Three strategies for true beginners of an outreach program of a public university in the current context of education in Costa Rica

Abstract

Many students do not have fundamental knowledge of their first language and do not know some basic concepts such as parts of speech and how they function. They do not know the basic mechanics of writing and do not have the habits of reading and studying. As a consequence, when they embark on the journey of studying English in a private or an outreach course program, the process of learning the new language becomes a difficult, frustrating task for them. Very often it takes this population more time to learn and understand how the new language works until they are able to construct their own speech starting with simple coherent sentences. Under these circumstances, the teaching process is now more arduous for English teachers. The educators have to adapt to these deficiencies and must use different resources to remedy and repair these empty holes in the background knowledge mesh that students need to build the basis of the new language. Have course programs become more lenient? Have their goals to graduate students been lowered? As a result, in this chain of events, has the quality of English these students speak when they graduate from these outreach course programs decreased? These are questions we may not be able to respond to for now. The proposal of this paper is aimed at strengthening the initial knowledge of beginning learners of English so that they become more proficient, autonomous, and knowledgeable English learners and speakers.