Jim Coopers talks
about English as a second language in Puerto
Rico on his essay “Teaching”. This topic is still prevailing of our society. Jim Coopers narrates his
experience of coming to Puerto Rico from the United States to teach English at
the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus. His experience here in the 1950’s
was kind of a bad one because he has some expectation, but the reality was
different, the university students didn’t knew English. I can imagine that this
was a frustration for him, but in my opinion he had to be more understanding,
because on that time even some people didn’t know how to write or read in
Spanish. Of course this wasn’t the case of university students at the
University of Puerto Rico, but it was the reality of many Puerto Ricans. What
does that tell us? That the Puerto Ricans where struggling with the establishment
of a second language. In another aspect
I’m in complete agreement with Coopers with his suggestion to change the syllabus,
because they were pretending that students that didn’t know a language started
to analyze literature in that language, English in this case.
If we transport
ourselves from the 1950’s to now, the 21th century, we can see that much has changed.
The majority of students, not only university students know English. Since
elementary students are taking English classes, in the elementary students take
mostly grammar and English as basics, in middle school starts the combination
of grammar and literature, and in high school the approach is to literature.
This style reminds me of what Jim Coopers explains in his essay, that a student
have to learn the language and then immerse in what literature and analysis is.
Maybe that has been the reason more people and students know better English.
As I mentioned before in other of my blog
entries, I consider that we Puerto Ricans are very privileged of having two official
languages, Spanish as our native language and English as our second language.
As a business student I really know the benefits that this situation brings to
us. It opens many doors for us.
I think this shows how much the educational system in Mayaguez has changed. Its good to Read about a person that was part of what started the change and why it did.
ReplyDeleteHe had, in my opinion, expectations that no culture could have met. The official language was politically changed not culturally so that change would and could never happen over night.
ReplyDeleteWhat I like about all of this is that he did not criticized the intellectual capability of the students, but the way the students were being educated and encouraged. I agree with Marilu also. You cannot expect a country to learn a new language just like that, learning a new language is a challenge, especially if most people around you do not speak it.
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