Government doubles down on bilingualism: 16,000 graduates from English Immersion Program

[Dolores]

Vice President Raquel Peña celebrated a significant milestone in the nation’s education sector on 27 November 2024 when 16,000 students successfully completed the 20th graduation of the English Immersion Program. The Ministry of Higher Education (MESCyT) program is free to students.

“Today is a day of celebration and national pride: 16,000 young people have achieved a goal that represents both an academic achievement and a great personal victory,” Peña declared.

Peña emphasized the critical role of English in key sectors such as tourism, services, and communication. She announced the government’s commitment to doubling the program’s budget in 2025, reflecting the nation’s dedication to fostering bilingualism.

“English has become a crucial tool in key sectors such as tourism, services, and communication, and it is one of the most spoken...

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[Aguaita29]

Lots of those who graduate didn´t actually learn with the program. I hear that those who start from scratch have a very hard time. My former assistant, who completed the program, couldn´t actually keep a conversation in English and had issues with very basic stuff like numbers, days of the week, etc.

 

[Notengo]

Most who try their university english on me already get lost after “chello chow aar you”..

Today is a day of celebration and national pride. Lol, I never got that after learning 4 languages at highschool, which was common practice. Too bad it didn’t include spanish back then..

 

[CristoRey]

This is fantastic.
Next they should start offering Responsibility Immersion classes
followed by Respect Immersion classes.

 

[Peterj]

Most who try their university english on me already get lost after “chello chow aar you”..

Today is a day of celebration and national pride. Lol, I never got that after learning 4 languages at highschool, which was common practice. Too bad it didn’t include spanish back then..

Was your high school in Dutchland maybe?

 

[Notengo]

Was your high school in Dutchland maybe?

Yes indeed, just like you I guess.. Dutch, English, German and French were common. Spanish was not even an option back then, maybe nowadays it is.

 

[Peterj]

Yes indeed, just like you I guess.. Dutch, English, German and French were common. Spanish was not even an option back then, maybe nowadays it is.

You guessed correct and indeed at that time Spanish was only connected to Sinterklaas.

 

[chico bill]

I have heard very few polished English spoken by Dominicans. It was much better in Puerto Rico (obviously) and Costa Rica and Columbia.

I would settle for more polished Spanish being spoken in DR. I can say I have heard similar guttural Spanish in the rural regions of PR but here it's almost universal that you here gibberish. I heard it yesterday in Sirena.

I recall being on a project in PR trying to speak with an 'electrician'. After a few minutes of back and forth I turned to one of the other workers to help me understand him.
He just shrugged and said we can't understand his Spanish either.

 

[NALs]

I have heard very few polished English spoken by Dominicans. It was much better in Puerto Rico (obviously) and Costa Rica and Columbia.

I would settle for more polished Spanish being spoken in DR. I can say I have heard similar guttural Spanish in the rural regions of PR but here it's almost universal that you here gibberish. I heard it yesterday in Sirena.

I recall being on a project in PR trying to speak with an 'electrician'. After a few minutes of back and forth I turned to one of the other workers to help me understand him.
He just shrugged and said we can't understand his Spanish either.

In Spanish no dialect is incorrect. There is no such thing as Spanish gibberish. That you may not understand all of them is a different story.

Reminds me when I posted several videos of Norberis in these forums and many expats claimed they couldn’t understand her English. Yet, I knew what she was saying every single time. That left me perplexed. Was it clear English? No, but I still understood what she was saying. I was left wondering if the issue was with many of the expats that were claiming not to understand rather than Nor eris itself with her thick accent. That’s taking into account I hardly hear anyone speaking English with such a thick accent.

 

[chico bill]

In Spanish no dialect is incorrect. There is no such thing as Spanish gibberish. That you may not understand all of them is a different story.

Reminds me when I posted several videos of Norberis in these forums and many expats claimed they couldn’t understand her English. Yet, I knew what she was saying every single time. That left me perplexed. Was it clear English? No, but I still understood what she was saying. I was left wondering if the issue was with many of the expats that were claiming not to understand rather than Nor eris itself with her thick accent. That’s taking into account I hardly hear anyone speaking English with such a thick accent.

You should visit parts of rural Louisiana where you will encounter plenty of gibberish English.
I had a crew working for me on a tower project from there..
I could only understand one guy, the rest spoke gibberish English, it was not recognizable.
I'm not actually talking about a dialect, I'm talking about abbreviations, mispronunciations and street or country slang. I call it lazy Spanish.
I lived in Costa Rica more than 1 year, and traveled quite a bit in Colombia and up & down the entire Pacific Coast of Mexico - There you encounter people willing to speak and pronounce words correctly in complete sentences.

 

[josh2203]

You should visit parts of rural Louisiana where you will encounter plenty of gibberish English.
I had a crew working for me on a tower project from there..
I could only understand one guy, the rest spoke gibberish English, it was not recognizable.
I'm not actually talking about a dialect, I'm talking about abbreviations, mispronunciations and street or country slang. I call it lazy Spanish.
I lived in Costa Rica more than 1 year, and traveled quite a bit in Colombia and up & down the entire Pacific Coast of Mexico - There you encounter people willing to speak and pronounce words correctly in complete sentences.

While I agree for Spanish that the Colombian dialect sounds much more like not-broken-Spanish than the DR dialect, I would be careful too regarding starting something is "gibberish", as I know few countries where indeed even words are pronounced differently and people from different regions really might not understand each other. Still, these are the actual slangs from a particular region, so the official way of speaking if you will. Same in my country in Scandinavia, the slang differences are very big, words are even written in a different way and yet, it's a slang and not just trashing the language, even the slang names are in fact official parts of the language grammar.

I do however think that perhaps such DR things as "k lo k" are not really part of any official slang but as you say, street slang... Then again, the fact that often a Dominican drops the s from the end of a word and kind of replacing that with H (not the Spanish pronounciation of H, which is just omitting it but the English one) but not quite, I would perhaps consider part of the dialect as I have spoken with a very highly educated elderly neighbor, and she speaks like a true Dominican I think, resembling of that of how Abinader speaks...

 

[NALs]

You should visit parts of rural Louisiana where you will encounter plenty of gibberish English.

That’s different because there are no rules regarding English regarding theses things. There is a correct English dialect (in reality two since there is Queens English which is the English used in the UK, Jamaica, etc and then American English which is the one used in the USA and is the “standard international English) and a not correct one. Gibberish English is a real thing.

Spanish, unlike English, is “governed” by the RAE and a series of Spanish language institutions that are present in all the Spanish speaking countries and in nom-Spanish speaking countries with a very large population of Spanish speakers (ie. USA). Among the many things they have established is the notion that there are no incorrect Spanish dialects. This is part of being less patronizing from part of the Spaniards and more inclusive of the Spanish spoken by non-Spaniards peoples given that by nature Spanish is a language that derives from Spain, hence the name. This is also what is behind the creation of a type of dictionary from the RAE that includes words in use only in some countries or in certain regions of some countries as oppose to widespread. All words included there may not be used by most Spanish speakers, but they are correct words in the Spanish language.

I'm not actually talking about a dialect, I'm talking about abbreviations, mispronunciations and street or country slang. I call it lazy Spanish.

Those are legitimate in Spanish, all of them.

I lived in Costa Rica more than 1 year, and traveled quite a bit in Colombia and up & down the entire Pacific Coast of Mexico - There you encounter people willing to speak and pronounce words correctly in complete sentences.

Yet, not in Andalusia Spain by the very Spaniards native from there. Andalusian Spanish (which includes shortening many words) is a legitimate Spanish as well as all the other Spanish spoken in Spain alone and in the rest of the world. There is no such thing as an incorrect Spanish. Spaniards from Madrid tend to actually make fun of Spaniards from Andalusia precisely for the way many Andalusian speak and they aren’t entirely understand in Madrid, often native Madrileños asking the Andalusians to speak slower and don’t cut many words. None of that make Andalusian Spanish any less correct than Spanish spoken anywhere else.

 

[chico bill]

That’s different because there are no rules regarding English regarding theses things. There is a correct English dialect (in reality two since there is Queens English which is the English used in the UK, Jamaica, etc and then American English which is the one used in the USA and is the “standard international English) and a not correct one. Gibberish English is a real thing.

Spanish, unlike English, is “governed” by the RAE and a series of Spanish language institutions that are present in all the Spanish speaking countries and in nom-Spanish speaking countries with a very large population of Spanish speakers (ie. USA). Among the many things they have established is the notion that there are no incorrect Spanish dialects. This is part of being less patronizing from part of the Spaniards and more inclusive of the Spanish spoken by non-Spaniards peoples given that by nature Spanish is a language that derives from Spain, hence the name. This is also what is behind the creation of a type of dictionary from the RAE that includes words in use only in some countries or in certain regions of some countries as oppose to widespread. All words included there may not be used by most Spanish speakers, but they are correct words in the Spanish language.


Those are legitimate in Spanish, all of them.


Yet, not in Andalusia Spain by the very Spaniards native from there. Andalusian Spanish (which includes shortening many words) is a legitimate Spanish as well as all the other Spanish spoken in Spain alone and in the rest of the world. There is no such thing as an incorrect Spanish. Spaniards from Madrid tend to actually make fun of Spaniards from Andalusia precisely for the way many Andalusian speak and they aren’t entirely understand in Madrid, often native Madrileños asking the Andalusians to speak slower and don’t cut many words. None of that make Andalusian Spanish any less correct than Spanish spoken anywhere else.

Well if there is gibberish English there certainly is gibberish Spanish as well.
Dame do ma chela y stoy chevere

 

[Notengo]

In Spanish no dialect is incorrect. There is no such thing as Spanish gibberish. That you may not understand all of them is a different story.

Reminds me when I posted several videos of Norberis in these forums and many expats claimed they couldn’t understand her English. Yet, I knew what she was saying every single time. That left me perplexed. Was it clear English? No, but I still understood what she was saying. I was left wondering if the issue was with many of the expats that were claiming not to understand rather than Nor eris itself with her thick accent. That’s taking into account I hardly hear anyone speaking English with such a thick accent.

Context. Even when reading a book in your native language you don’t actively read each word. Your brain recognizes patterns and fills it in. Same with understanding other languages, if you recognize only few words in a sentence you might still understand what is said. Some do that better than others.

 

[josh2203]

Context. Even when reading a book in your native language you don’t actively read each word. Your brain recognizes patterns and fills it in. Same with understanding other languages, if you recognize only few words in a sentence you might still understand what is said. Some do that better than others.

Very true. I have worked in 4 languages and as part of many recruitment processes over the years, taken many reading comprehension assessment tests in various languages. If the text to be read is a simple email or something, that's kind of easy. But if it's more towards an academic text or about legislation, there are usually a decent number of words I have no idea what they mean, as I have not needed the vocabulary on those texts ever before. So I read the text a few times and then start mapping the message based on the context and the surrounding words... I have passed many assessments just with this methodology and completed many tasks in my jobs doing the same...

 

[josh2203]

Lots of those who graduate didn´t actually learn with the program. I hear that those who start from scratch have a very hard time. My former assistant, who completed the program, couldn´t actually keep a conversation in English and had issues with very basic stuff like numbers, days of the week, etc.

Our elder son went to a very nice private school in POP before the pandemic. It was supposed to be one of the best in town, and the lessons were in English. All went well (in my opinion) until they started doing virtual lessons, the teachers giving classes over Zoom during the pandemic. That was the first time ever I actually heard the professors speaking English. I had never had a doubt before, but with all respect, I had expected way more from them. Not for the curriculum nor the content, everything was perfect in that sense, our son was happy there and learned perfectly. But the professor was Dominican and the English they spoke was just awful in my opinion. Not just the accent, which I honestly had not expected to be that strong for a person that speaks English day in day out but the language used was also rather simple. Yes, they were first graders, but still...

I kept my mouth shut as indeed learning did take place and our son was doing really well, but I was just surprised how badly they in fact spoke English, the school being promoted as English speaking school...

 

[bob saunders]

Our elder son went to a very nice private school in POP before the pandemic. It was supposed to be one of the best in town, and the lessons were in English. All went well (in my opinion) until they started doing virtual lessons, the teachers giving classes over Zoom during the pandemic. That was the first time ever I actually heard the professors speaking English. I had never had a doubt before, but with all respect, I had expected way more from them. Not for the curriculum nor the content, everything was perfect in that sense, our son was happy there and learned perfectly. But the professor was Dominican and the English they spoke was just awful in my opinion. Not just the accent, which I honestly had not expected to be that strong for a person that speaks English day in day out but the language used was also rather simple. Yes, they were first graders, but still...

I kept my mouth shut as indeed learning did take place and our son was doing really well, but I was just surprised how badly they in fact spoke English, the school being promoted as English speaking school...

We had an English teacher that learned her English at Doulos Bi-Lingual school in Jarabacoa. She spoke English without a Dominican Accent but had an American southern drawl. Many of the kids that go to Jarabacoa Christian school or Doulos Discovery speak excellent more or less unaccented English. Their teachers though are mainly young religious American teachers, mainly from the southern United States.

 

[JD Jones]

My ex-neighbor Dominican English teacher (RIP) would read things I barely understood, but the words she was reading were normal English. She had her own way of saying many things.

 

[slinger]

I'm old and have CRS and can't remember much Spanish either.

 

[JLSawmam]

This immersion program may not be perfect, but I do think English is a wacky language to learn. Phonetic? Nope. Lots of words pronounced the same and maybe spelled the same yet with different meanings? Lead, lead...lead, led...read, read...read, red...and so many more examples! Am I write? Rite? Right?