On my high school there was a woman from USA who was supposed to help us in speaking, but thanks to our dear teacher that wasn’t possible since my teacher didn’t like her, so because of her “preferences” we couldn’t practice English, instead that teacher made us to learn endless lists of words, phrasal verbs and all that stuff and, of course, she asked the less common ones.

Also the problem is in the student’s part, nobody complains about this so nobody solves it.

Well, this is one of the reasons that makes me want to leave this country.

PD: Sorry but I couldn’t answer before.

My hypothesis is intelligent kid normally starved of first hand experience overdoses on first experience of experiential learning. Antidote to this is to reduce levels of stimulation and introduce increasingly greater levels when he can handle it. Otherwise set boundaries like No we won’t learn with the fruit until you can behave properly. If all else fails give him a banana if he promises to behave! If punishment and bribery fail you will have probably realised what it is to be a teacher impotent in the face of a child. Happens to the best of us!

To answer your question: here in Spain, English is taught mainly from a grammatical point of view. I mean that in most high schools, students memorize verbs, do practice exercises where they have to fill in the blanks, and learn vocabulary. None of that is bad, but it seems to me like students spend very little time actually practicing their English (actually speaking).

In the USA, the teaching of foreign language used to be that way many years ago. Nowadays, there is much more emphasis on “communication” (actually speaking the language) as opposed to “grammar.” In fact, in the USA we often say that it is OK if you don’t conjugate a verb right as long as you get your message across and are understood.

Personally, I think that your ability to speak a language comes from the amount of time you spend actually speaking the language. That’s why, when I teach English classes, I try to focus more on getting my students to speak rather than spending too much time on grammar grammar grammar. I think that what’s wrong in Spain is that people spend a lot of time studying English, but very little time actually speaking it. Things are starting to change though… now more and more people are interested in “conversation” classes in which grammar isn’t the central piece of the puzzle.

You’ve brought up an interesting topic… I’d like to hear what you (and any other readers of my blog) think about all this.

Thanks for the comment!

From your point of view, what do you think about the way English is taught? I mean… I have learned almost nothing at high school!
I have been learning English since I was 4 (English wasn’t compulsory at school), so I had to go with a private teacher (but I don’t remember throwing fruit at her ^^).
The point is that since I stopped learning English there (not sure but probably when I was 10-11), I’ve learned English through Internet, mainly by reading things that I couldn’t find in Spanish so I had to make an “effort”, but the main improvement was meeting a British person a year ago and I’ve improved a lot despite what you may think because of my several mistakes here. Before meeting her, my English was really, really poor.

So after 14 years learning English, it’s not still as good as it should be (I can’t understand very well English conversations and I can’t speak it fluently). So occurs with my 8-year-old sister.

This might be a personal case but have a look at this, and look where is Spain…:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:English_foreign_and_second_language_EU.jpg

So after telling my boring personal experience, what’s your opinion?