Two years on, and the Generalitat has announced plans to take things a step further by teaching English to children as young as six years old, as well as have some non-language classes taught in English for the first time.
Grand plans to promote what the Generalitat calls ‘the third language’ have been introduced slowly, but this year sees a significant expansion on the last. Eight hundred schools—double the number of 2008—have been specially selected to promote English involving around 261,000 pupils across both primary and secondary schools. At the launch of the programme, Catalan Minister of Education Ernest Maragall spelled out the plan’s lofty targets. “The objective is for pupils to finish secondary school with a basic level, and to finish baccalaureate or professional training at a level equivalent to fourth level [upper intermediate] in a language school, which is considerably high.”
The obvious question this presents is where will the teachers come from? The Generalitat estimates it needs around 15,000 teachers able to teach English in Catalan schools by 2010 to reach its target. At least a third of these will also be expected to teach several non-language subjects in English. The answer, according to Generalitat policy-makers, is to get the current teaching staff up to speed by sending 9,000 of them on intensive English training courses. These are currently being split between the Escola Oficial d’Idiomes, summer courses abroad and European exchanges. In addition, about 500 native English-speaking classroom assistants will be recruited to primary and secondary schools, while native teachers from private language schools and even Erasmus students will be employed to give conversation classes in state schools.
Such an ambitious plan has elicited some scepticism from within the English-teaching industry, and teaching associations in general. Rosa Cañadell of the Unío Sindical de Treballadors de l’Ensenyament de Catalunya (USTEC), the public education trade union, believes the new plan is important but finds it hard to see how it can achieve its objectives in such a short period of time, especially in view of other pressures. “The current level of most Spanish teachers’ English is far below the level it would require to meet the Generalitat’s high objectives,” Cañadell was quoted as saying in Avui. “But there are many other problems that the public education system must deal with, such as declining grades, students leaving school at 16 and integration of new students, that are equally pressing. It’s difficult to see how all these challenges can be met at the same time.”
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