treatment on the part of the administration and says that pro-
motion to the status of supervisor was awarded not on the basis of good performance but on
the basis of who had better relationships with the program administrators. Her interview
also reveals moments in which she attempted to wield command of English when vying
for power with a supervisor:

Yo le hablaba en inglés todo y me decía que le hablara en español porque no sabía… entonces
él me ponía bien en todo (.) y le decía si aquí estoy mal por qué me pones que estoy bien (.)
entonces como que… se molestaban en esos aspectos que yo los corrigiera.
I would speak only in English to him and he would tell me to speak in Spanish because he didn’t
know … then he gave me good grades on everything (.) and I told him why do you say I’m
doing well if I’m wrong here (.) and then he would … get upset that I corrected him.

As she says, this strategy would only upset supervisors. That it was unfruitful is
revealed by the fact that Deyanira left the NPEES after a couple of years. Marco speaks
of similar experiences with supervisors but, unlike Deyanira, he wields his university
degree rather than English as a power tool. It is revealing that Marco also left NPEES.

Y entonces yo veo que el supervisor es una persona sin preparación (.) que fue mi alumno en un
taller (.) y digo ¿cómo es supervisor?
And then I see that the supervisor is a person without any qualifications (.) who was my student
at a workshop (.) and I wonder how come he’s the supervisor.

Another way that IPC influences NPEES is with its textbooks, which effectively
become the NPEES curriculum. Teachers, however, subvert this curriculum. They complain
that the textbook is too vocabulary-focused and has repetitive topics and songs, as illus-
trated by Marco’s comments below:

Siento que le hace falta porque es un circulo que no salen (.) es un circulo … solamente son
vocabularios aislados … vocabularios aislados y el verbo to be y el presente progresivo y así
no salen de ese círculo … con el programa que tienen no puede el alumno ser … crear su
propios … propias oraciones ... por ejemplo el niño se aburre (.) son las mismas canciones
en cada grado (.) entonces el niño va creciendo y necesita nuevas canciones (.) tienes que
buscar nuevas canciones(.) materiales.
I feel it needs more work because it is a vicious cycle … it’s only word lists … word lists and the
verb be and the present progressive and you can’t get out of the cycle … with the current
program the student can’t be … can’t create their own … their own sentences … for
example children get bored (.) it’s the same songs year after year (.) then children grow up
and they need new songs (.) you have to find new songs (.) teaching aids.

To counter these features of the textbooks, she and other teachers report using other text-
books creating their own activities to encourage production of full sentences. They include
 Current Issues in Language Planning 275

different songs and use technology where school facilities allow it in order to avoid
boredom:

Siempre estuve llevando material extra(.) de hecho compraba libros … pues este …. tenía con-
tactos con la editorial que trabajo con la Techmoon … me apoyaban(.) les comentaba eh … mi
situación y como yo les consumía(.) les … les(.) les consumíamos libros pues me apoyaban en
ese aspecto(.) me facilitaban los libros(.) me los rebajaban y esos libros los utilizaba en el
NPEES para reforzar.
I always brought additional material (.) as a matter of fact I bought books … because uh … I had
contacts with the publishing company that I work with Techmoon … they supported me (.) I
told them about my uh … my situation and because I bought (.) we bought … books from them
they supported me about it (.) they gave me books (.) they sold me books with a discount and I
used those books in the NPEES as review exercises

In the next section, we draw from interviews with all of the participants to present and
discuss power issues related to how NPEES begins to operate in schools.

Negotiating entry into schools

Because English is not an official course in the elementary school curriculum, its adminis-
tration need to negotiate entry into schools with the school principals and school supervi-
sors. A particularly contentious issue is the scheduling of English courses. Initially, NPEES
administrators expected that English would be treated as an additional course and integrated
into the schedule so that, in effect, all elementary schools would be adding 90 more minutes
to their work day. This, however, did not happen in many schools because principals did not
allow it as this would require them to stay in school longer. Because many principals and
some teachers also serve as principals and teachers in other schools in the afternoon
shift (from noon to 4:30 pm), their livelihoods would be affected by having to stay past
11:30 am:

Pero se hizo ahí un juego que no fue muy bueno (.) las escuelas decidieron poner las clases de
inglés en cualquier momento (.) y con este respetar era ampliar su horario (.) pero los direc-
tores no quisieron (.) hay directores con dobles plazas (.) maestros también (.) y entonces se
complica mucho la situación.
But something not so good happened (.) schools decided to schedule English courses at any
time they wanted (.) respecting the established schedule would have meant longer hours for
them (.) but the principals didn’t want to (.) some of them and some teachers have other pos-
itions at other schools in the afternoon shift (.) and that makes the situation complicated.

As a result, all English courses in a majority of the schools are taught simultaneously
within each shift, from 11:30 am through 1 pm in the morning shift and from 5 pm to
6:30 pm in the afternoon shift, twice a week. This has a negative impact on teachers’
income as they cannot teach more than two courses in the morning shift and two courses
in the afternoon shift. While this teaching load may seem ideal when considered from
the stand point of developed countries, the very low hourly wage that non-unionized tea-
chers are paid in Mexico (about 5 USD per hour for NPEES teachers) along with the
high cost of living push teachers to hold as many jobs as they can. This situation is
likely to have a negative impact on the quality of their lessons.
Besides principals, school district supervisors are very important gatekeepers: they lit-
erally grant or deny access to schools. As NPEES supervisors Romeo and Natalia put it,
they tend to be suspicious of NPEES and its communicative, play-oriented teaching
methods
276 M.D. Perales Escudero et al.

Comunicación falta con las escuelas(.) con los supervisores de zona(.) cuando llegamos con
los supervisores de zona no nos dan esa apertura … tienen una forma de ver la educación
muy tradicionalista(.) nosotros no nos vemos en ese esquema entonces a ellos no les parece
(.) con decirle que a veces nosotros hacemos unas clases con canciones(.) con juegos(.) y
para ellos estamos perdiendo el tiempo(.) ha llegado a ser una fricción donde nos piden
que reduzcamos los tiempos de la hora de inglés.
We need more communication with the schools (.) with the district supervisors (.) when we talk
to them they are reluctant to let us into schools … their views on education are very traditional
(.) we don’t see ourselves like that and then they don’t like it (.) sometimes our lessons include
games and songs (.) and to them that’s a waste of time (.) it’s become a contentious issue and
they even ask us to cut our lessons short.
Los supervisores de zona que muchas veces ellos no les(.) como que no están muy abiertos a la
nueva estructura del inglés(.) como que son muy renuentes a eso(.) como que esperan que
vayamos(.) que platiquemos con ellos para que nos den permiso de entrar a las primarias.
A lot of the time the district supervisors don’t (.) they’re not very open to this new English
program (.) they are kind of reluctant to accept it (.) they expect us to go (.) talk to them so
they’ll give us permission to start the program in the elementary schools.

These comments highlight the negotiation processes and difficulties that occur when a
policy initiated by one administrative structure is implemented in another. NPEES is an
initiative of the state’s ministry of education, but the principals and district supervisors
answer primarily to the union. That NPEES is unofficial obligates NPEES officials to
have to negotiate entry with district supervisors, who do not think that singing songs and
playing games in English are appropriate teaching methods.
Entry negotiation is further complicated by the fact that NPEES is not a part of the state
ministry of education’s elementary school department. Instead, it is a part of the department
of secondary education and work training as revealed by Megan:

El programa nació en una dirección que no debería de estar(.) nosotros queríamos cambiar la
adscripción de educación media superior y capacitación para el trabajo(.) nada que ver con
nuestra área(.) educación básica(.) entonces para básica éramos algo ajeno(.) de repente las
áreas tienen como ciertos recelos y no nos daban información(.) pero a nosotros sí nos pedían
que hiciéramos esos trabajos(.) si el programa hubiera nacido en educación básica(.) hubiera
tenidos condiciones diferentes(.) no sé qué tan buenas(.) pero condiciones diferentes.
The program was born in a unit where it shouldn’t have been (.) we wanted to change our insti-
tutional placement from where it currently is at the department of secondary education and
work training (.) nothing to do with our area (.) elementary education (.) then we were alien
for the elementary education department (.) the different departments are defensive of their pos-
itions and wouldn’t give us information (.) but we had to do the work anyway (.) if the program
had been born under elementary education (.) the conditions would have been different (.) I
don’t know how good (.) but different.

According to Megan, the fact that the program operates under a department other than
elementary education causes alienation. The elementary education department views
NPEES with suspicion and withholds information from NPEES administrators. Megan
speculates that the program’s conditions would have been different had the program
been created within the elementary education department. We do not know the reasons
why this was not so, and we also do not know why the program continues to operate
outside the elementary education department. However, these comments further reinforce
our perception that there is a degree of posturing involved in NPEES creation and operation,
and they also support our point that several layers of power and power struggle exist within
government agencies.
A further source of struggle related to the union stems from the fact that unionized tea-
chers can ask for leaves of absence and organize union meetings with no notice. Because
 Current Issues in Language Planning 277

NPEES teachers are not unionized, many times they are not notified about these decisions
and so they come to schools only to find that their students are not there because their
primary teacher did not come. This is revealed by the comments of one parent and one
supervisor below:

Jacobo (parent): No hay apoyo … en los años pasados(.) las maestras (.) once treinta y ¡pun! Se
quitaban (.) entonces si venía (.) la maestra de inglés (.) bien (.) si no (.) también (.) entonces no
hay esa comunicación (.) no ha habido apoyo de los directores (.) de los administrativos (.) los
maestros vienen acá (.) los dejan (.) y están a la bendición de Dios
There is no support (.) in the past years (.) the teachers (.) would go home at eleven thirty (.) they
didn’t care if the English teacher came or not (.) then (.) there is no communication (.) no
support from the principals (.) from the administrators (.) the teachers come here and are aban-
doned to God’s good will.
Natalia (supervisor): Nosotros no somos sindicalizados(.) el sindicato es(.) lo peor le digo(.) lo
peor que pudo haber existido … que si el maestro pidió algún permiso económico(.) que si
hacen junta sindical(.) lo que sea(.) a nosotros nos perjudica y perjudica a los alumnos(.)
porque(.) los puentes(.) los días festivos.
We are not unionized (.) the union is (.) the worst I’m telling you (.) the worst thing that could
have existed … the teachers get days off (.) they have union meetings (.) whatever (.) this hurts
us and our students (.) because of the long weekends (.) the holidays.

As highlighted by Natalia, the unionized teachers’ prerogatives to miss school days

practically without notice as well as their proclivity to take long weekends cause disruptions
in the implementation of the NPEES curriculum.
In addition, teachers need to tread carefully in some schools where the two unions
(SNTE and CNTE) are represented. As explained above, there have been very strong con-
flicts between the two. NPEES teachers need to assume a position of neutrality lest they lose
what little support they have from principals:

Yo les he comentado con varios maestros(.) que no hagan eso(.) que se integren(.) porque yo la
escuela tengo(.) está dividida(.) con eso de los 2 sindicatos(.) unos maestros apoyan a la direc-
tora y otros maestros no … como que ya se dieron cuenta de que soy imparcial
I’ve told several teachers (.) that they shouldn’t do that (.) they should work together (.) because
the school (.) is split (.) because of the two unions (.) some teachers support the principal and
others don’t … I think they’ve realized I don’t take sides.

The next section presents and discusses data pertaining to ideologies around English
that are apparent in the discourse of administrators and parents.

Ideologies around English

In the discourse of parents and administrators, English in elementary schools is valued as a
tool that will help children to pass their secondary school English courses as apparent in the
comments by Megan and two parents (Jacobo and Estela) below. First is Megan’s comment:
Bueno pues cuando lleguen a la secundaria va a ser un problema … hay mucha reprobación en
secundaria y entonces se vuelve una piedrita en el zapato … la intención es que cubran un
perfil de certificarse internacionalmente.
Well when they get to middle school it will be a problem … there is a lot of flunking in middle
school and then it becomes a problem … our intention is that they develop proficiency so they
can get international certifications.

Megan issued this comment as she was discussing parents’ reactions to the NPEES. In
her view, many parents fail to appreciate how useful NPEES is in terms of avoiding
278 M.D. Perales Escudero et al.

problems of failing secondary school English courses, which according to her is a persistent
problem as large numbers of students fail those courses. These comments are echoed by
Jacobo and Estela, parents of NPEES children. Jacobo is a practicing architect with a
college degree in architecture, whereas Estela is a homemaker with a middle school
education:

Pos a mí me parece muy (.) muy bien (.) dado que es una herramienta que más adelante ellos
van a usar (.) en el caso de los de primaria (.) pos en la secundaria lo van a aplicar (.) que es
más … que ya la asignatura de inglés ya es escolarizado.
I think this is a relly good idea because it is a tool they will use later on (.) in the case of elemen-
tary school students (.) well they’ll use it in middle school (.) where it’s more … where English
is a school course.
A mí me gustaría que estuviera en todas las primarias ... o sea que empezaran desde primaria
para que cuando pasen a la secundaria no les pase los que nos pasó(.) por ejemplo ¿no? Que
llegamos a la secundaria cero inglés.
I would like the program to be implemented in all elementary schools (.) I mean they
should start since elementary so that when they go middle school they won’t go through
what we went through (.) for example right? We knew no English when we started middle
school.

These parents’ comments were issued in response to our questions about their
impressions on the NPEES. In Jacobo’s case, he says that he thinks NPEES is a good
idea because English is a tool which children will use later on in secondary school,
where English is a course in the curriculum. Similarly, Estela says she would like the
program to be implemented in all elementary schools (NPEES is only given in selected
elementary schools). She says the reason why she would like this is so that when
children move on to secondary school, they will not go through the same plight as
their parents who began secondary schooling with no knowledge of English. These
comments can be interpreted in two different ways. On the one hand, they are probably
reflective of Jacobo and Estela’s own experiences with English, which are limited to
school contexts, that is, they do not need to use the language in their lives. Thus,
their construal of the usefulness of English is shaped by their own life experiences
with the language.
On the other hand, these statements by Megan, Jacobo, and Estela can be read as per-
formances of an internalized ideology that construes the goal of acquiring new knowledge
and developing new skills as merely to pass exams. Other possibilities for English learning
such as learning about other cultures, analyzing one’s own or using the foreign language to
reframe and rework one’s identity, do not enter the discourse of these parents, Megan, or
NPEES documents as discussed above. Surprisingly, integrative discourse (i.e. a discourse
of economic advancement) is absent in the parents’ and Megan’s discourse. Their actual
discourse in effect reduces children to schooled subjects, human beings whose vital
horizons are defined by the boundaries of schools and the logic of standardized tests.
That this is the case is further warranted by Megan’s statement regarding the goals of
NPEES:

La intención es que cubran un perfil susceptible de certificarse internacionalmente.

Our intention is that their proficiency develop so they can get an international certification.

In this statement, Megan links NPEES to the market logic of international standardized
tests. Recall that the official goal of NPEES is to get students certified with the FLYERS test
of the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate. This policy sets NPEES on
 Current Issues in Language Planning 279

the receiving end of a global flow of power controlled from the inner circle country par
excellence, Britain.
The statement by Noelia, another parent with a middle school education, performs an
ideology that connects English more directly to a neoliberal discourse:

¡Ay, sí! Porque orita (.) todo orita (.) está más avanzada la vida. Y orita el que no sepa inglés (.)
pues(.) no vale mucho (risa).
Oh, yes! Because now, everything now, life is more advanced. And now those who don’t know
English aren’t worth much (laughter)

In Noelia’s statements, the value of English as cultural capital that may lead to monetary
capital becomes apparent, as does the loss of value experienced by those who have not
appropriated English. Beyond being a valuable commodity, English becomes a parameter
that can be used to assess a person’s value. From our limited data, NPEES parents appear to
be ‘good subjects’ (Pagliarini & De Assis-Peterson, 1999) that have internalized the
ideological discourse surrounding the creation and implementation of NPEES. It is, thus,
possible that this discourse has achieved hegemonic status in the context of the southern
Mexican state.

Conclusions
Our data appear to confirm our initial impression that the creation and implementation
of the NPEES are instances of posturing on the part of the local government. For instance,
the program was created without any budgetary support. Its structural location outside the
department of elementary education, which is surely due to a decision of top bureaucrats,
further complicates the flow of cash and information that the program needs to operate.
Although the program now operates with specific budgetary appropriations, access to
these moneys is difficult.
Our interviews with the program coordinator, supervisors, and teachers, have revealed
that school district supervisors and school principals are powerful agents who determine
access to schools. The influence of principals in Mexican language policy had been docu-
mented by Patthey-Chávez (1994) for indigenous language instruction policies (many of
them choose not to implement them), but our study shows that principals also influence tea-
chers’ income and parental motivation by determining course scheduling. School district
supervisors suspect the communicative, play-based methodologies used by teachers, who
nonetheless continue to use them in creative ways that subvert the curriculum of the IPC
textbooks.
IPC emerges as yet another powerful agent, one that links NPEES to the global flows in
the economy of ELT, flows centered in Britain. IPC has become the provider of curricula
and teacher training through an opaque process that involved organizing a national
meeting of NPEES administrators.
NPEES operates with an ideological framework that presents English as neutral, a tool
whose sole purpose is to help children pass their secondary school English examinations
and obtain a British-based international certification. While it is of course possible that
English will end up having many other effects on these students and the community
where NPEES is implemented, these are not considered by policy-makers, implementers,
or receivers. Thus, unlike other outer circle countries such as Japan, Malaysia, or Korea
(the studies in Tsui & Tollefson, 2007), Mexico, as represented by the southern Mexican
state, does not use English to promote its own national identity or project it outward to
280 M.D. Perales Escudero et al.

English-speaking countries. Rather, by relinquishing control of the English curriculum to

IPC, this Mexican state subordinates its English-related LPP to the forces of the global
market. Tellingly, this global flow would not be possible without internal collaboration
by local agents in ways that we could label as ‘informal’ (Altvater & Mahnkopf, 2008),
that is, there was no structured procedure for awarding book selling to IPC, and there
does not appear to be a structured procedure for switching to another textbook supplier.
Megan, the coordinator, exerts some power in choosing the kinds of training she wants
for NPEES teachers, and teachers report that they subvert the IPC curriculum, but we do
not have data to describe these processes.
Our data thus reveal intersections between micro-policy and macro-policy and inter-
actions across layers of governmentality and global flows. The decisions of school district
supervisors and principals regarding English teaching entry and scheduling create local pol-
icies that re-direct macro-policy in ways unintended by state government agents. In
addition, our interviews with Megan reveal power struggles within the level of macro-
policy. Megan, who is closest to the micro-political context, is at the receiving end of
these power struggles due to the status of NPEES as an unfunded/poorly funded
program housed in the wrong institutional unit. She is quite powerless in her dealing
with other macro-political and micro-political agents. She and her supervisors are in
most direct contact with the micro-political dimensions of NPEES implementation, and a
great deal of policy creation and enactment occurs at this intersection.
For that reason, we propose an analytic level that we call meso-policy, a level that would
capture the agency and power brokering of the government agents most directly in charge of
policy implementation. In the case presented here, Megan is one such agent that acts within
the constraints created by senior state bureaucrats and federal regulations as to the struc-
tural, institutional, and financial conditions of NPEES, which is a kind of vertical flow of
power. At the same time, she and NPEES supervisors negotiates power horizontally with
other departments and governmentality agents in schools (principals and school district
supervisors). We believe that a focus on this level helps to identify those agents and
structures that most determine actual policy implementation. In our case, these are
school district supervisors, principals, and the location of NPEES in the institutional struc-
ture of the state’s ministry of education.
Our article is limited because of the small size of its sample and the lack of observa-
tional data. Our claims should, therefore, be interpreted as tentative and as providing the
basis for future research. For example, it is not clear how the process of deciding to
create the NPEES unfolded. We also do not know if parents with different educational
levels would express the same ideologies as the few parents in this study did.
A lingering question for us is how to use our findings to improve NPEES. A possibility
would be to conduct training with the participants at the meso-policy level (Megan, the
NPEES supervisors) and micro-policy level (principals, school district supervisors,
parents) to make them aware of the ideologies they operate with and of possibilities for dis-
rupting their hegemonic power. We could offer different options for rethinking the role of
English in the curriculum and the community’s life and culture. Hopefully, a kind of com-
munity policy (Baldauf et al., 2010) might emerge from these efforts. We may also write
memos addressed at higher level bureaucrats to make them aware of the role of district
supervisors and principals and propose policy changes aimed at incorporating these
agents more actively and overtly into policy-making so that perhaps they would offer
more favorable conditions for NPEES operation. These might be ways to make good on
the claim that critical ethnographic work should inform policy (Jaffe, 1999; Canagarajah,
2006).
 Current Issues in Language Planning 281

Notes
1. Due to the sensitive nature of the information, we present in this article and the potential negative
consequences to our informants if government officials read it, we have taken every precaution to
ensure that their identities will remain anonymous. These include not revealing the name of the
program in question or the name of the state where it is implemented.
2. (.) = a pause shorter than 1 s; … = a pause longer than 1 s.

Notes on contributors
Moisés Damián Perales Escudero is an associate professor of Language and Education at the Univer-
sidad de Quintana Roo. His research and publications focus on academic literacies, critical reading,
language and literacy policy, and intercultural education. He holds a PhD in English and Education
from the University of Michigan.
María del Rosario Reyes Cruz holds a PhD in International Education from the Universidad Autón-
oma de Tamaulipas. She is a professor of Language and Education at the Universidad de Quintana
Roo. Her research and publications focus on foreign language pedagogy, epistemic beliefs in edu-
cation, and educational technology. She is a member of the Mexican Council for Education Research
and of Mexico’s National System of Investigators.
Griselda Murrieta Loyo is a doctoral candidate in Education at the Universidad Autónoma de Morelos
and an associate professor of Language and Education at the Universidad de Quintana Roo. She has
degrees in French and English linguistics. Her research and publications focus on foreign language
pedagogy, epistemic beliefs in education, and educational technology.

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