The goal is to reach five million high school and higher education students

On Tuesday, March 5, the online version of the English without Borders program went live. Initially, two million individual passwords will be offered to undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in public and private universities, and to students from private institutions who have obtained at least 600 points in every edition of the National Secondary Education Examination (ENEM) since 2009.

The program will offer different types of English language learning support. The online module is provided through the My English Online (MEO) platform, prepared by the educational sector of National Geographic Learning in partnership with Cengage Learning.

The goal for the future is to distribute around five million passwords so that a larger group of students, including those in high school, have the opportunity to improve their knowledge of the English language through the platform. The English without Borders online program will allow undergraduate and graduate students to develop their proficiency in English with a view to entering the Science without Borders program.

Another phase of the English without Borders program includes the testing of language proficiency. Mastertest, a company accredited in Brazil by the Educational Testing Service (ETS), will apply 500,000 TOEFL tests to check the standard of English among students in Brazilian universities. 250,000 TOEFL ITP tests are ready to be applied in Brazil and await only the completion of the registration system. All the universities selected for this initial phase are now registered and their testers have already received the necessary training. The students who obtain the best results in the test may then be selected for classroom-based courses. 

The expansion of the CAPES-Fulbright program, known as English Teaching Assistantships (ETA), is another of the Ministry's initiatives. In this module, 200 experienced English teachers from different regions of the United States will come to assist teams working in the classroom-based modules in the 59 training centers of participating federal universities. From the very beginning, 20,000 students are expected to benefit.

Source: Ministry of Education