Poor Grammar: English teaching in Mallorca

Prepare yourselves for a grammar lesson.

Ok, so you haven't switched off. Then I shall begin.

Amidst the debate as to the language of teaching in the Balearics, a third language has appeared. English. Its appearance is not new, but the regional government intends to formalise this appearance by having certain subjects taught in English; again, not a new idea.

According to the government's education minister Rafel Bosch, "it is evident that society demands a commitment" to the teaching of the third language, one that goes beyond its being taught as a subject.

Bosch is one of the more impressive of the government's ministers. He comes across as reasonable and as being prepared to listen. For all the jibes that he is attempting to take the Balearics back to the days of Franco, he has never once proposed that Catalan be eliminated as a teaching language. There is to now be parental choice as to the language of teaching as part of a system of trilingualism, in which English will be the third part.

Teaching certain subjects in English raises a number of questions. Which subjects? Do the pupils already have sufficient understanding? Are the teachers proficient? And would the teachers become teachers in both language and subject?

It is not an easy system to introduce. Ideally, it would start from the earliest possible age at primary school and be used for instruction in something like art which, because of its visual content, would be ideal. A combination of sound and vision is a powerful means of instruction.

A problem would be in now introducing it for older pupils. The standard of English, as has been well reported, is not good in Balearics schools. It isn't particularly good at university level either.

The British Council is already involved with the teaching of subjects in English in some schools. If this means that it supplies either native speakers or those proficient in English and trained satisfactorily as language teachers, then fine. What you cannot have are teachers who are not armed with the necessary language skills.

When I was 14, I attended a school in Germany, a country that even back in the late sixties and early seventies placed great emphasis on the teaching of English. The lady who taught English, nice enough, wasn't that good. She made mistakes, mostly of a grammatical nature.

More recently, when working in Germany, a female colleague (American and herself a language teacher) was obliged to take issue with the English teacher at her son's school. The boy had been marked down for a grammatical error that wasn't. He understood more about the use of the past continuous tense than his teacher did.

A couple of anecdotes don't prove a point, but if it is the case that in Germany, with far superior standards of English than in Mallorca, teacher mistakes can be made, then how would English instruction be in Mallorca? Who corrects the teacher?

The more complex a subject is, the more complex the language has to be, which means that the grammar is likely to be more complex. English grammar, at a basic level, appears far more straightforward than, say, Spanish or German, and this is due partly to simpler verb conjugation. It's when you go beyond the basic level, that it becomes anything but straightforward.

With English, you can seem to get away with things grammatically, but this is no reason for a teacher to think that he or she can, especially in a teaching environment where rules of grammar are more formally taught, as is the case with Spanish or German, and where pupils are used to a structured grammatical approach. Unfortunately, and even for some native-speaker teachers, English grammar is not well understood.

Grammar is only one aspect of the teaching of language, and for pupils in the Balearics, those reared on Spanish (and to a lesser extent Catalan), there is a major issue when it comes to English pronunciation. This is the far lower number of sound registers in Spanish compared with English. Tackling this should be a fundamental in teaching English in schools, but if not, the result will be that, for all the good intentions, the standards of English will not rise as much as minister Bosch might hope. I wish him luck.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.