CAMBRIDGE University Press (CUP) has released the results of a survey carried out on English teachers in Spain and can now reveal that the vast majority of them think that the country’s president, Mariano Rajoy, would not even pass a school English test.
Three out of four English teachers surveyed revealed that the president, who recently refused an offer for free lessons, would fail even a primary English exam.
Ninety two per cent of those surveyed thought that Spanish politicians in general were lacking in language skills while 88 per cent thought that they had the worst English among their peers in the EU. Ninety four per cent said they felt embarrassed to hear them speak in the Queen’s tongue.
Seventy three per cent thought that the level of spoken English in the country was “poor” and that it would take Spain around 15 years to come up to the levels of other EU countries.
CUP spokesperson, Julio Redondas, commented that Spain has a historical and cultural hang-up about learning languages and that this would be hard to change. He went on to underscore the fact that things would have to change over the course of a generation and not in two days.
On a more positive note Redondas stated that Spaniards were now more aware of the need to learn languages and, despite the public’s fondness for criticising their public figures for not speaking it properly, he listed several language powerhouses in the country including the King, the soon to be King, and Foreign Affairs Minister, Angel Moratinos, who can even speak some Serbo-Croatian and Arabic.
CUP interviewed around 1,000 English teachers in schools, universities and private language academies across the country to obtain the results.
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