THE Ministry of Education last week reiterated its appeal for students to become fluent in Spanish, describing it a “tremendous asset” which will open up scholarship and employment opportunities in the region and internationally.

To that end, education minister Ronald Thwaites, who was addressing some 200 students at a Spanish Immersion Day staged by the Spanish-Jamaican Foundation on Wednesday, April 15, at the Kingston and St Andrew Parish Library on Tom Redcam Drive, said Jamaica needs to be far more integrated with the Latin American countries which are in close proximity.

The students, fielded from Wolmer’s Girls’ School, Excelsior, Edith Dalton James, Calabar, Meadowbrook and Mona high schools, will be sitting the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) Spanish oral examination next month.

They got the opportunity to interact with native Spanish speakers from Argentina, Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua, Mexico, Costa Rica, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic and Colombia. The native speakers were paired with Jamaican teachers of Spanish, who guided the students through oral exam practice using recognised themes from the CSEC syllabus.

The minister called the event “a wonderful occasion”.

“It gives our students a chance for immersion in conversational Spanish, which is usually a big contrast to their classroom experience where grammar and vocabulary are the concentrations. It also gives students the opportunity for networking with personnel from the various Latin American countries,” he said.

The one-day workshop was a collaboration between Thwaites’ ministry and the embassies of Spanish-speaking countries in Jamaica in an effort to support the teaching and learning of Spanish as a foreign language.

Other workshops will be held at Sam Sharpe Teachers’ College in Montego Bay and Church Teachers’ College in Manchester.