The teaching of different languages in a specific school


I am going to talk about the teaching of different languages in a school called Claret. It is a charter school that have Pre-School, Primary, Secondary and Baccalaureate. The learning language of this school is Catalan. In pre-school, children start doing English 3 hours per week, the other subjects are taught in Catalan. In Primary School, children have 3 hours per week of Catalan language, three hours of Spanish and 3 of English, and they have Visual Arts Education in English one hour per week. In Secondary, they have 3 hours of Catalan (except in 4th of Secondary that are 4), 3 of Spanish and 3 of English (except in 2nd of Secondary that are 4). They can also choose an optative subject of French (from 2nd until 4th of Secondary) or Latin (in the last year of Secondary) that are done 3 hours per week. The school offers extracurricular classes of English (for all the ages) and Sports for Kids for Pre-school.

In this school, they give importance to all the communicative competences in all the languages. Taking in account all the languages, they start working comprehension, speaking, writing and reading from Pre-school by daily routines, games, tales and songs. In Primary they start using books to introduce grammar. They have a reading program, use it also in English, where the oldest children help and teach to the youngest (Pre-school) to read.

To teach English, they use the AMCO method that try to acquire the new language in the same way as they learnt the mother tongue. This method gives importance to the active methodologies, cooperative work, learning by projects, multiple intelligences and emotional education. In Pre-school, teachers use daily routines, games, tales, songs and TICs to teach English. In Primary and Secondary they also work by projects and use the cooperative work. They also have a conversation assistant program, on which there are some native people that come to help in the English activities in all grades. In English classes, teachers speak all the time in English and they promote the participation of the children asking questions and doing corporal activities where children should move their body to get active in their learning.

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