The English as a foreign language process under the focal skills approach in public schools

Abstract

The Ministry of Education in Chile has openly stated that children need to communicate in English in order to face the challenges of the globalized world. Because of the characteristics of social vulnerability, affected students are not able to reach this goal. This article purports to present a critical analysis of the use of the FOCAL SKILLS Approach (Hastings, 2007 [1988]) with socially vulnerable students. The authors also intend to describe a set of didactic activities that showed to be successful for the teaching and learning process of English in this school context.