English language teaching is not exactly a strongpoint in Spanish schools. There must be something wrong if, after learning English in school from the time a child is four years old until he's eighteen, upon graduation that child is not able to string together two sentences that make sense.
It's become a Spanish tradition to bewail the fact that we can't speak English and that we'll never speak it. Some people say Spaniards simply can't learn foreign languages, that it's a genetic defect. I say the genetic defect lies in our education system.
I remember studying French and Spanish in high school in Boston. We had a foreign language class every school day for four years. By the last year we had read literature in the original language, not adapted for learners. Most classmates could speak Spanish or French at a rudimentary level and understand it at a higher level. The same went for the fewer who studied Italian or German. And then Americans think they have bad language teaching. No, they don't, it's just that normally the rest of the world communicates in English, so Americans don't feel it's an urgent necessity to learn other languages.
Spaniards, however, do. Most world leaders speak English, except for the Spanish leaders, who look foolish toting around an interpreter at European or world meetings. Spain is trying to pick its economy up by exporting more. For that it needs to contact other companies in other countries using English, which has become the world's lingua franca. People who can't find jobs and are thinking of emigrating need to learn it. Besides the language of the country they're going to, many employers want their employees to have a working knowledge of English. So why can't Spaniards seem to learn English?
I suppose, in part, because children aren't exposed to English until they're four years old and then for only fifteen minutes a day three days a week. How anyone can expect a four year old child to understand someone speaking English for only fifteeen minutes is beyond me. The time goes up to two hours a week at the beginning of primary and finally to three classes a week (not a full hour each) at the end of secondary school. In primary school the books are completely in English and children are expected to learn simple sentence structure and the most basic vocabulary and grammar. Sometimes a teacher will speak in English during class, but not often. Children are expected to learn by osmosis, I suppose. When some of my younger students first came to me for help they didn't even understand the instructions of each exercise because they had never been explained in class. They're not expected to learn translation of any kind and never read large texts in English nor are they expected to even write independently. By the time they get to seventh grade (the first year of secondary) they are expected to know rudimentary English but they know about as much as when they began. In secondary school the emphasis is on grammar and knowing how to form the tenses, how they go together and word order and clauses and all different forms of speech. But if they are obliged to read a book, it's rewritten to a low level and they generally won't understand it. Never do they have to write compositions and only rarely speak in English in class.
Something that also doesn't help is that only rarely do you hear English on the street. And television is dubbed. That came about with the advent of television when Franco controlled everything. He decided to dub the foreign television programs the same way he dubbed the movies shown in the cinemas. That way the upper echelons and the Church could make sure the Spaniards wouldn't hear anything detrimental to Catholic and Apostolic Spain. When Franco died the dubbing continued, more than anything because people were used to it. And now, with the advent of TDT, it would have been a wonderful time to finally show programs in original version with subtitles in Spanish but no one took advantage. So now most of our European neighbors can watch Breaking Bad in the original English and augment their knowledge of the language while in Spain the only English you hear is if you're standing next to English speaking tourists.
And so the strange signs appear in shop windows and restaurants. Tabla de quesos (cheese sampler) becomes Table of cheeses. Pizza al corte (pizza slices) becomes pizza to the cut. Having had no practice communicating in English people tend to pick up a dictionary and literally translate what they want to say, leading to perplexed tourists. Careful at the airports. Having only heard Spanish teachers speak mostly in bad English (good Spanish teachers of English exist, but are still too rare), the flight announcements in translated English may be difficult to understand. You may understand that flight 708 to Reykjavik has been announced at gate 32 and end up trying to board flight 1780 to Riyadh.
Yes, some Spaniards speak English well, and every day more Spaniards are learning to speak good English. The tables are starting to turn but too slowly. Changes in the curriculum and daily life are still needed but won't occur any time soon. In the meantime people like me will have plenty of work helping teach people beyond the textbooks and end the self-imposed belief in a genetic disability that really doesn't exist.
It's become a Spanish tradition to bewail the fact that we can't speak English and that we'll never speak it. Some people say Spaniards simply can't learn foreign languages, that it's a genetic defect. I say the genetic defect lies in our education system.
I remember studying French and Spanish in high school in Boston. We had a foreign language class every school day for four years. By the last year we had read literature in the original language, not adapted for learners. Most classmates could speak Spanish or French at a rudimentary level and understand it at a higher level. The same went for the fewer who studied Italian or German. And then Americans think they have bad language teaching. No, they don't, it's just that normally the rest of the world communicates in English, so Americans don't feel it's an urgent necessity to learn other languages.
Spaniards, however, do. Most world leaders speak English, except for the Spanish leaders, who look foolish toting around an interpreter at European or world meetings. Spain is trying to pick its economy up by exporting more. For that it needs to contact other companies in other countries using English, which has become the world's lingua franca. People who can't find jobs and are thinking of emigrating need to learn it. Besides the language of the country they're going to, many employers want their employees to have a working knowledge of English. So why can't Spaniards seem to learn English?
I suppose, in part, because children aren't exposed to English until they're four years old and then for only fifteen minutes a day three days a week. How anyone can expect a four year old child to understand someone speaking English for only fifteeen minutes is beyond me. The time goes up to two hours a week at the beginning of primary and finally to three classes a week (not a full hour each) at the end of secondary school. In primary school the books are completely in English and children are expected to learn simple sentence structure and the most basic vocabulary and grammar. Sometimes a teacher will speak in English during class, but not often. Children are expected to learn by osmosis, I suppose. When some of my younger students first came to me for help they didn't even understand the instructions of each exercise because they had never been explained in class. They're not expected to learn translation of any kind and never read large texts in English nor are they expected to even write independently. By the time they get to seventh grade (the first year of secondary) they are expected to know rudimentary English but they know about as much as when they began. In secondary school the emphasis is on grammar and knowing how to form the tenses, how they go together and word order and clauses and all different forms of speech. But if they are obliged to read a book, it's rewritten to a low level and they generally won't understand it. Never do they have to write compositions and only rarely speak in English in class.
Something that also doesn't help is that only rarely do you hear English on the street. And television is dubbed. That came about with the advent of television when Franco controlled everything. He decided to dub the foreign television programs the same way he dubbed the movies shown in the cinemas. That way the upper echelons and the Church could make sure the Spaniards wouldn't hear anything detrimental to Catholic and Apostolic Spain. When Franco died the dubbing continued, more than anything because people were used to it. And now, with the advent of TDT, it would have been a wonderful time to finally show programs in original version with subtitles in Spanish but no one took advantage. So now most of our European neighbors can watch Breaking Bad in the original English and augment their knowledge of the language while in Spain the only English you hear is if you're standing next to English speaking tourists.
And so the strange signs appear in shop windows and restaurants. Tabla de quesos (cheese sampler) becomes Table of cheeses. Pizza al corte (pizza slices) becomes pizza to the cut. Having had no practice communicating in English people tend to pick up a dictionary and literally translate what they want to say, leading to perplexed tourists. Careful at the airports. Having only heard Spanish teachers speak mostly in bad English (good Spanish teachers of English exist, but are still too rare), the flight announcements in translated English may be difficult to understand. You may understand that flight 708 to Reykjavik has been announced at gate 32 and end up trying to board flight 1780 to Riyadh.
Yes, some Spaniards speak English well, and every day more Spaniards are learning to speak good English. The tables are starting to turn but too slowly. Changes in the curriculum and daily life are still needed but won't occur any time soon. In the meantime people like me will have plenty of work helping teach people beyond the textbooks and end the self-imposed belief in a genetic disability that really doesn't exist.
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