Reflection about the programme: "Do you speak English?"

After watching the 30 minutes documentary called “Do you speak English?”, I would like to reflect about some questions that are covered in the programme.

To begin with, I want to talk about the importance of knowing English. I know a lot of people, especially old people with more than 40 years old, that have no idea about speaking English. That is because they didn’t learn English at school. Maybe in the past, English was not so important but, at the present, English is the most commonly spoken language in the world and we can find it in different aspects of our life like: technology, science, tourism, education, etc. If we want to travel to other countries, we can use English to communicate in there, but increasingly, we have to use in our own city because, as I analysed in another entry of this blog, there are a lot of foreign people living here. That’s why, we can find almost all the jobs that apply people with a good level of English.

Although the schools are conscious about the importance of learning English, I think that the teaching methods and strategies are not the most appropriate because, comparing with other countries, we are unfortunately the third from bottom. Talking about my experience of when I was a child, I don’t remember to have practised communicative competence when I was learning English at school. We started learning English in Primary school with some vocabulary in books, and later, grammar with more books. Even the teacher talks to us in Catalan, not in English. I think that now, the education is changing, and teachers are looking for new methods and strategies to get the students learn better and more. In my opinion, the best way to teach English is making the children speak in English, and not focus just in grammar. I also think that we should change the materials. We should replace books for other creative things like technology.

I had the opportunity to do some teaching practices in a school of Austria. Although the language of Austria is German, we had to teach a class of 6-7 years old children. They start learning English at this age playing speaking and vocabulary games and in two years they get to talk about different topics quite good. Is not until Secondary school that they start writing words or doing grammar, but they speak very well at that age. I really liked this experience, and I took a lot of ideas that I would like to try one day.