The Spanish language school that delivers lessons on a budget

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/sep/24/spanish-state-funded-language-schools

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The queue up the stairs of the Escuela Oficial de Idiomas, Alicante's state-funded language school, seems shorter this year. It takes 45 minutes to get to the office on the first floor, only for the secretary to point out that I don't have the right sticker for the registration form. Downstairs there's another 40 minutes of queuing for the special sticker, before finally going back upstairs.

Then it's a case of taking the form to a bank, queuing again, paying, getting the form stamped and bringing it back to the Escuela for one more queue.

This bureaucratic ritual feels like a metaphor for the whole business of classroom-based language learning.

In July 2013, however, 25,500 people applied to one of the EOI's 11 language courses, about 40% of them for English. This is, at least in part, because of the price. For my Advanced Spanish course I'm paying €67. This is for the entire academic year, four hours a week, from late September until the exam at the end of May. Last year it was €47. For that you can forgive them a little bureaucracy.

"We're unique," Mercedes Pozo, the school's director, says. "An organisation like the Escuela de Idiomas, that's paid for through taxation, just like primary and secondary school education, there's nothing like this anywhere else in Europe. All the foreign students who come here are surprised by the fact that there's such a high standard of teaching and you only have to pay a minimal fee."

A typical lesson would horrify anyone who holds the fashionable view that the only way to learn a language is to get out there and speak it. In the first two years there are conjugation tables to be learned. Last year our inordinately patient teacher, Antonio, spent most of his time taking us through the subjunctive, the part of Spanish grammar that's most resistant to being simply "picked up" in the street.

This isn't a problem for us because, living here, we have the best of both worlds. We can learn the grammar in the classroom and everything else in our day-to-day lives. Spanish students studying English with the same approach, though, are not so lucky. They complain that, with the large class sizes, they have few opportunities to speak. Pozo, however, argues that we underestimate the importance of grammar.

"When you learn the language in the street you learn the music of the language," she says. "That's very important. It's not just about words and grammar, it's about rhythm and intonation, too. But adults can't learn by just reproducing what they hear. It's easy to learn to say, 'I want to eat'. But if you want to convince a friend to lend you €100 euros. You can't just say, 'Give me 100 euros!' They'll say 'Why?' You need persuasion. That's grammar."

Mónica Mateo, an architect currently working as an academic, has every reason to learn English. Her profession has been hit particularly hard by the economic crisis in Spain and many architects have been driven to look for work abroad. She studied English more than 10 years ago at the EOI and, still speaking the language well today, she's grateful to the school.

"In Spain they now teach children of three English," she says. "But I didn't start learning until I was 12 and the teachers weren't as good then. They taught you the basic grammar and not much more. In the Escuela Oficial the teachers were much better and it was really cheap."

At the EOI the cost is set by local government, and the Valencian region's schools are among the cheapest in Spain. Even with spending cuts they've survived better than some public services, although teaching staff might not agree. Valencia now expects each teacher to take five classes this year, instead of four, for the same salary. Maximum class size at beginner level is now 42, although many students drop out after a few weeks.

The Escuela's biggest problem is its success. They don't have space for all of the 12,000 applicants who want to study English. Each year they draw a letter of the alphabet and then produce a list of students in alphabetical order, from that letter, until they've filled all the places. Wouldn't it be better to choose students on the basis of need or ability?

"That's the big debate," Pozo says. "Should there be some kind of assessment? But how do you assess 12,000 people who don't have any money? To cover all the demand we'd need another school of the same size as the one we already have."

For all its problems, there's a sense of urgency to language learning in Spain that doesn't exist in the UK. The country is acutely embarrassed by its English language skills. Any politician or public figure who dares to speak English on TV without being fluent can expect a wave of ridicule, not from Anglophones but from other Spaniards. Most recently Madrid mayor, Ana Botella, has been the recipient after her pitch to the Olympics committee went viral.

In the UK we're also a little embarrassed about our language skills, but only in the way that we might be embarrassed about not knowing how to cook. The problem with this attitude is that when the skills suddenly become necessary they seem almost impossible to acquire. Spain's British ex-pat community will tell you that they've tried to learn Spanish but it just hasn't "gone in".

Language classes help the language go in much faster when you start the fun bit of actually speaking to people. After studying at the EOI, Mateo took a month-long intensive course in Bedford. She says that when she first met her host family she had a moment of panic, on realising that she had no alternative but to speak English. Very quickly, though, she realised that she already had the basics.

"When you study slowly over a long period of time you don't realise how much you've learnt," she says. "They couldn't speak Spanish so I had to speak to them in English and it was great."

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