Abstract:

Spanish education policies nowadays aim towards a bilingual education in which the role of English, especially in teaching, has arisen great importance. Numberless of educational projects and teacher training courses have been organized for that reason. This project in its experimental phase pretended to provide students with the appropriate learning environment to communicate in English without having to go abroad and involved a private foundation, public secondary schools, and autonomic and local authority.

The main goal was to promote as much exposure to the target language as possible, aiming to improve student’s motivation, encouraging them to speak among their peers and to teachers in English. Secondary goals were consequently to develop their language proficiency level, to improve their oral communicative skills providing them with interaction strategies, to become more autonomous.

In order to participate there was a pre-established initial level of English language command and the admittance commission personnel only invited students of 2nd of ESO (compulsory secondary education) who scored excellent qualifications in 1st of ESO. The number of sessions or lasting period allowed was initially limited to 40 hours, which were distributed in 9 Saturday sessions of four hours each.

The project required two experienced English teachers to monitor students in the process through communicative tasks, as there wasn’t any theoretical work involved. Students enjoyed outdoor and indoor activities, such as role plays, games, information search in computer rooms, etc. and therefore we made use of several buildings (local primary school, local sports centre, gardens…), taking into account that engaging students in activities where partnership and cooperation is required, at this age is fostered in the school curriculum.

Activities and sessions outcomes were assessed following a series of items such as behaviour, attendance, interest, participation, etc however students didn’t really assess the project.
The experience was positively perceived as successful on the part of students, parents and even local authorities, so we were enabled to start another edition of the project. This second phase helped us to improve the sessions and other towns could also participate.

Keywords:

Oral communicative skills, compulsory secondary education, active learning, experimental project.