Bringing the kids on board

We all know how important learning English is today in places like Catalonia. If you want to get anywhere in today's world you need English to do so. Business, education, leisure, travel, the internet, it's almost impossible to function in the 21st century without English. We also know that given this importance, ensuring that our kids grow up with a high level of English is one of the best ways of ensuring they will have options when they are adults.

Yet, how to go about doing this is another matter. There is plenty of debate about how children should acquire English, in school or in private centres, as toddlers or pre-teens, spending summers with English families, watching original version films, the list goes on. Yet, there are a couple of aspects to learning English that everyone will agree with: having as much exposure as possible, and preferably doing it in an authentic manner.

This is where we can help. Catalonia Today has always provided authentic content that can be used by those wanting to consume information relevant to them in English. At the outset we made a decision not to fill the magazine with glossaries, complementary exercises and the like, because while the magazine can be used as a teaching tool, we wanted to provide authentic English content rather than a school textbook. Recently, we have expanded our offer with such things as television programmes on El Punt Avui TV, English versions of Catalan news stories in El Punt Avui newspaper, and now podcasts of audio content in authentic English.

But we're not done, and we will continue to expand our content whenever we see an opportunity to do so. One such opportunity has just presented itself, and so we grabbed it with both hands. The children's magazine, Barçakids, has started running a series of biographies of historical figures in Catalan and English. They kindly allowed us to reproduce this material in our magazine. As you can see on pages 56/57, the first of the series is about Catalan cellist, Pau Casals, which comes with an accompanying audio version of the text.

Many readers have children in their lives, and now they can join in with their own material in English, which also has the benefit of teaching them history. We are not providing a lesson plan. The material is there to be enjoyed, although that does not mean it can't be used in educational ways. Kids could read at the same time as they listen, they could listen and then read to check if they understood, a part of the audio could be used as a dictation and then they could check their spelling in the text, or they could just read it, like any magazine article. It's up to you, we are just happy to be able to offer more content and material that might help with that vital task of improving our children 's level of English.