Teaching English in Puerto Rico

            One of the biggest problems in the Education System of Puerto Rico is the problem of English learning. It is supposed that at this time in Puerto Rico the majority of the young people were bilingual because they had study English for twelve years in school and a few years more in the university, but this is not the case. In Puerto Rico few people are completely bilingual, meaning that they can write, speak, read and understand English perfectly.

            The problem of English teaching in Puerto Rico is discussed in the seventh chapter “Teaching English” of the autobiographical book Down on the Island by Jim Cooper. At this chapter Cooper discusses his experiences in his second year as an English teacher in the Colegio de Mayagüez in Puerto Rico.  Cooper had the assignment to make changes to the syllabus of the English program at the University. While he was making changes to the syllabus he confronts the reality that not all the students understand English. He also confront the belief that other teachers had, that a university student in Puerto Rico know more than one language and had in their homes a lot of books, that’s not the reality even now. Sadly, one of his colleges believed that the Puerto Ricans could not learn English, but happily for him the students wanted to learn it. He changes the syllabus from one that was exactly like the one a freshman student of the States would have, to a new one specific for language. Later, Cooper became interested in the English educational system in the public schools where he found out that the schools were replicating a model made by the University of Michigan. That model was “oral/aural” method of language teaching were the students imitate the teacher.

            Cooper, in the chapter, criticized the model of Michigan, he said he would have stopped the class he visited because the only thing that the teacher did was repeating sentences that were on a book and making the students also repeat them. For him that’s not the best way to teach because the students are only imitating the teacher one hour per day. Cooper also criticized that the majority of the books are in English and the students don’t understand them. I see a great relation between the books Down on the Island and Identity by Peter Roberts because they show the importance of the language for a society. A similarity that I found was that Cooper mentions that in 1949 the commissioner of education “stood for the teaching for Spanish as the vernacular and English as a second language”. Cooper said that when this happened it was “an important gain of self-government” involving cultural values and feelings, this means that the language is part of the identity of the society.  Roberts explains that language is a universal human factor and a factor of place, geographically determined. Roberts teach that language is part of the identity of a society, like Cooper.  From the two readings I can infer that the politic of the society also affect the identity and the language, like we see in Puerto Rico.