Nearly 120 teachers meet since Saturday in the XVI Meeting of Teachers of Portuguese of the United States and Canada, which happens during five days in Faial, Pico and S. Jorge.

The initiative, this year organized in partnership with the Regional Directorate for Communities of the Presidency of the Government, is one of the annual events of the Association of Teachers of Portuguese of the United States and Canada (APEEUC) that joins more than a hundred teachers around the problematic of the Portuguese language.

It is the fourth time that the Azores welcome the meeting, which passed, in the most recent years, by Montreal (Canada), Coimbra and Lisbon.

There are at present nearly 50 communitarian schools that offer the teaching of the Portuguese language to the emigrants' sons and other interested people, and more than 100 teachers in the United States.

Besides these schools, more than 15 thousand pupils learn at present Portuguese in the official teaching in the USA.

The program of the meeting foresees the fulfilment of visits, walks and entertaining activities, in the islands in which it takes place, besides conferences and discussions on the local culture and the problematic of teaching in the two countries of North America.

During five days, the teachers, among which many Americans and Canadians of schools where Portuguese is taught, are going to have the opportunity to discuss some of the modern pedagogic practices in the teaching of languages, specifically of Portuguese as foreign language.

Among the planned initiatives there is a conference of Isabel Leiria, from the Institute Camões, on Wednesday, the 23rd, entitled “Teaching of PEL2: How to teach Vocabulary, Grammar and Pragmatics”, specially addressed to the teachers who deal in the USA and Canada with the teaching of Portuguese as second language.

The Association of Teachers of Portuguese of the United States and Canada was established in 1993 in New Jersey, USA, to defend the interests of the teachers who were teaching the Portuguese Language in the communitarian schools in the USA and Canada.

The association evolves, starting to include also teachers who teach Portuguese in the official schools of these two countries and others of Portuguese origin that teach other disciplines.