Primary education and teaching Basque and Spanish: New challenges<

Primary education and teaching Basque and Spanish: New challenges

I have always considered that with my short education I have gained enough experience over the last few years. I have studied to be a primary school teacher and now I am studying to be a nursery school teacher. My education has always been carried out in a place where there have been two main languages (Basque in this case). For this reason, there are various anecdotes that I can tell about the Spanish language.

The first was during my infancy. All of my social groups spoke in Basque, except my grandmother. I learnt very quickly how to speak Basque, but my Spanish was still a bit behind and when my grandmother had to take care of me she went crazy trying to understand me. It took me some 6 or 7 years to be able to communicate basically with my grandmother and from there my Spanish improved in every way necessary.

At first it was all okay, in my school there was not a huge amount of importance for knowing the Spanish language, not as much as Basque. It all sprung up on me when I arrived at secondary school and I didn’t know anything about the many accents that exist in Spanish. The teacher started to worry for me and because of this experience I started to hate the Spanish language at the age of 12. At 16 the situation only got worse. I felt frustrated and no one was able to motivate me in the subject. I managed to pass my exams and was thus able to go to university.

I started a course in Primary Education in Basque, but there was always more than one subject in Spanish. On the other hand, there was a subject that consisted in teaching a second language (Spanish in this case) to primary school students. Thanks to the teacher that I had for that trimester I learnt that the Spanish language was not my enemy, but that I had found the adequate tools to motivate myself.

From then on the Spanish language has been a reality that surrounds me and I have had the luck of giving particular classes to children and teenagers in the Spanish language and they have motivated me to study it. I want to carry on developing myself in this environment and because of this, I feel that this course is indispensable.