Achievements and challenges of the strategy for the improvement of english at Varona Pedagogical University

Abstract

The policy for improving the English language in higher education has become a necessity in the present decade. By engaging the university community in a strategy for orienting and controlling this process, better results could be achieved in terms of students’ proficiency certification. The purpose of this article was twofold: first, it followed the aim to describe the actions included in the strategy and second, to enhance understanding of the achievements and challenges towards certification at Dolores Corona Language Centre. In the context of the need of preparing future competent professionals in the English language, able to understand the content of their specific specialties in this language, the strategy has played an important role because encourages the development of these specialists’ communicative abilities. For gathering all the information, interview to teachers, observation to lessons, pedagogical tests, students’ survey and documental analysis were applied as empirical methods. The constant exchange with stakeholders made possible to redesign and update the actions proposed. Thus, the strategy obtained resembles Enrique José Varona University of Pedagogical Sciences and the processes that in terms of teaching and learning are being developed. Developing students’ four language skills (listening, reading, writing and speaking) is not an easy task mainly for non–language specialists. Through this strategy, language barriers caused by the lack of skills to understand information and express themselves about their specialties in the language are broken.