Last month’s announced 1.8 million euro campaign for bilingual education has received mucho media attention. For those of you outside of Madrid, let me fill you in on why the “Yes, We Want” campaign makes native English speakers shake their heads and sigh.
The picture to the left is an example of one of the posters for the publicity campaign. The boy is holding a sign that says “Yes, We Want” and it looks and sounds a bit odd, right? That’s because it’s grammatically incorrect English.
I believe the main point was to try to copy Obama’s “Yes, We Can” presidential campaign slogan and play with that to promote bilingual education.
This article by leading Spanish newspaper, ElPais, titled, “How to Announce Bilingual Schools: with Bad English” talks about how the grammar used throughout the campaign is incorrect. The even better part is below the newspaper headline reads, “The Ministry of Education says This is the Best Slogan in Recent Years.”
Did anyone think of running this by a native speaker? The United Kingdom and Ireland are two countries full of native speakers and moreover they are located less than a two-hour plane ride away! Not only that, but with the number of expats living in Madrid, there is no excuse (in my opinion) for such a huge error.
More importantly, how does a campaign like this make the educational level seem like in bilingual schools? If the people organizing the campaign aren’t capable of writing correctly in English, how much confidence would a parent have in sending their child to a school to receive a bilingual education?
For me, after two years of working in a bilingual school outside of Madrid, I truly thing that bilingual education is working. I see the difference even in some of my 6th graders who have only been part of the bilingual program for one year and my first graders who only know a bilingual education. Although they may not always respond to me in English without a prompt, they understand about 75% of what I say gestures and facial expressions included.
It’s a shame that to announce the openings of more schools and try to market bilingual schools to increase enrollment is done so poorly. I hope that in the leiu of economic hardships right now in Spain that funding for my program continues because I truly believe it makes a difference.
I really shouldn’t be surprised though because the Spanish president, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, doesn’t speak English either. He goes to conferences and needs to ask for a translator. He held up “Foro Davos” conference for it least ten minutes back in January because he was the only attendee who didn’t speak English at the roundtable discussion.
On the other hand, Alberto brought up a good point. Perhaps this campaign was done on purpose. Perhaps the Ministry of Education wanted to demonstrate the need for Spanish children to be educated in English. Perhaps they wanted to show the low level of English here in Spain and demonstrate the need through the slogan. Mind you, I write all of this in a half-kidding way but ya know what? he could be right. After all, the campaign has cause quite a stir on expat blogs and news outlets and received a lot of free publicity.
What do you think?
Some links in English:
Web of Language – post by Dennis Baron in English points out that the on further inspection of the posters read “Yes, we want estudiar en ingles (to study in English)” which is a technically correct sentence but in a mix of the two languages. ( I did the same thing above with the word mucho)
La Vida Loca – This post points out that the ad posters also feature the letter ñ!
bebesymas.com & Europress.es – Posts in Spanish
Since the start of June I feel like I have been so busy. This week to make up for it, I’m taking part in Classy in Philadelphia’s weekly feature called, Where in the World Wednesday.
As you can tell, it’s gorgeous there. The best part is the town is super small and everyone seems to know each other. I like it a lot up there because it’s really relaxing and peaceful.
