My experience with English courses at the University

Nowadays, it has become a part of the common sense to assert that you need to know how to speak English if you want to be succesfull as a professional and to be integrated into the global world. So it couldn't take too long for the University to incorporate the teaching of English as a requirement for the titulation of the students.

I knew from the beginning of my career that at some point of it I would have to take two English courses. I didn’t really like the idea, I thought I had the minimum English skills required to access and make profit of the English literature (that was the point, wasn't it?), so I saw it rather like a waste of time. Although I wasn’t completely wrong in what respects to my reading abilities and its precarious sufficiency, when I finally took the courses I saw it was not going to be a waste of time: my oral pronunciation was really-really poor, and it was a good opportunity to improve it.

So how did it go? Let’s first see what was the didactic at display: classes consisted mainly in oral discussions with classmates following the instructions from a book or those that the professor gave, in order to learn different aspects of grammatics and vocabulary; after the discussions we shared our thoughts and doubts with the rest of the class and the professor. The other main element for our learning process was the writing of this blog. As you can see both were very appropriate for the development of productive linguistic abilities: you were forced to produce written text and spoken language. So that was very adequate for me at least and I think I have improved quite a lot in comparison with my previous knowledge.

On the other hand, a minor critical remark: I think books editors and teachers should join together and revise urgently the topics they choose for the excersices. This is very amazing, they are really lame and embarrassing. Indeed sometimes you would prefer not to speak or write rather because what embarrasses you is the topic itself and not the use of the yet unknown language . I think students should choose, as much as possible, their own topics of interest in wich to excercise the foreign language.

But that's just a detail. In sum, it was a very pleasant experience, I had real good time and it allowed me to improve my weaker points with regard to the production and comprehension of messages in English .

The facilities of the Social Sciences Faculty

I think the main facilities in my faculty are the canteen, the photocopying shops, the library and the computer labs. I don't use the canteen very much, however I think it has very expensive prices in comparison with some of the others shops in the campus, like the one placed near the sciences Faculty. The fotocopying shops are two: the green one and the chuncho’s. I prefer the green one which is runned by Hugo, a very nice guy.

Now, the library I’d say is the poorest one of our facilities, it doesn’t have enough books and it is not used by the students as a library but rather as a meeting room. So we definitely need a room only dedicated to study (i.e. a room in which the rule of silence were respected) and more books! Now about the computer labs: I think we are OK with what we have now: we have two labs with enough number of computers. Although, the printing machines tend to fail a lot and some of the computers are much slower tan others, becuase they are the old ones, the ones that were working before the investment on new modern computers was recently done.

Last general comment, now about the facilities of the campus: the soccerfield sucks badly, it’s very poorly maintained, it needs urgently to be leveled and the actual grass must be retired and replaced for a new one, of better quality. This would allow the full display of my soccer skills and increase the quality of the time we spend excercising ourselves with our mates.