Etnographic Report

Pontificia Universidad Javeriana
Enseñanza de Lengua extranjera
 By: Brian Martin

In the context of globalization and because of Colombian policies, the Ministerio de Educación Nacional formulated the Programa Nacional de Bilinguismo 2004-2009, which includes the new standards of communicative competences of foreign languages – English-, which pretends that in the year 2019 the total population of Colombia achieves a development of bilingual competence.  So does the Cafam school, which proposal is to bring up people with the capacity to face up the challenges worldwide; this program came into effect in 2011 with the second phase of the bilingualism project.

For Cafam School, being bilingual means being capable of using two languages with different purposes, in different fields and varied levels of abilities.  The bilingualism model at Cafam is supported for four principles derived from concepts and researches towards bilingualism, bilingual education and bialphabetism. 

How?

Cafam stated that education first in the mother language. Because of some researches that have shown the construction of knowledge is more effective through the mother language, especially in the early stages of development of bilingualism. That is the reason why Cafam carry out the whole process first in Spanish so they forwardly can produce the knowledge in a second language.

Bi-culturalismo: know the English-speaking culture without granting a privilege to that culture over ours. It is only give them the possibility to get to know that culture better. This also includes crating environments of learning, which I found great, because English can only be learned in real-life situations, Cafam implements reading and writing to reach that goal.

Context

Cafam school is a very varied school, in the matter that one may find any socio-economical statues, as the director of bilingualism said once to me, “here you find the ones who did not have dinner last night, and the once who had caviar for breakfast”, and I did find that is true. Once in class, in one of the activities of sharing experiences about traveling, working, future, the discourse is again varied, some talk about have been in Europe having lunch in Paris, some talk about swimming in Colombian rivers as the funniest trip they’ve done during their lives. Another example I have seen, there was an activity in which students must show a receipt and make it in front of the class, some barely carried out the activity with some fruits, or sandwiches with jam and bread, and others made a banana split with nutella and not cheap ingredients.

What I’ve actually seen in classes is that none of these socio-economical positions play an important role in the matter of students interactions, they seem like they do not care about who has more or less, they treat equally each other, and that, in this unequally country Is a sign of hope on humanity.

What really do influence the students at Cafam, is the fact that a low percentage of new students, with a high socio-economic status, come from expensive bilingual schools, so that makes a big difference on the process of each class, because as it is said at the beginning of this research, they are just implementing the common European framework for languages at the school. No matter what, these students have to stick to the level the class is going through, because the majority is in a low level of the language, and little by little they will implement a system in which the students can be in an appropriate level.    

At Cafam, while my staying; the students took a test that measures the level and proves if students are in the right level for their grade. In the case of my grades, the took the KET test, and it seemed to be a little hard for them, five out of 42 just had an almost perfect test, the rest of them found it hard to do. 

To continue, I put a list of fields observed in class and the analysis make on them.

Language Teaching: There is a program stated for each group, the topic once given, is followed by the next by periods of time, simple present should not take longer than five or six sessions, if students did not get it, at the end of the semester a little review is given. The abilities; reading, grammar, listening and speaking, are measured separately and summed up with activities done in the trimester. 

Personality of students: What is good of being in two different grades, 6^th and 7^th, could show me how hard the human being changes his way of acting, puberty hits very hard and one can notice it every day, at 6^th grade students are more docile and stick to the rules, they may have problems with the language learning, but they keep being meek. On the other hand, 7^th graders do not care neither about what is going on the board nor what the teacher is saying, their word is over teachers. They bow their heads when it comes to subpoenas or annotations in their records.

Approaches or Methods: I have not seen teachers who are free to teach in their own way, they are so fidel to the program that changing anything could scare them. Is that, or I’m wrong and every teacher teaches as a direct method enthusiast. Teacher commands everything; students barely talk or participate, just when they’re asked to do so.