I’m attending a 1 month english language staff training course. It is 18:20 and I’m in the coffe break time. I do not use english in my normal life, nor in my job, but anyway, I thought it was a good chance to practise spoken english, which is the most difficult thing to get in order to keep my english alive. It’s not easy to find an english spoken person to talk with.
The course title is : “English for the European Union” and for the first time in my life, I’m not desperately willing the course to end. The company I work for, ussually send their workers to these sort of training courses, but I’ve never found interested any of them, neither useful.
I was talking to a job mate who was also going to attendd the course, and I told him that if the teacher was not an english native, I wouldn’t stay long.
I was only interested in conversation. I didn’t really care about the matter we were going to talk about
: only conversation.
I’ve noticed that english language tuition in Spain has been always focussed on grammar mainly. Spanish kids are having english lessons at school since they are 4/5 years old, so most of us do have a fairly good level of english grammar, but if you are a non english speaking person and you are in Gatwick, saxon genitive is not very useful in order to ask how to get to King’s Cross Station. So at the end of high school there are only a few that are able to speak your language. And it is the lack of conversation at school the one to blame
Back in the course, the teacher is a spaniard from Santander, I was thinking about leaving, when I heard his accent………..and it was great. I closed my eyes and I was listening a native. So I decided to stay the whole course.
We’ve talked about the EU institutions, the European Parliament, the European comission and all the bla, bla, bla. About the traslations services, the last enlargement, the fathers of the EU……………,about the Italian man who went to Malta on holidays (Have a look at it at Youtube, highly recomended)(
The Italian who went to Malta)
The teacher told us that he was going to teach us how to read phonetics transcriptions and even when I first thought “this is not goona be very useful” it is folks. In fact I guess it is the most important aspect of this course. I gotta admit that it was a bit boring at the beginning, well it was boring at the end too, but now, when I have to resort to the dictionary, I do read the phonetic transcription on the fly.
It is true that the conversation I got was not the one I expected, but folks, just for phonetic transcription it is been worth.
The title of the thread is just because I coudln't stop laughing after listening what happened to this italian guy.
Saludos
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