By: josé luis calvo buezas  (Page 5/7)

Language as a learning instrument

Human culture in general, particularly European, has a basic nucleus for understanding, so that language and thought can be very hardly separated. Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, was preoccupied with the world of culture, and defined language as the first science. Later philosophers have wanted to reduce science to a well-constructed language or analysis. To understand a text is to mentally transform material symbols and to extract meaningful thought.

With the arrival of a child or adolescent immigrant to a scholastic center, the possibilities of their integration increase or decrease according to whether or not they know the language. They coexist and participate by means of communication. Although language is not the only means to establish relations, it is the most important; in a certain way, it encircles all the others.

More than a third of the schooled immigrants have problems dominating the language. Others, although they use it colloquially, have little knowledge of it. This constitutes the first problem to facilitate their integration and to provide them with the basic tools for the rest of their learning that compose the curricular project in diverse levels of schooling. 

According to Calvo Buezas, many Spaniard students express that the most powerful justification of the separation of foreign students from the Spaniards would be to put them into Spanish language classes, then incorporate them into general classes only after the learn Spanish. The professors also state in another similar survey that the major difficulty in teaching some immigrant students is their ignorance of the language, which generates a sensation of impotence for the teacher. Failure of even simple communication with them results in a seemingly insurmountable problem. There have perhaps not been situations in modern education that have demanded as much patience, creativity, and ingenuity as overcoming linguistic barriers. Foreign students live through these traumatic experiences, which add more difficulty to the challenge of high-level scholastic learning. The ability to understand orders is also fundamental for coexistence because you cannot do something if a request from the teacher is not understood.

According to Dies, language, among the factors, makes the integration of immigrants so difficult because it prevents learning and communication with the rest of the students and professors, causing these students to fall behind in class. Ignorance of the language produces similar effects to those which the construction of the Tower of Babel symbolizes. Although the immigrant student who does not know the language quickly learns the necessary words to communicate something with one’s schoolmates, the student needs to be able to handle micro and macro linguistic structures, like a coherent group of connected propositions that carry out the entire meaning of the message, to be able to progress in school.

Specialist psycho-pedagogues in this matter consider these following steps to be fundamental: