Saturday, September 13, 2008

Reducing standards in English

Half of the 4 and 5 year old children in the Alicante province  (over 15,000) will not be getting English lessons this term.

National legislation states that children should learn English from a young age in order to improve the use of the language within the general population. However the Conselleria de Education has not arranged for sufficient numbers of teachers to meet the demand

Insufficient resources in individual schools and lack of money to hire staff are cited as the root of the problem.

In our experience, English is not popular amongst many Spanish children who find it a difficult language to get to grips with. We are told that, even in secondary schools, there is a heavy reliance upon text book learning rather than oral work which would probably make the lessons dull for students.

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