THE ALEX PROGRAM: SOME EXPERIENCES

Publicado en Capital Letter No. 3

Mayo de 2003

ABOUT ALEX IN MEDELLIN

Lucía Helena Estrada

We started implementing this new program the previous semester and we have learnt a lot from this first experience. Last semester we had around 613 students willing to begin; many of them gave up for several reasons including academic obligations, not effective strategies to schedule their time and even misunderstanding of the project ALEX.

Last semester some students did not understand the importance of working extratime in the lab and they found the ASESORIA useless, so they did not want to attend it at the beginning. This semester the teacher staff have been working on different strategies for students to have an effective use of the resource room and ASESORIAS. Nowadays, the resources room is full most of the time, there is even a space problem because the lab is not big enough for the number of students we have in this moment. 

Students are more conscious so they are eager to visit it and from the very first weeks they were asking for tutors. This semester teachers are working on different projects to improve our resource room. Some of them are organizing material in order to re-classify and systematize it. Others are designing new material for specific skills and levels or adopting class activity documents as support documents so that students have more opportunities to work by themselves.

We believe in autonomy and we are all working on it as well!

THE ALEX PROGRAM IN MANIZALES

Cesar Augusto Contreras

This current year, the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, branch of Manizales, is celebrating 55 years of its creation (1948). However, the teaching of foreign languages here just started in 1958 and lasted until 1972, when hot revolutionary political movements of that epoch, promoted by many students, made the courses collapse and disappear as subjects pertaining to the academic programs.

Then, some sporadic courses in English and other languages such as French, Italian or Japanese continued to be scheduled as elective subjects. But now there is a new option in order to provide students with a better and permanent variety of languages courses: ALEX.

After ALEX was created and formally began as an institutional program of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (year 2002), more than 550 new students were enrolled to take the courses. In the first semester of the year 2003, 580 more were also admitted to courses in

English, French and Italian. 16 hired teachers are joined to the ALEX Program and a micro Self Access Center (SAC) is now in the phase of implementation since no Department or Section of Foreign Languages has ever existed at this branch of the university up to now.

At present, there is a very favorable, enthusiastic atmosphere about the ALEX Program. In general, students feel that languages are very important for their professional and personal education as well as an effective, helpful tool in their lives. For these reasons, among others, this program is rapidly meeting the expectations of the student population in our institution.

WHAT IS HAPPENING WITH ALEX IN BOGOTÁ?

Lina Rodríguez and Leonardo Solórzano

Some Foreign Languages Students’ opinions on ALEX after three months of implementation.

In our last issue, we showed what ALEX was and its objectives. In summary, ALEX is a program based on autonomous learning (with the teacher as a guide) in order to go beyond language…to learn its culture. To have an idea of Foreign Languages Students’ opinion about the implementation of this program, we devised and applied a survey.

We found some generalized ideas. The first surprise was to know that the ALEX courses do not replace the electivas for Foreign Languages Students. ALEX is intended for students from all careers except Languages. Second, what the students expected from this program was the access to the Resources Center as an important tool of the program. So far, students have not been able to do so.

The Resources Center was supposed to have materials, such as tape recorders, videos, reference books and many other audio-visual or reading materials. This fact has constrained students’approach to an autonomous model. It is expected that ALEX opens the doors of the Resources Center by the end of this term.

There are some facts that also worry students. The first is the number of hours a week. A student’s opinion on this issue is that, 'We ask for more time because with three hours per week we are not going to be able to learn'. A second aspect has to do with the number of students in the classrooms; quoting a student’s opinion, 'There are even 50 students in a classroom and we cannot interact with each other'. Another student who is taking an elective argues, 'The level of speaking has decreased about 50% compared with the electives because almost nobody participates in class since there are many people, and the methodology does not allow it'.

Now we just can wait to see how ALEX is going to be developed when it has the necessary resources and when students have and understand the information about this program. This can be just a problem of communication and lack of resources that can be solved with time, since this is the first time this program has been carried out. The students and the teachers also have to give the most they can to make this program grow.