An immersion space to support learning process

Learning a new language is a hard process for some people, even for us as teaching students will be hard without the proper tools. thats why, ICESI University has created the English Learning Centre (E.L. to say it faster) a place where the students can go and ask for help with anything they need to understand or practice from this second tongue. 

This space give us an idea of the comitment that the university has in languages and comunication skills with their students,  and in a more general way, with making learning process familiar with immersion strategies. We can say this for three main reasons: 
1. We find fisical and digital material like books, comics, workshops, boardgames and monitors, which means money from the department
2. This kind of proyects doesnt appear by magic, they need documents, meetings an warranties, which means extra efford from directors and teachers.
3. EL is not the only support centre that we have in Icesi, we have maths and writting spaces, that work in a similar way.
Students have all the tools and spaces to be the best professionals posible. 

Another benefit that the University got with this, is that monitors are collecting all the data got from the students, their strenghs, their weakness so teachers can improve their practices, knowing what learners need. 

Monitors will help you, even if you dont ask for help, if you are doing any activity, they will get close to you and see how they can help you, to make you last your time. 

All universities should bet for spaces like this one, in order to make language learning easier for their students, all efford will count when you want to teach something. 

Today`s public education should give more importance to reading and writing skills.

When I was in 9^th grade, I decided to study languages by academic modality, so my education in 10^th and 11^th grades was harder in English if we compare it with another groups. But even though, not all my classmates are English speakers nowadays ¿why? Because (at least in public education) we have to think how to teach real English (and not just the verb to be every single year). 

From my experience, I say thet we must work in reading and writing more than speaking and listening comprehension, in order to make our students feel more comfortable with the language, and get better results in ICFES exams.

 I’m not trying to say that we should avoid oral and audiovisual experiences, but we are dedicating a lot of time for that and is necessary to balance purposes, in order to make students real English speakers.

Jeremy Harmer is an important presenter, seminar leader and teacher who cares a lot about English language teaching. So based on some of his ideas, I’ll try to give 4 possible steps to improve reading and writing skills.

The first step will be make them identify the kind of text they are working with, they need to be able to check the details that make the ad an ad, and the letter a letter.

Second, they have to identify the purpose of the text, it doesn’t matter if they’re reading or writing, or if we talk about an advertise or an essay, every text has a purpose.

Then, it’s good to make them involve in general world knowledge, because language is deeply rooted to cultures so in texts there’s a lot of vocabulary that is proper for the specific topic and culture we are working with.

And finally they can work in cohesive and coherent production of texts, which are skills that we almost get in our mother language, and skimming and scanning skills, that are also important in every language, to get the information from every text.

Reading and writing must have a purpose in every language, so those steps are useful not only for English learning, they can be used in any other language. Remember that those are suggestions based on a famous author, as teachers we face different problems in our classrooms, its our job to find the best way to make our students achieve their goals.