Panama English language skills near worlds worst

AFTER  years of experimental  initiatives by successive education administrations, Panama remains near the bottom of the barrel when it comes to English language teaching programs

Panama is poorly rated when evaluated according to a study conducted in 2013 by EF Education First (EF), an international body   specialized in language teaching since its founding in 1965.

The report places Panama in position number 52 of a total of 63 countries evaluated.

This is the third analysis in which the Panama  has participated

The first study was in 2011 and the country was ranked 40 out of 44.

The second was in 2012 and Panama finished 51 out of 54 nations.

The latest reports shows  that in the last seven years Panama has shown  no improvement in language learning and is still on the list of the 15 poorest English speaking countries,  including Guatemala, Ecuador and Costa Rica Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden are the top three.

Nicolás Escobar director of EF in Panama, , said the idea is to know the level of bilingualism – a person’s ability to use two languages in any communicative situation – anywhere in the world. For that, 750 ,000 tests (oral and written) were applied to people between 18 and 60 years of age in the 63 countries.

The results produced  by EF t did not surprise Indira Rojas, an English teacher for 16 years at the Chino-Panamanian Cultural Center.

She said that the main factor that influenced to Panama’s low grading  has to do with the ineffective and often routine methods of preparation in public education.

She  told La Prensa: “the teachers themselves do not have the necessary training to be able to teach a second language in a natural way to the students”.

Language law
Rojas said that the country has lagged behind and has failed to comply with Law No. 2 of January 14, 2003, which mandates the provision of English as a second language throughout the country.

The Ministry of Education (Meduca) argues that  the report it is a perception and does not necessarily reflect reality, considering that the level of English in the country is intermediate reports La Prensa.

Yarielis García, director of the Language Unit of Meduca, said that to encourage learning, a $135 million investment is planned for the “Panama Bilingual” program.

The initiative, launched last July by President Juan Carlos Varela and which will run until 2019, plans to train 305,000 thousand teachers and students. Of those  25,000 will be teachers; 100,000  thousand, students of average and premedia and 160,000 initial and basic students

During the administration of Education Minister Lucy Molinar (2009-2014) bilingual projects were eliminated and others were created.

For example, the English for Life Program, which was promoted by the director of the Gabriel Lewis Galindo Foundation, Marta Lewis de Cardoze, during the Martin  Torrijos administration (2004-2009), was canceled.

The initiative reached 42,000 primary, secondary and adults seeking work. But when the new administration arrived it stopped funding.

Molinar argued that “these were isolated programs, with their own budget, territory and autonomy such that they could not be effective. It was as if there were seven or eight parallel ministries. Now innovations are being applied to these programs, but to the whole system. “

The Meduca chose to create the Children Program through which teachers spent five hours a week teaching English, an initiative that benefited more than 125,385 children in 350 schools across the country.