2038

Carlos Meijide Garcı́a

April 29, 2018

We can only see a short distance ahead,

but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.

Alan Turing’s words, who is the father of modern computer science,

are appropiate when we consider the profound renovation that the methods
of language teaching must undergo. We see plenty of academies on our
streets, expensive acknowledgments of idioms, modern languages centers at
Universities... But are they worth it?
Everybody is aware of the fact that our present civilization tends to
multicultural confluence, which was born last century specially in the West-
ern capital cities because of inmigration. Hence, we are world citizens and
linguistic borderlines are more and more diffuse. At this point, remember
Mandela: ”If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to
his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart”.
As a consequence, the way we learn languages will, hopefully, be much
more human. A natural proccess with a key factor: the Internet. Perhaps in
the 2030’s it may not be so strange to listen to a French radio station, read
a magazine written in Italian or do our daily Chinese listening exercises on
our mobile phone while we do our fitness routine.
In this line, we mustn´t think that this is about teaching physics to an
engineer, chemistry to a pharmacist or mathematics to an economist; the
canonical form of learning a new language starting with the formal grammar
is becoming too archaic.
However, multilingualism must begin at birth, as psychologists agree on
the fact that adults tend to analyse everything which spoils in some way
our ability to adapt our brain to new syntactic structures. Therefore, the
solution might be focusing on the challenge as children would do; just as it
should be done...