A GUIDEPOST REPRINT: “The Quixotic World of Spanish Teaching,” 21 March 1986

“THE QUIXOTIC WORLD OF SPANISH TEACHING”
by Douglas Boyd
first published in GUIDEPOST
21 March 1986

While Spaniards’ jealously guard purity of their language from an Anglo-Saxon invasion, native English speakers use Spanish – often wrongly – in their mass media and everyday conversation without a qualm.

Thus the world “guerrilla” is seen in British and American media to mean an irregular fighter (you know, the little guys in the berets, with rifles as tall as themselves) while the Spanish press refers to a “guerrillero”.

In Western movies and books, cowboys talk about the “hoosegow”, meaning jail.  The word is a phonetical rendition of the Spanish “juzgado”, which in fact means a court.

But purists of Spanish – or “castellano” as they prefer to call it – have hopes that such misuse of their language will be corrected in the future through wider teaching of Spanish abroad.

A report for the Spanish Culture Ministry says that Spanish ranks second only to English as the foreign language most studied in Europe, and in many English-speaking countries it is the first foreign language choice of students.

In Scandinavian countries, says the report, Spanish is becoming increasingly popular.  For example, in the past year the number of students studying Spanish in Norway has risen from 3,500 to 10,000.  The report says that in East Bloc countries and the Soviet Union, standards of Spanish teaching are among the highest in the world.   As an example of its success, the report cites that a copy in Spanish of Bernal Diaz del Castillo’s Historia Verdadera de las Indias has sold 70,000 copies behind the Iron Curtain.

In the United States, 15 million people are native Spanish speakers, while a further 10 million have mastered the language.  The country has 105 Spanish-language radio stations and 13 TV stations.

Headquarters of the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid. (Editor’s note: Five years after “The Quixotic World of Spanish Teaching” appeared in Guidepost, which was then a print magazine, the Spanish government created the Instituto Cervantes to dessiminate the Spanish language and Hispanic cultures abroad .*)

But the Ministry of Culture in Madrid complains that Spanish is taught abroad without official support from the government.

Officials point to the British Council and the U.S. Information Service schools and libraries as examples of government support for English teaching, and say the Spanish government should consider similar methods to promote the language and the culture.

In 1983, the government set up an interministerial committee from Culture, Education and Foreign Affairs to study the promotion of Spanish abroad. But according to Soledad Puertolas, the Culture Ministry’s representative on the committee, no concrete program has yet been drawn up to support the teaching of Spanish to foreigners.

Education Ministry Under-Secretary Joaquín Arango says the ministry would like to standardize Spanish teaching and testing abroad, but adds: “There is a great demand for Spanish overseas which is frustrated because, with a few exceptions, there are no official Spanish centers offering supervised classes with native Spanish teachers.”

The Foreign Ministry controls 25 cultural centers abroad, most of them in Latin America or Arab countries.   A Foreign Ministry official said, “It doesn’t make sense that we have Spanish cultural centers in Alexandria, Damascus and Beirut, but not in the United States or Tokyo.”  He said such institutions were normally set up for political, not cultural reasons.

The Education Ministry says that while Spanish is popular, it is studied mainly by part-time students and does not figure in many official school curriculums overseas.  n Britain, for example, for every 10 secondary school students studying Spanish, 50 learn German and 187 French.

In Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Mauritania, Spanish is on the school curriculumns, but there is a severe shortage of teachers and materials.   What books there are come from France.

Soledad Puertolas hopes this situation can be changed: “The main objective of promoting language in Europe would be for it to become an obligatory language option in secondary schools.”

But other officials say that to achieve this, more Spanish government support is necessary.

GUIDEPOST cover, 21 March 1986

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*INSTITUTO CERVANTES
“Instituto Cervantes is the public institution created by Spain in 1991 to universally promote the teaching, study and use of Spanish and contribute to the dissemination of Hispanic cultures abroad. Reporting to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation of Spain, it collaborates with prestigious institutions, both national and international, public and private, with the aim that products and services related to Spanish are governed by quality criteria and to promote the meeting and exchange of Spanish and pan-Hispanic culture with other cultures of the world.” 

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IMAGES supplied by Guidepost from various sources
Featured image/rapplw, Pixabay. Edited.
Instituto Cervantes/Luis Garcia, CC BY-SA3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
INSTITUTO Cervantes logo by Instituto Cervantes. Derivative work/Mr. Ajedres, cc by-sa3.0, Wikipedia