FIRST DRAFT ESSAY

Santiago’s question: As Colombia is looking forward to be a bilingual country, Should public schools increase the number of hours of English in school as private schools do since second graders? 

THE ISSUE OF DEALING WITH TIME

One of the main issues which teachers have to deal is to manage in short English class’s time what the Ministry of National Education (MNE) demands. The MNE has stipulated some special achievements for every grade, as well as, they has demanded that by the time when students get graduate, they have to be able to speak in English, or at least, having reach a B1 level in English (according to the Common European Framework of reference for languages: learning, teaching, assessment, it is an intermediate level).  

Nevertheless, most of the students from high school have a poor English proficiency, most of the time because teachers did not cover all what they were needing to teach, because of the low hourly intensity.  There is not is no enough time, it makes difficult to carry out all the activities necessaries for developing students language skills.

Another important thing is, as the time is limited, what many English Teachers do is to be too much dependent to the student book, they tend to be focus on teaching grammar, and vocabulary. And sometimes, they do listening activities. But those activities which requires to use the language, as speaking and even writing, would be affected because there is no time for long activities. So, currently time of English in public Schools have just let students get a superficial knowledge about the language, at the same time classes become boring and make students lose interest about learning the language.

Thus, if MNE wants bilingual people it is important to make a change on curriculums demanding more quantity of English class for making students realized the real importance that English and being bilingual have. And giving teacher the opportunity of planning really good classes which encourage students to learn, and help them to acquire easier the language through classes well done.