Ambitious Plan: All High School Graduates Bilingual
by Rod Hughes
All high school graduates will be bilingual in 2017, if a new plan launched by the Arias Administration is implemented. The demand for English-speaking workers for multinational companies in the country has far outstripped the supply–only one in 10 adult Costa Ricans are comfortable in a foreign language.
Minister of Public Education Leonardo Fornier presented the ambitious program to private enterprise and the rest of the administration in a special event. It would entail training teachers to, between 2013 and 2017 to turn out three classes of students in 90% of the nation’s high schools, graded by the common European standards in living languages.
During those four years, 25% of students would graduate with complete fluency and spontaniety in a foreign language and comprehension of complex texts (C-1). Another 50% would be in the B-2 classification, able to read complex and abstract texts and speak fluently. The third, B-1, would be able to read and speak standard English. (Most of the students will study English despite its defects as a universal language simply because, in an era of globalization, it has become the lingua franca.) After that, it is hoped that even higher standards may be applied.
Analysis
As ambitious and needed as the program is, it suffers from a basic defect: Language training needs to begin much earlier than high school, before the well-known rigidity of concept sets in that inhibits language performance in most people. One of the few excellent ideas to come out of the administration of the younger Jose Figueres was the advent of English training in grade schools. (Figueres was fluent in English, having been trained in the language at an early age.) But that program has since proceeded only haltingly, hampered by a lack of fluent teachers.
A second bar to success is method: a pondrous copybook/memorization teaching style is still in use today because of inertia in the public educational system. As a father and stepfather of children whose schooling was through this method, this reporter can testify that its success rate is low. It is easier for the teacher, many of whom have only shaky knowledge of the language, but it is the most unnatural of teaching techniques. If we learned our own native language by memorization of vocabulary and grammar rules, we would be 15 years old before we could speak even the simplest sentence. But because it is easier for the teacher, it has hung on like a bad cold.
Still, the plan is noble and one would hope that a new generation of more fluent, flexible and imaginative teachers can reach the goals for which Garnier is reaching. And that the next couple of administrations will see it through.