Bilingual Matura Part 2 – Woah! That's English for stop a horse
...Having the bilingual matura gives a pupil an advantage over the rest, of that there is no doubt. Many universities throughout Europe give lectures in English, English is the lingua franca, blah blah blah, we all know the score. More important, however, is that the pupils taking part in the programme learn the right English.
Send a 16 year old to an English speaking country on an exchange programme for one year and they will return with a high level of English. Their written English will not be the best, yet combine this with the bilingual matura and there is some real potential. The question is what level of English does Switzerland demand of its young adults? The nature of English being the global language on a social and economic level does not necessarily require for foreign speakers to be fluent. English speakers do not cringe in the same way as German speakers do over slight grammatical faults. Furthermore, as the English language reached the 1,000,000 word mark there seems to be little need for foreign speakers to have an extensive English lexicon.
An underlying problem with the bilingual mature programme is to be found primarily with the level of teaching. To ask a Swiss teacher to teach their subject in English is to assume that they have advanced English skills, which is from from the truth. There are some exceptions, however, on the whole these are teachers with a good but far from perfect level of English.
Let's call them A, B, C and D. A is an English teacher who will be teaching history in English, absolutely no problem there. B is a Swiss man who has been married to an American woman for several years, his spoken English is good and written English not so good, the problems are starting. C is a confident mature teacher with an intermediate to advanced level of English, however, any pupil she teaches will invariably pick up small faults which become difficult to rid of once embedded into those linguistic brain cells. And finally D is a teacher new to the profession, hoping to impress in a male-dominated workplace, her English is simply not good enough and as of August she will be expected to teach all that she has learnt in a foreign language and combine that with the already present difficulties of being a young teacher. Not set in your ways, teaching predominantly unappreciative school kids can be a lot of hard work. It makes you ask serious questions about yourself as a person.