ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the experience of the Brazilian ESP Project, which since 1978 has aimed to help students from some fifty universities and technical high schools to improve their reading in English for academic purposes. Language Awareness in Brazil is usually called conscientizaç ã o. As a term it shares some features with what in the UK has been termed Language Awareness, but the overlap, as will become clearer below, is far from perfect. The term was coined by Paulo Freire in his adult literacy work in the early 1960s, and in his usage has political as well as educational connotations, which for many years kept Freire in exile. His adult literacy work started with key concepts of importance to the illiterate's understanding of his or her own social condition, and thus reached language proficiency through social and political awareness.
