Crime and punishment

I've got a few hours of teaching over the summer with an academy here in Pinoso. Sixty hours of preparation in six weeks for the B1 exam.

Within the European Union there is an agreed framework for language study. Various educational bodies organise exams to accredit learning at the various levels which go from starters - A1 - through to more or less bilingual at C2. So B1 is a lower intermediate type course.

This is the official description of the B1 level: Can understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters regularly encountered in work, school, leisure, etc. Can deal with most situations likely to arise whilst travelling in an area where the language is spoken. Can produce simple connected text on topics which are familiar or of personal interest. Can describe experiences and events, dreams, hopes & ambitions and briefly give reasons and explanations for opinions and plans.

So basically it says that you can get by in situations that you know about with texts, recordings and conversation in English. Obviously enough, within the documentation for the exams there is more detail but to give an example, about pronunciation, the documentation says that a word should be intelligible.

Now I have a critic. A Spaniard who lives in the UK and who always takes me to task whenever I make generalisations about Spaniards. So here we go. I await his comments.

It seems to me that one of the elements of the Spanish education system is to punish errors. The exam I am teaching to is run by Cambridge Examinations and their style is to reward success. To give an example at school. If a Spanish pupil fails more than a given number of subjects then they are sent back to repeat the year. There are opportunities to resit the exams between the end of one academic year and the start of the next so lots of Spanish youngsters spend a good deal of their summer holidays cramming for exams. If they pass sufficient of the failed subjects they can continue without repeating the year.

Lots of the students I deal with have learned with the la Escuela Oficial de Idiomas, the Official School of languages. Without having direct experience of la escuela oficial it sounds to me as though they have some quality teachers doing a quality job. On the other hand they seem to be very nit picky. They teach the sort of English that is grammatically correct but, at the same time, old fashioned. It may well be true that "Could I have an orange juice, please?" is more formal than "Can I have an orange juice, please?" but I don't think many English speakers would worry about that. Indeed it may well be that the escuela oficial is even more grammatically correct and teaches "May I have an orange juice, please?" I was taught, and I still say, "If I were you..." but I have no problem with "If I was you..."  - I'm sure the escuela oficial does. So the students are barraged with lots of rules, lots of detail. They become so caught up in the detail of the grammar that they find it difficult to speak or to write fluidly. Now grammar is important but if it gets in the way of basic communication it becomes a problem.

So one of the problems I have with my students is getting them to see the broader picture. Through their learning career they have seen their work returned covered in red pen. Every detail mistake is punished. Rather than being praised for having written something that has mistakes but would be perfectly comprehensible to an English speaker, the only comments are on the errors. Students are corrected as they speak breaking the spontaneity and communication. Obviously mistakes have to be corrected but they don't need to be over emphasised. "Then these two persons go to the cinema," says the student. "Ah, says the teacher - so these two people went to the cinema - and what film did they see?" Corrected but not deflated. Oh, and I've been told a couple of times by Spanish colleagues and employers that I should replace my black or blue biro with a red one so that the mistakes are highlighted.

We were doing something about the speaking exam and I mentioned that asking for clarification was a good thing - it shows that students are behaving as real people would if they were speaking. I mentioned that navigating around a word they didn't know or remember was also considered to be positive. "Oh, I've forgotten the name but it's the thing you use to dig the garden". I sensed that the students didn't really believe me. On the listening exam where lots of the questions are multiple choice I was stressing that they should leave no question unanswered. if you have three choices and you don't know which it is give yourself a sporting chance and plump for one. "Don't they take marks off for getting the answer wrong?" I was asked.

Day to day

Last century I passed a fair bit of time in schools. Firstly I had to study in them. My secondary school, between 1965 and 1972, was quite a violent place as I remember. Bullying from other pupils and downright violence from the staff. Later, between 1996 and 2004, I had an office in another school though I couldn't say I really took much notice of my surroundings. I was working in what was called Community Education - adult education, youth work and community development - and it just so happened that our office was there close to the classrooms and other facilities that we used for some of the programme. The only time I remember venturing into a classroom during school hours was to have a word with someone who organised the Duke of Edinburgh's Award for us. She was a teacher at the school and I went to hunt her out in her room. Noisy as I remember it, and much less formal than when I went to school but everyone seemed to be working with purpose.

I'm working in a school again now and this time I'm actually with the youngsters for at least some of the time. I have nine lessons a week with nine different groups. They are full classes with around thirty pupils in some, a few more in one and a few less in others. I think one of them is a special needs type group though, to be honest, I'm not sure. They do pretty well with the English and they seem keen which is all I need to have a good time.

The school is interesting. It's a very loud place. It's very informal. I'm at one with the dress code in jeans and t shirt and I may be a bit over finicky in having a shave before going to work. At times when the pupils are on the move, in fact every time, it seems a bit chaotic but I've never seen any violence or any bullying other than the sort of fleeting and unthinking attacks that young people unleash on each other without pre meditation and without malevolence. I'm sure it's there but I haven't seen it. I have, on the other hand, noticed lots of acts of kindness and friendship between the students which surprises me.

The youngsters don't show me any respect but they don't show the opposite either. Tens of them greet me every day as I wander the school and some even try to pass the time of day with me.

The noise level in the classrooms is pretty high and the real teachers who hold my hand in the lessons occasionally make someone change seats or leave the room. I presume this means the youngsters must be misbehaving in some way but I never notice. I do notice the ones who don't participate at all though. There are several who just stare at their shoes or draw elaborate pictures in biro. There seems to be no expectation that they join in at any level.

The academy, the afternoon sessions are a completely different kettle of fish. These are paid for private lessons. Most of the youngsters are there because their parents believe that English will be good for them. This may well be true but English is less appealing than the park, their friends or Sponge Bob on the telly. I sympathise. They go to school all day, they have homework to do and then they are expected to do more studying. So it's a bit of an uphill struggle and some of the little dears sorely stretch my patience. The adults and older teenagers in the academy are perfectly nice.

One thing I have probably noticed about the Spanish Education is the apparent use of books. In the school my role is to model real English so I am expected to talk and listen. I am not expected to work to any particular scheme or pattern but I get the idea that most courses start at page 1, exercise 1, go on to exercise 2, exercise 3 etc. The youngsters are certainly keen, conditioned maybe, to fill in the gaps in the exercises. In fact it seems much more important to fill in the gaps than understand the language that goes into the spaces. This involves a lot of pencil sharpening, rubbing out and the modern versions of tipp-ex. I was told yesterday that I will be given a timetable for working through the various books - you know the sort of thing. By the end of January you will have completed Unit 4. Apparently parents don't like to see the books that they have paid for not getting filled up with writing, rubber detritus and tipp-ex. Progress can be measured by the number of pages completed.

I'm sure that such an innovative methodology will turn out legions of capable English speakers.

I must be in Paris

I used to use an English language exercise about the difference between must and could. You know the sort of thing; she must be delayed: she could be ill, she could be in traffic. The example went something like " I can see the Eiffel Tower, I can see the River Seine - where am I?" I learned to write the words on the board because my pronunciation never clicked with my Spanish students but it didn't help much. The success rate on "You must be in Paris." was pretty low. Maybe 50% would get the French capital with Rome coming a close second. Another exercise had pictures of the Christ statue in Rio, the Opera House in Sydney, The Coliseum in Rome and The Capitol Building in Washington DC. Hardly anyone could identify anything other than the Coliseum.

Now not recognising Sydney Opera House is no sort of crime; no measure of intelligence. I'm dead against lots of rote learning and there is no reason that anyone should know a series of landmarks but I would have hoped that a bunch of young people would maybe have done just a little better. Most of the students for the particular course were mid 20s university students doing Master's degrees after all.

There are lots of American series on Spanish TV. Programmes like The Mentalist, Bones, Big Bang Theory, Modern Family, Two Broke Girls etc. Nowadays we normally watch these programmes in English with the Spanish subtitles on just to give the impression that we live in Spain. Where the subtitles make some reference to something colloquially American - Betsy Ross sewing the flag, tater tots, doughboy marshmallows, Fox News etc. - the subtitles often gently subvert that into a Spanish reference. So Lifesavers become Chupa Chups and Russell Westbrook becomes Marc Gasol. Some "black" US delicacy in Blackish last night was translated into ham and tortilla by the subs.

I sometimes don't get the US references myself. It's a foreign country after all, and my faculties are going, but I can usually work out the basic idea. I can also see a justification at times - for instance where the reference is language based as in the example of tater tots - which were simply translated as crisps. On the other hand such a narrow, parochial view of the world where everything is referenced to Spain seems basically unhealthy to me. It could be one of the reasons those students don't know that the Eiffel Tower is in Paris.