INFORMATION ABOUT COLEGIO SALESIANOS SAN JUAN BOSCO -
PUERTOLLANO - SPAIN...
The school is situated in Puertollano,
an industrial city. Puertollano is located in the south of Castilla la
Mancha. It belongs to Ciudad Real. It has got 53000 inhabitants. It was
formerly a coal mining town but today only one open-cast mine remains.
Nowadays the main industries are petrochemicals (REPSOL), fertilisers (Fertiberia),
power generation and, most recently, the manufacture of solar panels. The
city has received national and EU aid to diversify its economy after the
decline of the coal industry. As an industrial city, most people work in
Repsol – one of the most important factories in Spain. It counts with
public transport and it is very well communicated with Madrid, the capital
of Spain, and other important cities, such as CĂłrdoba, Sevilla and
Barcelona thanks to the high-speed train (AVE).
The name of Puertollano is a
concatenation of "puerto" (pass) and "llano" (flat). It is often said that
"Puertollano is the town of two lies", because of the polysemy of the
Spanish word "puerto", which means both "pass" and "port". People often
say that "Puertollano doesn't have a port neither it is flat". It is
partly built on the slopes of surrounding mountains.
The school is located in the east part
of the city. The neighbourhood in which is placed is divided in two parts
being the school in the middle. People have got less economical facilities
in the up part rather than in the low part of the neighbourhood. It is a
religious school. The school counts with nursery school, primary school,
secondary school, high school and vocational training. The school has got
over 70 teachers and 1100 students.
The interest in language learning has
continued to grow in recent years and has become a necessary value for all
citizens in our growing European area. We must prepare our students to
live in a world that is increasingly international, multicultural and
multilingual. We are aware of how important it is for our pupils to be
competent in today's society and to be able to cope with life, speaking
foreign languages.
Salesianos Puertollano is a school
with highly motivated students and their families. We wish to continue
improving and promoting the foreign languages in the school in order to
achieve levels in line with the needs of the current society. We propose
the project bearing in mind that there are needs in the school in this
area and that we have a common dream: "To train competent people who can
use different languages to speak, understand, read and write, creating
positive attitudes towards them and, at the same time, helping to
understand and value one's own language.
We want the learning of foreign
languages to provide our students with the possibility of better
understanding reality, of forming themselves integrally, of relating with
members of other countries, of enriching their cultural world by favouring
attitudes of respect and tolerance.
By participating in the programme of
bilingualism, we intend to integrate ourselves into a dynamic educational
system that adapts teaching to the demand of real life. We assume that it
is a priority to combine the increase in the importance of developing the
Communicative Competence of the students in the English language with the
maintenance of a high level in the educational quality of the school and
an optimum learning. Furthermore, we strongly think that it will not
affect the acquisition of the basic contents of Primary Education in our
mother tongue.
People in charge of the project are:
Javier Enrique Calatrava (ICT teacher), AdriánSabalete (English teacher)
and Luz MarĂaYepes (headmistress). As there are three people in charge of
managing the project, we guarantee its continuity. We also have a
commission of thirteen teachers who will help us with the project tasks.
The career path of our school in the
promotion of foreign languages is very much consolidated. We have been
doing this for eight consecutive years with fruitful results. We have
participated in important innovation projects related to foreign languages.
We have participated in European programmes for the last nine academic
years. We have developed bilateral meeting and exchanges with English
speaking schools and we have also carried our several Comenius, and
currently, a KA219 and Erasmus+ assistance programme. In addition, we have
considerable expertise in carrying our extracurricular activities in
English.
We support the idea of bilingualism with a Learning Community approach. It
is based on the fact that the entire Educational Community (parents,
teachers and students) is involved in the development of the project.
Furthermore, we have staff from other countries, who are volunteers and
members of other foreign educational communities. |