Last year I participated in a very interesing program to prepare English teachers to deal with young learners of English for the first time in the context of Brazilian public shools. It was the first year when English started to be taught at this young age in municipal public schools in the city of Sao Paulo. I acted as one of the tutors for these teachers, doing with them many activities, involving story telling; book handling; reading strategies with different kinds of texts, such as recipies, involving miming and acting out; all followed by theoretical discussions on how multiliteracies can be used in this context.

There were two intensive weeks of course, one in February and another one in August, where the teachers were exposed to all kinds of activities and had the opportunity to discuss the pros and cons of each one of them and about how to adapt them to their local contexts. They reported that the course helped to deconstruct many preconceptions about teaching a foreign language when students are not yet literate in their own language. They agreed that, when language is lived through social practices, it is possible to build strategies to use it without focusing only on the written word. Practices like translations and grammar exercises - still common in many Brazilian formal schools when a foreing language is taught to older students - couldn't be used in this context, what helped everyone to realize - including parents and principals - that literacies do not involve only the coding and decoding of syllables and words.

Besides the two weeks of intensive course, throughout the whole year, the schools were visited every week by the tutors, who observed at least 2 classes a day and had feedback sessions with the teachers. By doing that observation, I was able to notice that the young learners became capable of doing many practices using the English language, including the reading of simple multimodal texts, such as adapted tales, personal cards, party invitations, street art pieces, among others. And, contrary to what many professionals feared, that literacy process didn't cause any confusion in relation to their literacy process in Portuguese.

At the end of one year of experiments, teachers, students, parents and principals showed their contentment about the project, whose content has become part of the curriculum for children aged 5-9 in municipal public schools in the city of Sao Paulo. As a tutor, I still keep contact with the teachers I accompanied during this one year and their reports about the starting of the second year of this curriculum shows that it is possible and positive to propose practices like those.

This year, I'm involved with another literacy project for young learners, this time aimed at garanteeing that they will be literate in Portuguese before they become 8 years old. Again, there are intensive courses with teachers and school principals, who, in turn, will be study advisors to teachers who work at the first years of schooling with the mother tongue. And I can say that these projects makes me even more eager to keep doing research on that area.