Learning/not learning English.

There are some things about the English classes that I would like to analyze, because in my experience those classes have always showed some problems to achieve effectiveness. I don’t mean they are the result of a teacher poor work, for the contrary, the English teachers are always trying to solve the problems that the English Class presents in his nature. The examples will be my school experience and this class, and I`ll try to descript their differences and equalities.

In school, the English class system was very typical: a book with activities for reading and writing (fill with the missing word, answer to the question, put the sentence in order, etc). The listening was the same but less frequent (answer the questions after listening the tape). My class had the problem of being too crowded, like forty students and one teacher, so the routine was the teacher writing the “grammar focus” in the board and nobody doing nothing, except for the last five minutes of the class, when everybody copies the answers of those who know English since always.

Now, in university, there are a lot of things that show a more prepared class and some others that remind me the same problems that we had in school. The difference between these is motivated by two factors: a different disposition of the students, and the implementation of a few teaching techniques and technologies. The disposition is maybe the most important, the private classes, in the same direction, where students have to pay expensive prices, have also that advantage because the “client” force himself to carry out the tasks given. In school the disposition is blocked by the monotony of the method and the separation of those who know from those who don’t. So those who wanted to learn, in the beginning, realize then that it`s easier to give the minimum (using their classmate`s answers) because they feel that there`s something about English that is denied to them.

So the technologies (interactive writing in blogs) or the techniques (conversations with guidelines) are better received in university because the disposition is different: the labor structure tells us that every opportunity of gaining knowledge capital is an investment in our productive future, specially the English knowledge.But the problem is something that goes beyond the possibilities of a class. No matter how much technologies or pedagogical techniques are used, there is something that seems to be unable to be result with teaching. I thing that problem is related to the relation between English and the daily life of the student. A person who doesn`t has a daily relation with English, doesn`t has access to the core of language, and I think that is, a English way of thinking, not an ideology, a way of thinking that is strongly mixed with its language. That means that the possibility of a student of learning English is influenced by his social and economic situation, because, the signs in a more high society are always in a more intensive interaction with English signs.