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Interview
1 December 2014 2.00 h

Making linguistic history

With El Punt Avui Televisió's English Hour underway – coordinated by Catalonia Today – we get the lowdown on a key programme that follows the English lessons of primary class

The Class, the new doc­u­men­tary from El Punt Avui TV, fol­lows the Eng­lish lessons of a pri­mary class in a Barcelona pub­lic school, al­low­ing view­ers a priv­i­leged glimpse into the inner-work­ings of Cat­alo­nia's ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem.

Every Mon­day, Wednes­day and Fri­day at 6 pm, El Punt Avui TV's Eng­lish Hour fea­tures The Class. What was your in­volve­ment?
–Let me start by say­ing that the El Punt Avui group has be­come a pi­o­neer in in­cor­po­rat­ing Eng­lish pro­gram­ming into its sched­ule. It is the par­ent com­pany of Cat­alo­nia Today, which for some time has been pro­vid­ing con­tent in Eng­lish for El Punt Avui's Sun­day sup­ple­ment, Presència. I have been in­volved with all of these pro­jects since the be­gin­ning and now we are tak­ing ad­van­tage of the op­por­tu­ni­ties pro­vided by hav­ing a space on a tele­vi­sion chan­nel.
The Class was also your idea. How did it come about?
–The orig­i­nal idea was mine, but straight away I took steps to bring peo­ple from the au­dio­vi­sual world into the fold, as well as tak­ing ad­van­tage of the human re­sources in my own pro­fes­sional sphere. The ini­tial idea was to put a cam­era in a pri­mary class­room dur­ing Eng­lish lessons in a pub­lic school in a Barcelona neigh­bour­hood, plac­ing the lens at the level of the chil­dren to ob­serve or doc­u­ment the learn­ing process – in this case, the Eng­lish lan­guage – as well as the dy­nam­ics of a work­ing class­room.
You are a lec­turer at the Uni­ver­si­tat Pom­peu Fabra and pres­i­dent of APAC (As­so­ciació de Pro­fes­sors d'Anglès de Catalunya). What was their role?
–A de­ci­sive role in many ways. For a start, the au­dio­vi­sual de­part­ment of the UPF pro­vided in­terns for the pro­duc­tion, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the pro­duc­tion com­pany Play­time, di­rected by Marta An­dreu. The di­rec­tor of the mas­ters pro­gramme in doc­u­men­tary cre­ation in UPF, Jordi Balló, lent us his wis­dom and ex­pe­ri­ence in de­vel­op­ing the con­cept. As well as that, APAC teach­ers of­fered their valu­able per­spec­tives on cer­tain as­pects of the pro­duc­tion.
What was the at­ti­tude of the De­par­ta­ment d'En­senya­ment to this ‘in­tru­sion'?
–In my opin­ion, ex­cel­lent, be­cause it was not seen as an in­tru­sion but rather as an op­por­tu­nity to share with so­ci­ety what hap­pens in a pub­lic school. The de­part­ment was in­stru­men­tal in fa­cil­i­tat­ing ac­cess to the schools, while the man­age­ment of the Splai school in Nou Bar­ris, the par­ents of the pupils and the teacher, Oscar del Estal, have all shown ex­tra­or­di­nary gen­eros­ity. That is why I like to say that The Class pre­sents Eng­lish lessons in a pri­mary class as a pub­lic and moral space from within the pub­lic ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem.
The Class is ac­com­pa­nied by the pro­gramme Sto­ry­time. What is that?
–The se­ries ex­plores ques­tions that go be­yond learn­ing Eng­lish, but we wanted to com­ple­ment it with more con­ven­tional ma­te­ri­als that are nev­er­the­less de­ci­sive when learn­ing lan­guages: sto­ries and ex­tended ex­po­si­tion in spo­ken lan­guage. For Sto­ry­time we have three na­tive Eng­lish teach­ers who act as nar­ra­tors, each day telling a dif­fer­ent story. For this we have the British Coun­cil in Barcelona to thank, and es­pe­cially its Young Learn­ers Cen­tre.
What ef­fect could this have on the field of learn­ing Eng­lish in Cat­alo­nia?
–I have no doubt that El Punt Avui Tele­visió is mak­ing lin­guis­tic his­tory. And it is worth men­tion­ing the rest of the pro­gram­ming in Eng­lish, co­or­di­nated by Marcela Topor from Cat­alo­nia Today, which in­cludes in­ter­views, de­bates, and so on. I be­lieve it rep­re­sents an un­prece­dented ex­plo­sion of the Eng­lish lan­guage in our media. If schools, teach­ers and so­ci­ety sign up to it, we are po­ten­tially fac­ing a gen­uine qual­i­ta­tive step for­ward. Per­haps now more than ever we can start to glimpse the pos­si­bil­ity of a gen­uine trilin­gual so­ci­ety.
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