3163. How to Foster Fluency in the Target Language

 

Some weeks ago I watched a video in the Internet about the educative school company where I taught in Jaén, southern Spain, and I got stunned: I saw a girl aged 12 or 13 from the female school of the city plus a young man from the male school speaking in fluent English, and it was all amazing, like they were totally bilingual.

As a matter of fact more and more students of that institution can do so, and in many other Spanish schools too: the overall thing in Spain is changing, and on the street you can hear more English than twenty years ago, definitely.

When I taught at that male school I didn’t make immersion in English, but now I would do it: it’s the only way our students can learn the tongue and also acquire it.

Acquiring a foreign or second language entails and implies unconscious gaining the language in a particular atmosphere where the students are exposed to that tongue. We teachers have to create immersion in the classroom: that room is a piece of an English-speaking country, let’s say, and as well we teachers should talk in Shakespeare’s language before and after the lesson: remember the classroom is a place where that language is the vehicle one for communication.

And besides all this is beautiful and I like it so much: beauty is educative for our students! / Photo from: wallup net. I think the picture is from Ireland.