Author: Petra Schablas
At the beginning it was not easy to get into all the courses. Due to the economic crisis the University has a huge money problem. There are just a few courses open for Erasmus students and they offered just one of my courses from the Learning Agreement. All the registration process was very chaotic because there were not enough places. I had my registration in the mid of March and we were not able to do anything in and for our courses until the registration because we didn´t get a password for the Moodle course which would have been very essential. The lecturers did not wanted to have us Erasmus students in their courses and we all did not feel very welcome.
Another problem was the language. We were told that all our courses will be in English so it is not completely necessary to speak Spanish. But when we were there some lectures were very upset that almost nobody of the Erasmus people spoke Spanish."This is a huge problem. There are rally not enough places and not enough English courses for all of you if nobody speaks Spanish."
In the end we had to do a lot of persuading so I was able to enrol in the following courses:
-Didáctica de la lengua extranjera: Inglés- This course is for future primary teacher to learn how to teach english to very young learners. There were 50 Spanish students and 5 Erasmus students. The teacher tried to teach some didactics but most of the time she was just teaching basic English to the students because their English was really content we already learned at home and on the other hand she was not able to ask difficult questions at the final exam because the Spanish students would have had a language problem. We had to do a lot of handycraft homework and I was really amazed how much effort everyone of the spanish students put into!
-Inglés 2: This is a course from the langugage department for students who study English language and literature studies. Eventhough the students studied English as their main subject the level of difficulty was also not that high. I had a good feeling through the whole semester and it was easy going but in the end the final test was pretty hard. There was very complex vocabulary and tricky grammar and many people failed.
- Corrientes y Experiencias Renovadoras en Educación Infantil (Innovative Trends and Experiences in Infant Education): This is a course for future kindergarten teacher and is mainly about the history of pedagogy. Officially the course should have been held in English but on the first day when we joined this subject the lector told us that it will be held in Spanish due to English langugage problems. After some controversy and -again- a lot of persuading we made a deal that the teacher talked in Spanish and always made a quick summary of the spoken topics in English. This was good for our Spanish improvement but very exhausting. Especially the team work with the other Spanish students was very difficult. We had to arrange some lessons in a real school and also do some other project work which was a lot of work because they were not even able to speak some simple English phrases and my Spanish was also poor. Thank Google for Google Translate which was our savior. At the end the teacher was suprised that all of us 5 Erasmus students in the course managed to pass all the 5 Exams during the semester, obviously she didn´t expected that.
-Spanish A1: This was my favourite course. We had such a nice Spanish women who really cared about us 15 Erasmus students. We did a lot of grammar and vocabulary but it helped us to learn some basic structures of the langugage. I already had 6 years of French in school which really helped me to understand the langugage maybe a bit faster. But at the end of the semester we were all able to understand quite a lot and talk about some daily life routines and situations.
-Teacher practical: After the problems with all our nonexistend courses we were not really suprised when the secretary told us that it is not possible any longer to do a teacher practical. So we had to care about it on our own and luckily found an employee from the university who has a son in a school where we were able to do the practicum. We arranged with the headmaster to stay in the school of Bellavista for 12 days from the morning until 3 o´ clock in the afternoon. The problem was that, as mentioned, it was not an official course so we had to skip some of our univeristy courses on all of these days. The practical was very interesting because we were able to join classes from the kindergarten until up to 13 year-old children. I teached some English lessons and the rest of the lessons I supported the teacher and the children. We were able to do a lot of cultural work and it was great to see the differnces between the spanish and the austrian school system.
School:
C.E.I.P. El Puntal
Goya s.n.
21110 Bellavista
Secretaría: 959524978
All of our courses had 6 ECTS. Apart from the teacher practical all the other courses were twice a week for 2 or 2 1/2 hours. So we had every day about 2 hours of univeristy in the morning and two hours in the afternoon.
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