Thursday, March 24, 2011

Annoying English

The students I have in my Intermediate Spanish class are very good. The absolute majority really wants to learn the language. They are very receptive and enthusiastic. However, months into the semester I still can't get them to stop speaking English in class. I have done all I can to explain to them that it's the most counterproductive thing they can do. They sabotage everything they achieve by switching into their native language every two minutes. Every class session, I beg them to stop using English pretty much every five minutes. I'm getting to the point where I'm almost waking up at night, screaming "No English here!" 

What annoys me is that they have had three semesters of Spanish before coming to my class. Normally, people who taught them in the SPAN 101 and 102 courses are supposed to put a stop to this habit of speaking English in Spanish classes. Many of my colleagues, however, don't want to make the effort, and use quite a lot of English in class. Retraining their students afterwards is an incredible drag.

It's one thing when language classes are taught by somebody who has been trained as a language teacher. Often, however, college administrators think that anybody can teach a language as long they are a native speaker. This is patently untrue. There are many things about language teaching that need to be learned before one can proceed to teach a language class. Of course, it saves a college a lot of money to hire a bunch of underpaid, unqualified instructors and let them do whatever they want in class. The results, however, are that our students take a lot longer than they need to learn the language.

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