Elqui Valley tourism students strengthened their English speaking skills

07-10-2021

High school students from the Carlos Mondaca (Vicuña) and Bicentenario Mistraliano (Paihuano) technical high schools benefited during the first semester from an English scholarship created jointly by Fundación Educacional Oportunidad and the Instituto Chileno Norteamericano de La Serena, which was renewed for the second semester.

The pandemic, and all the difficulties associated with it, were not an impediment for students of the tourism speciality of the Carlos Mondaca (Vicuña) and Bicentenario Mistraliano (Paihuano) technical high schools to participate in a course that allowed them to enhance their English speaking skills and thus generate new opportunities related to the speciality they study.

This opportunity arose thanks to a scholarship promoted by Fundación Educacional Oportunidad and the Instituto Chileno Norteamericano de La Serena. Thus, the young people participated in beginner and intermediate level courses that lasted 36 teaching hours each.

May Ling Janis, a student from Liceo Mistraliano, was grateful for the possibility of accessing this course and noted that "it helped me to improve my English, meet new people, learn new words and as a tourism student it will help me a lot to interact with foreign clients".

Rony Rojas, a student at Liceo Carlos Mondaca, added that "English will help me a lot in the future, in my work, studies or if I go abroad. Now I also feel able to meet new people.

"This initiative allowed us to continue to strengthen the teaching of contextualised English, connected to local needs. The students mentioned feeling more confident and secure to communicate in the language, as well as having enjoyed the methodology of the classes and meeting new people. We are very happy to have contributed a grain of sand to their learning process", said Paz Collao, head of the We Learn Programme at Fundación Educacional Oportunidad.

The director of the Instituto Chileno Norteamericano La Serena, Ruth McBride, explained that "the purpose of the project was to stimulate the students' oral production and that is difficult, it is a skill, the oral capacity is a capacity that is difficult to stimulate in the classroom. So this project was much more than stimulating oral English among the students, it was to create a community where the students felt happy and calm and to establish bonds between them so that they felt confident enough to dare to speak".

Fundación Educacional Oportunidad has been collaborating with schools in Vicuña and Paihuano since 2006, developing its We Learn programme, which aims to promote the learning of English by students in pre-school and primary education in the public sector.

In addition, in 2018, thanks to an agreement with the US Embassy, the We Learn Access course for secondary school students began to be developed and will continue in 2022, after being interrupted in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic.