Mucking in for a new learning experience

Diana Finch explains the lessons to be learnt by bilingual but pampered students on a study trip to Britain

Bringing English language and culture to life in a classroom is never easy, particularly if your school is located as far away as Chile. At Craighouse, a bilingual school in the capital, Santiago, we try to bridge this gap by bringing a group of year eight students to England on a three-week course at the Bell Language School in Saffron Walden each summer.

By the time our students reach senior school at age 12, they can read, write, speak and understand English with varying degrees of accuracy. Apart from their English lessons, they will have been taught history and science in English, but most other subjects in Spanish. Though their English will be quite fluent, they can soon feel out of their depth when confronted with the wide range of accents to be heard in colloquial English, spoken at normal speed, without the carefully articulated concessions that most of us (unconsciously) make to foreign students.

At the beginning of the academic year, in March, we hold a selection process for all the applicants for the trip, where interest, effort, maturity and behaviour are the main criteria. Three accompanying teachers are designated and then the preparation for the course begins.

The advantage of a closed group course, as opposed to a typical open registration EFL summer course, is that the syllabus can be negotiated with the language school and tailored to the exact needs of the group. On our courses at Bell the English component, which includes language, projects and skills work, takes up most of the morning. This is complemented by arts and crafts, a variety of sports and activities, and preparation for outings.

When putting together the excursion programme, we try to strike a balance between sightseeing and shopping with the typical day-in-London, day-in-Cambridge, and outings with more local flavour. On this year’s programme we included a church service followed by a festival of traditional morris dancing in the small village of Thaxted, and interviews with stall owners at Saffron Walden market. This year the pupils also went to the theatre in London for a matinee performance of The King And I, an exciting experience for youngsters fed on a diet of videos.

Other Craighouse teachers also set the students tasks for the trip. The technology teacher asked the pupils to take a series of black-and-white pictures for their photography project. The science department will be getting reports from the excursion to a local wildlife reserve, where pond-dipping and board walks were among the day’s activities. The pupils are encouraged to keep diaries and to put together a course magazine resulting from their project work as a group activity.

The study trip also has a more general educational nature. For children brought up in a world of maids and nannies, the experience of three weeks in a residential language school is in many ways a novelty. Preparation before the trip includes going through simple rules for living together comfortably as a group, keeping things tidy, and managing money. All of this is discussed before the trip, and weekly evaluation sessions are conducted during the course to see how well these rules are being followed.

Anyone who has travelled abroad with a group of 13-year-olds knows the difficulties of moving around in public places, handling luggage and getting pupils to respect cultural codes. The “yes please”, “no thank you”, “excuse me”, “sorry”, that pepper every interaction in English do not come naturally to Chilean Spanish speakers and have to be drilled and practised before and during the trip. Respecting queues and taking turns and using pedestrian crossings sensibly with traffic coming the “wrong” way cannot be taken for granted. The pupils need constant reminders.

To the question “Will my child come back speaking much better English?” asked by ambitious parents we give cautious answers. Not necessarily a noticeable difference. Listening comprehension will undoubtedly improve, and more colloquial expressions will come more naturally. But the effects of direct exposure to a language and culture that have been studied for years in the classroom are for the most part intangible.

One cannot measure the visual images gained from travel, nor the mental adjustments made as the real replaces the imagined, and prejudices and stereotypes give way to informed opinion. What we have done is simply to place things in context through a fun learning experience.

Having lived all my life in South America as a bilingual, binational citizen, I have frequently had to interpret and explain attitudes and gestures and behaviour at a level that goes deeper than language. The more each culture does to understand the other, the easier it is to establish real communication. It is the intangible things that often make the difference.

Diana Finch is head of English at Craighouse School, Chile



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