REFLECTION ON KIM POTOWSKI'S VIDEO: "No child left monolingual"

VIDEO: No child left monolingual

In this video, Kim Potowski tries to encourage multilingualism and talks about the bilingual situation in the USA’s academic system.

She centres her speech on immigration to illustrate how immigrant languages are treated in the American territory and uses her own experience to make her point.

Her grandparents were immigrants from Lithuania and had to learn English to survive in their new country, becoming therefore bilingual. However, their offspring received a much bigger input of English since it was used at school and everywhere outside their home. Consequently, the English language completely substituted their mother tongue and the next generations never used it or learnt it.

Another influence to this phenomenon of language loss is the fact that schools only focused on English and didn’t teach immigrant languages. Fortunately, this situation is changing little by little nowadays, but Kim Potowski remarks that “we still have a long way to go”. She mentions that the USA doesn’t encourage heritage languages enough and American people don’t usually make the effort of learning a non-English language, probably because they don’t feel the need for it. Using her own words, America “exhibits and promotes monolingualism in English”.

Nevertheless, the situation is not as terrible as it may seem. Schools are currently more aware of the different languages that can be found within its walls in the present, and that is why several of them are becoming bilingual in order to promote linguistic diversity. In the end, by promoting the heritage languages of immigrants, the nation can learn to communicate in different languages and it can lead to numerous advantages, not only in communicative terms but also in relation to global commerce for example.

As Kim Potowski explains, research has proven that bilingual lessons help immigrants to learn English. If they are given 100% English lessons, they don’t understand the explanations as well as they should and they fall behind. Through bilingualism and two-immersion programmes, they receive the important instructions in their first language and it helps them improve much faster because they understand what is being explained and what they are supposed to do.

Even parents who are monolingual in English are trying to make their children learn a new language or even more than one. The problem is that, typically, kids start learning a new language in high school at the age of 14 approximately and that is way too late.

Cognitive research discovered that different parts of the brain are used at language learning before and after the age of 8, which is commonly known as organic memory. That is why two-immersion programmes are important as well as starting language learning in kindergarten, always through programmes based on meaningful content.

Schools and society need to integrate all languages, foster heritage languages because bilingualism has proven to have numerous advantages. It improves problem solving skills, delays dementia or Alzheimer about 10 years and also promotes better acquisition of a 3rd or 4th language. And these are just a few examples of its benefits.

In Spain, the situation is not so different from that of the USA: English acquisition has become highly important and not much attention is being given to other languages.

Society is aware of the importance of English around the world, and that is why nowadays English teaching starts at Pre-primary. It is not until high school that students start learning French or German, which means that in the previous stages of the educative system only English is taught as a foreign language.

Kim Potowski talks about the importance of starting language acquisition at a young age and using meaningful contents as well as promoting two-immersion programmes to promote better acquisition of the foreign language. Here in Barcelona, the educational system seems to agree with her especially on the first two aspects.

People are aware of the high abilities kids have to learn a language when they are young, and parents want their children to start learning as soon as possible. For this reason, English teaching in schools starts when pupils are 3 years old and several private centres develop English lessons even for babies.

Besides, in order to use meaningful contents, schools started integrating CLIL a few years ago. This way they use the language as a tool to teach another subject instead of focussing on grammatical aspects and this new method has proven to be quite effective regarding English acquisition.

However, as was mentioned previously, foreign language teaching focuses basically on English and doesn’t integrate or foster other languages, which I believe should change. I’m not saying it is easy because it definitely isn’t, but schools should promote plurilingualism as well as the acceptance and fostering of different cultures and languages.

In the end, we live in a world in which many different cultures coexist within a same territory and they shouldn’t be undermined or excluded, because that is just a sign of intolerance.

REFLECTION ON "30 MINUTS": English language in Catalan society and education

VIDEO: Do you speak English?

Nowadays, we live in a globalized world and English has become a lingua franca, a common language amongst the different countries to allow communication.

After the Second World War, American companies started to grow and flourish and English became the language used for commercial purposes.

With tourism increase and international businesses, English has been found essential for companies to communicate with their clients. However, even though English has been taught at schools for more than 3 decades, employers still find it very difficult to find personnel with a good English level.

According to a research carried out by the European Union, only 25% of the teenager population between 14 and 16 years old are able to use English correctly in comparison to Sweden, where more than the 80% of the students proved to have great competences in the language. What is the explanation for this low level of competences in English?

I believe that the main explanation lays in the educational system.

English lessons follow the traditional method based on grammar, but this method doesn’t promote comprehension and expression in English. It doesn’t focus on actual communication, and the only way of learning a language is by using it.

My experience teaching English as a foreign language has shown me that language immersion plays a decisive role, especially at young ages. Contact with English promotes a better comprehension of the language and makes its use easier for the speakers. It allows learning in a more natural way because, in the end, at young ages it’s easier to make connections in the brain.

Unfortunately, in Cataluña, this contact with the English language is very low. English teachers speak Spanish in class, which means that students are not exposed to this foreign language appropriately. Also, the movies are dubbed instead of subtitled, which reduces drastically the population’s exposure to the English language.

We should make an effort to get more in touch with the English language at every stage, starting with the education sphere by focusing less on grammar and more in meaningful contents or by supporting the initiative of teaching subjects like Maths or Science through English, because only by perceiving a language and by using it we can actually learn it appropriately.

MULTILINGUALISM

Diary entry #1

Multilingualism is the ability of an individual or a community of speakers to use more than one language. This post will try to reflect the monolingual situation in the city of Barcelona.

Immigration has been one of the major causes of multilingualism since it implied a greater and expanding exposure to different languages.

For instance, in Barcelona, if we compare the foreign population data from 2007 and 2017 we will be able to see that this population increased from 15.42% to 17.58% in a matter of 10 years, according to the data provided by Idescat (Instituto de Estadística de Cataluña). This percentage increase of 2.16% may not be very high but it is definitely significant.

Barcelona’s immigrant habitants come from every country in the world, each of which has its own mother tongue, and that causes the cohabitation of a wide range of different languages within the same territory.

This means that, for example, a family from Africa who speaks Arabic as their mother tongue will be exposed to at least 2 more languages which are Spanish and Catalan, the official languages of the land. However, if they have contact with families from Italy, China, Sweden or any other country they will also be exposed to these other languages, probably.

Idescat shows that in 2017, most of the immigrants came to Barcelona from 5 main countries: Italy, China, Pakistan, France and Morocco. These 5 countries have completely different languages but they all cohabitate in schools with the official languages of the territory (Spanish and Catalan) as well as with hundreds more although, unfortunately, not much attention is paid to them in academic terms because the language policies created by the European Union to support multilingualism do not include the languages of the immigrants (Baetens, 2009).

Another important cause of multilingualism is the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL).

The CEFRL was published by the Council of Europe to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and it states that all citizens in Europe should have the right to learn at least 2 foreign languages. This is the reason why schools in Barcelona teach English and another foreign language such as German or French.

Nevertheless, Barcelona is not the only place where English is taught as a foreign language. English has grown into a lingua franca, a common language used around the world to communicate and its learning has become essential everywhere. But why English? Let’s begin with an image.

The red countries represent the areas invaded by Britain, which gives us an idea of why the English presence is so wide. In the end, this language was necessary to carry out trading activities and businesses around the world and that situation fostered its growth.

In addition to that, it is important to take into account how the USA influence expanded after the Second World War. American companies started to grow and flourish and English became again the language used for commercial purposes, causing that schools all over Europe started teaching English as a foreign language.

Consequently, different initiatives have developed over the last decades in order to promote a better acquisition of the English language.

One of the main ones is CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), which consists on teaching different school subjects such as Maths, Science, History, etc. using the English language. Instead of basing the lessons on memorizing grammatical rules, this method uses language as a tool or a means of communication to teach meaningful contents, which has proven to be rather efficient.

Another initiative which has gained importance lately is starting the acquisition of English as soon as possible, since there is a generalized belief that students will have a better chance of learning a new language the sooner they start getting familiar with it (Prats, 2014).

For this purpose, schools have started to introduce English at Pre-primary education and several private centres have emerged with methodologies that apply to very young children, even babies. These private centres follow the ideas of natural learning and language immersion and focus on fostering the students’ oral comprehension.

I myself work in one of these schools and I have witnessed how efficient these methods are. When we are born, the way we learn how to speak our own mother tongue is by being exposed to it constantly, even if we don’t pay attention to the conversations. It is through listening that we acquire a language and become able to use it, even though being totally unaware of any grammatical rules. When we start learning our first language’s grammar at school we have already developed our ability to speak that language.

This natural learning is what these schools try to imitate. They provide students with a wide range of stimulus in English to start building their knowledge through context, as we do with our mother tongue. Of course, grammar is necessarily taught later when they are old enough to assure understanding and efficient use of grammatical rules, but when students reach this stage of their learning process they already have a solid base of comprehension and expression in the English language.

We can definitely state that for various reasons English is now the global language which allows communication throughout the continents and brings every country closer to each other. That is why so many efforts keep on being made with the purpose of promoting the language, because in the end it represents and ideal of hope for a better future, a future in which we will be able to reach all the different cultures in the planet, learn from them and create a better world based on communication, understanding, respect and peace.