Communicate it!

Oral english has become a very important part of our lives as people and teachers as well.

Back in the 60's, 70's and even 80's grammar was a fundamental part of teaching and learning english at Chilean college, this was because during this time there weren't any tools or ways to communicate with other countries or even there weren't to many people to practice english with in Chile. Softwares like Messenger or websites like Facebook or even cable tv didn't exist back then. For this reason one of the ways (or maybe the only one) to improve oral english was probably to travel abroad to other countries.

Nowadays technology or better said technological advances makes us easier the understanding and learning of languages, specially english, because we can get more acces to talk to a friend on England with a videoconference software for example, or watch a tv program about other cultures or even with music we can learn searching lyrics about a song on a website and sing it or playing an online videogame with people from other countries. And we can do all of this things without knowing all grammar rules.

On present day i think is not the way how we learn english that matters, the really important thing is the way how we are going to use it (of course an important part to learn and reinforce english is in elementary and in High school ). Because on present day we have easier acces to travel abroad and get a chance to live with people from another countries, learn their culture and communicate with them speaking even if we got a slightly use of grammar.

To finish i would like to say, that our job as teachers is to teach students the best ways to know how to communicate their ideas when the situation requires to talk in english and find the way how to make themselves clear at the moment to express ideas.

- ED