Brazilian techies must improve Portuguese skills

Kleber Pedroso is an experienced English language coach for Brazilian IT professionals. In his latest guest column for IT Decisions, he points out that before learning English, Brazilian IT professionals should be proficient in their own native language.

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I have been in the business of teaching English to IT professionals in Brazil since 2009. The years of experience in the field made me realize something that is very important: people must be fluent in their own language in order to learn a foreign language.

What I mean is that if you don’t even know the basics of grammar structure in your native language – whatever it may be – or if you do not have the critical thinking that is needed to understand when a synonym of a word you want to use is more appropriately employed in a specific situation, it becomes much harder for you to learn a second language.

That is because you have a poor vocabulary and structural background, so you will be not be able to make many linguistic comparisons between your native language and the one you want to learn. Most of my students have a basic problem: they do not have a full grasp of their own language. When that happens, teaching them becomes a more complex task.

As I said in my last article, governments are partly responsible for that. I say partly, because we are in charge of enriching our own cultural background. Culture is something that is acquired since we are born, then we receive formal education at school, but this is part of our basic formation as human beings: deciding whether we are going to develop our own minds or not is our sole responsibility.

Technical professionals should read poetry, short stories, newspapers, comic books and other printed material in order to diversify their vocabulary. And study books about their own native language grammar, too.

Once you decide that you are really fluent in your own language, only then you may be ready to starting learning another one.

Further reading:

>> Kleber’s previous column, where he questions the difference between technical English knowledge versus having full proficiency in the language;

>> What local IT trade bodies are doing to develop the English skills of IT professionals in Brazil and IT Decisions’ opinion on the matter;

>> Sam Watten’s first and second guest articles on the difficulties English-speaking executives have when working in Brazil,

Image by Loren Sztajer licensed under Creative Commons.