Foreign Perspectives

I spent the third week of August in Santiago de Compostela on an intensive residential as part of the Open University’s Spanish programme.

When you get all the documentation about the residential school a few months in advance the immediate reaction of most people is “Ahhhhh!!!! I can’t do this!” but in reality the relaxed atmosphere makes it seem relatively easy once you get going on it. As it’s part of a second year university course, right from registration on Saturday through to checking out on Friday, everyone is quite insistent that Spanish is spoken all the time. It might seem hard at the time but the idea is to force you to think in Spanish and to do that the best approach is to “live” in Spanish as far as possible.

As it was going to be quite a packed week, I went on the Friday which made for quite a relaxing Saturday (or would have done if I’d not walked right round Santiago in the morning) as the enrollment doesn’t start ’til after 2pm and the course doesn’t formally start until 7pm with the introductory lecture and first introductory class. Usually the first class seems to be amongst the hardest as if you’re not that fluent it’s often difficult to keep the Spanish operational late into the evening.

Sunday was quite short and not really as good as it could have been. In the French residential you have to write up a questionnaire in the morning and then go around the town interviewing people but in the Spanish one, we were given the questionnaire which I didn’t find to be nearly as useful in terms of learning and using Spanish. One unexpected problem we found that the very high proportion of tourists on the Sunday meant that we were often asking tourists the questions rather than the locals.

For the rest of the week, classes generally run all morning with the afternoons being effectively free though included in that “free” time is a visit to the cathedral and La Coruna. Surprisingly, Friday was actually quite a full day as it usually winds down with people leaving for their flights but the departure times in Santiago are quite convenient for the course so just about everyone was there until lunchtime.

Was it a good course though? I think so. Yes, it didn’t seem intensive but with around 20 hours Spanish classes in a week that’s what it was. The relaxed atmosphere makes it feel easier than it is but you do work hard and are tired at the end of each day. One thing that did surprise me was that all of the lecture rooms that were available to us were very much lecture rooms. The fixed rows of seats don’t really fit in that well with modern language teaching as it tends to involve a lot of group work and therefore moveable tables are much better. I assume that this seating arrangement is typical for Spanish universities but don’t really know for sure.

Strangely for a language course, the OU doesn’t have a residential for the final year of the Spanish course when most people feel that they’d need it most. Net effect is that a group of the tutors got together and set up what is effectively the OU residential in Alicante. Unfortunately, it isn’t part of the OU and therefore they can’t really advertise it as such so it’s a much smaller affair and only runs one week. It’s also quite expensive at around £500 for the week. However, there are alternatives to that and indeed the University of Santiago runs two week courses for around £400 so, at the moment, I’m thinking that I’ll do that next year: almost twice as much Spanish for £100 less seems like a good deal to me.