“The benefit of learning English as a Second Language”
…Trying to convince students about the advantages of that!
Imagine that you are in an important casting for a company; you really want to be selected. The requirements that the chosen one should to have are the following: ability to understand the function of particular words in sentences, ability to figure out grammatical rules from language samples and/ or memory for new words. If you have some of them you have more possibilities to obtain that sort of “position” in the company, the job consists on learning a new language. Do you want to get the job? Having those “requirements” (In technical words those are aptitudes) you can have more facilities to learn a language…whatever you like! Have you ever thought that you can have that aptitudes or abilities for that? Maybe now you discover it, think about that!
When you learn a new language you are developing new competences for thinking. Studies argue that you use a specific part of the brain for learning each language. So you can consider that as long as you learn more languages you enrich your intelligence. And considering the cultural point of view if you know more than one language, apart from your mother tongue, you can have a really enriching cultural contact with people from different countries; you can communicate with all people that you want…ISN’T IT WONDERFUL?
Now, talking about English, you know that this language is the universal one. If you have the opportunity to learn it for free, why are you not going to take advantages of it? Whether at school or later on you should to learn English any way. English is in every where, and if you want to feel part of here having any idea of English can help you a lot…you can see that in songs, games, publicity, magazines, even chatting on messenger or somewhere else, you can came across with a foreign guy and if you do not know how to express yourself in that conversation then probably you are going to feel ashamed or uncomfortable. On the other hand if you make a good use of your knowledge of English and you combine properly that sort of knowledge you can have really goods opportunities of dating with someone, getting good jobs, understanding movies without reading the subtitles, playing games perfectly, etc… don’t you feel happy when you think of all those possibilities?
That is like playing the guitar. First you have no idea how to play it, but you really want to know how to do it. Then, little by little you start to play first just a single note, then a piece of a song and then a whole one. At that phase you feel almost like a rock star, and then, when you can play even your favourite song in guitar…OH MY GOD, you feel you are THE BEST! You can do something that maybe someone else cannot. You can excel yourself. Don’t you feel special having that ability that others do not? My dear friend that is called SELF- ESTEEM…and imagine how it increases when you can perform yourself in a foreign language! And if it is English much better.
Certainly there is something that I can assert that it is true: English opens doors. Nowadays the percent of people that know how to speak in English is not enough to consider ourselves as a bilingual country. But you can help to increase that figure. I, as a teacher, just give you the tools to work, but the task is yours! LET’S GO MY DEAR FRIEND, you can be a “rock star”!
Camila Gómez
Interesting articles. Any comments about them?