Prior to 1994, English was taught solely in secondary schools in Costa Rica. Two months after his inauguration, former President José María Figueres (1994–98) fulfilled a campaign promise designed to make the country truly bilingual and mandated the teaching of English in Costa Rican elementary schools.
To date, all but the smallest public schools include English in their basic curriculum. Since that time, study programs for English at all levels have been developed by teams of experts and issued by the Ministry of Public Education (MEP). Just this year, new course syllabi were introduced at all levels.
The program, then, hasn’t been in effect so very long. How is it doing? Let’s take a look. The new curriculum constitutes a model of modern methods for language teaching. It advocates de-emphasis of the “formal component” (grammar, drills, etc.) in favor of the “functional component” — communicative competence: listening, speaking and, to some extent, writing. In fact, it explicitly states that “speaking is the ultimate goal in learning a language. Our program focuses on oral communication.”
It encourages the use of games, role playing, physical activity (a method called “total physical response”), singing, dancing, and “community language learning,” whereby the students participate in group activities while the teacher circulates in the role of counselor and helper. All of this is very much in tune with the current philosophy of language instruction.
Sometime back in the 1960s or earlier, cutting-edge teachers began to realize the ineffectiveness of teaching foreign languages solely through grammatical forms — conjugating verbs, filling in blanks, and so on. After all, it’s not how children learn their native language, so why teach a second language differently?
Thus was born the so-called “aural-oral” method. Simply put, students needed first to hear language, then speak it. Reading, writing, and understanding structure would come later.
Since that time, a variety of methods based on these principles have emerged. Many effective approaches were developed by ESL teachers who found themselves in multilingual classrooms and were forced to use only English, body language, and a great deal of humor and creativity to communicate. Surprisingly, this worked better than anything else had before.
I once had the privilege of working with six other teachers in an intensive two-week Spanish course — six hours a day. We played games, performed skits, told stories, danced the hokey-pokey, took walks, worked with clay, and even staged a variety show. We laughed a lot. We cried some. Occasionally, students would ask for grammar explanations, which we provided before returning to the fun. When things got tense, two teachers would pull out guitars and we’d all sing De Colores. At the end, nobody wanted it to end. The students said they had never learned so much or had so much fun.
Of course, not everyone is lucky enough to be in such an ideal learning environment. But reading the MEP program gives the impression that Costa Rican public school teachers are engaging their students in English conversation daily — because that’s what MEP is asking them to do.
Or is it? The poet T.S. Eliot once wrote: “Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the shadow.”
Sadly, the shadow has apparently fallen on Costa Rica’s English curriculum.
Across the country, students sit in square brown desks, filling out workbook blanks and copying from the board. They aren’t listening to English. They aren’t speaking English. Eventually, some learn to answer multiple-choice questions or fill in short responses to reading passages. But can we really say they’re reading English when they barely understand the content — or how to pronounce it?
Take the case of a young friend of mine, let’s call him Francisco. He was a top student in English throughout high school and passed all the ministry exams with flying colors. But when he enrolled in an advanced English class, he couldn’t understand or respond to the teacher. He dropped out and now works in a factory. I’m encouraging him to start over with real English classes, but he finds the idea discouraging.
I also help a couple of high schoolers with their English homework. They’ve never spoken a word of English aloud, nor do they understand spoken English. And I hear stories like this from all over Costa Rica.
As the Afro-Caribbean English speakers in Limón might say: “Wha’ happen?” How can MEP set its primary goal as “oral and written communication,” yet in most classrooms, the opposite is happening? There’s more than one reason. But the principal reason, I believe, is one that MEP itself has created — a problem well-known to great teachers everywhere.
Stay tuned for Part Two.
