SECOND LANGUAGE IN SCHOOL

In this blog I am going to talk about teaching a second language in primary education and also how it goes as the time pass.

I am going to talk about this because I was doing my placement at Howell’s School teaching Spanish. I started just in primary education, but they want to showed me how they teach Spanish in the different courses and how the pupils begin being better on it until they have their A level’s.

they point to factors that influence L2 transfer motivation, and this is important in several ways. (James, M.A., 2012), for the beginning, this is the main ingredient.

The teacher must be a person who shows and offers confidence and motivation to the rest of the students. The foreign language is something new for the students, it is not a subject like mathematics or their mother tongue, which they practice every day, the subject of a foreign language, is something completely unknown to them, so we must start easily, simple and welcoming, so that the students are not bored.

Giving a second language in primary is something that is being given not long ago in the United Kingdom. As the rest of the world studies English as a second language because it is in the language in which most people can communicate, they also want to learn a language other than English.

As for my experience in the school Howell´s, I have been able to be with girls from year 1 up to A levels giving Spanish. It is practically impossible to give only 30 minutes of foreign language per week and try to get the girls to memorise something grammatical. It's not possible, that's why games are used. Another curious fact is that the school has realized that girls are not used to using a dictionary and searching for a word, what they do is perhaps rather use translators, which is a big mistake. The use of the dictionary has started without fail in primary school, since later in secondary school they do not have a problem.

At GCSE, they focus more on grammar as they prepare for the exam they have. One of the most common mistakes they have in Spanish is the order of the sentences since in Spanish and English we say things in a different order. The process that these students have had has been two years working in Spanish as a subject. In high school, if they choose Spanish, they already have a regular class with books and everything.

The way they learn Spanish is totally different from the way I studied English in this case. It is true that Spanish grammar is much more complex than English, but for example, in Spain, in my case, we focus a lot grammatically and verbally on how things are written along with vocabulary. In the United Kingdom, on the other hand, speaking is a lot of work, pronunciation and listening to the teacher speak. They do a lot of exercises on everyday subjects. They usually do the exercises in groups because they are questions and they used to ask each other.

Finally, we have A levels, I was astonished by the level of Spanish that these students had. As I said before, we Spaniards usually learn English at school as a compulsory subject, but we always focus on the same thing as vocabulary and grammar. Well, in this case the English in A levels, I have had the pleasure of having been able to be in class of history of Spain and Latin America and also in class of history of the art of Spain and Latin America. As far as culture is concerned, on the part of Spaniards and the curriculum in the second language learning part, it seems insane to me that the English know about the history and history of the art of the country from which they are learning the language and we Spaniards are only capable of studying grammar. That way we are not educated in Spain about English.

The level of Spanish of these students is very advanced in which, texts on the history occurred in Spain, for example, text containing treatises or articles on the time of Franco for example (was a dictator who marked much in the history of Spain), students are able to translate without any problem.

To sum up, is not the best way to start the second languages with only half an hour, since it is seen that it is a subject completely different from the others and that it is something new every day. You can easily see that the majority of the students enjoy it. Later on, the way in which they improve over the years and the teaching they are given, which is very different, makes the students learn about everything and not just grammatically.

Reference list:

James, M.A., 2012. An investigation of motivation to transfer second language learning. The Modern Language Journal, 96(1), pp.51-69.

Yuldashev, A., Fernandez, J. and Thorne, S.L., 2013. Second Language Learners' Contiguous and Discontiguous Multi‐Word Unit Use Over Time. The Modern Language Journal, 97(S1), pp.31-45.