English compositions for the EOI

...And we did it. Ràdio Mannà began to broadcast on January 1989

It was one of the most exhilarating experiences in my life. A group of young people decided to set up a pirate radio. We only needed a room, an aerial, a transmitter and lots of illusion and imagination; and we did it. Ràdio Mannà began to broadcast on January 1989, the last year I spent in Castelló. I persuaded my friend Júlia to join my program, which we named He oblidat prendre precaucions. We were on the air on Sunday evenings, from eight to nine --although we used to be there at about seven and never leaving before eleven. I very much miss my friends there: José Maria and Eva conducting the previous program; Ximo as the responsible for the next one, La lluna, with its beautiful signature tune. I remember arriving home fully excited and completely exhausted.

I like considering my adolescence as being over together with the radio program. Júlia got a job in Palma and left the program. She knew I was looking forward to leaving my parent's home, so she told me to stay at her house and maintain me until I were able to find a job. I didn't think it twice. I waited until June to complete my graduation, and set off..

When I came ashore, I knew I had just two things: a whole life ahead to fulfil, and a friend whom I'd never be grateful enough to.

She was an open girl, cheeky and scatterbrained, somewhat vulgar

She was the first person to make my heart beat harder than usual. I remember her with extraordinary tenderness, and I still tremble a little when thinking about her. Her name was Yolanda, she was awfully beautiful and sturdy, her black straight hair loosening over her shoulders while standing in front of the blackboard, holding the chalk with her smooth, rounded pale hands. We happened to share part of our way back home from school, although in opposite sidewalks —she with her girlfriends and I with my boyfriends. We were thirteen years-old, and of course, the whole matter was secret and platonic: my shyness prevented me from neither a direct nor indirect approach; even I used to stammer every time she addressed to me to borrow something or to ask some question. She enabled my sensuality, awakened-for the first time- my passion and my imagination. Thanks to her, I learnt to daydream, and to desire.

At the grammar school, some years later, I met Marian. We sat side by side because of the coincidence in the first letters of our last names. She was radically distinct from Yolanda: very short and light, with an incredibly long blond hair that even made her look smaller than she was -and ugly to a fault. Her manners were opposed to mine, as well. She was an open girl, cheeky and scatterbrained, somewhat vulgar and miles away from being a prude. We got on more than well together, though. At that moment, she was going out with an older boy, a coarse slum-dweller who I appreciated, too. It wasn’t until long afterwards that I knew I had been in love with her.

And it would please me so much to find her in the street and invite her to have some coffee, to know about her life and to tell her that I loved her.

At the age of seventeen, I decided to recover the language they had intended to take away from me

Until my brother was born, Catalan had been the language of my family —beyond my grandparents, I doubt they were able to speak any other language at all. But our parents, following the general tendency in the country under the Franco’s dictatorship, decided to speak Spanish to us, in order to facilitate our academic career —it was the more extended argument those days, if any reasoning was required, for justifying such a transcendental decision; and I want you to notice this was not a worthless argument at all, whereas only Spanish was allowed at school, at grammar school, at university and at any other public domain.

At the age of seventeen, I decided to recover the language they had intended to take away from me. I began to study on my own. I read Catalan literature and decided to write and think in Catalan. It was hard, but I had the will and decision that, in adolescence, gives the complete conviction of being right. Catalan became for me much more than a language: it turned into a way of understanding the world and building myself an identity. I guess this difficult to understand for anyone living in a monolingual community, but I can assure that up to the minimal details of everyday life are battles if you want to live in Catalan, there in my country. And finally you get tired of fighting.

Becoming an adult means —or should mean—, among other things, giving up the absolute certainties and realizing the relativity of all points of view, including ours. If something remains non-negotiable in my life, though, that's my name. The name I changed when I came of age; precious name that represents me, that tells everybody (so does me) who I am. Name that nobody is permitted to maliciously alter and that everybody is invited to say.

The adult study of a foreign language is doomed to be annoyingly explicit

I can't avoid feeling a terrible envy when I think of children in any English-speaking area: why is so easy for them to perform something so difficult for me (i.e., to learn English), our huge differences in intelligence notwithstanding?

I remember a discussion I had, some years ago about the role of society in the social construction of masculinity and femininity. A friend of mine argued that he hadn't ever been instructed about the way he had to act as a boy ; that he and his sister had been educated exactly in the same way, so that any difference you could find between them related to proper gender attitudes had to be seen as genetically determined. Evidently, he didn't take into consideration the distinction between implicit and explicit processes of attaining knowledge; so I asked him whether he had had to wait for his mother explaining him what a dog was to know what a dog was!

In fact, that distinction is vital to answer the question I asked above: whereas children's learning of their mother tongue is chiefly an implicit process, the adult study of a foreign language is doomed to be annoyingly explicit. This is so because of the presence or absence of a context. Society as a whole (parents and other relatives, peer groups, radio and television, etc.) constitutes the primary context for children, which provides them with the fundamental elements of linguistic competence, i.e., a basic lexicon and the main rules guiding the connection of words. A secondary context ­of the most importance­ is school, where a systematic explicit learning is supplied, allowing children to improve the implicit linguistic abilities they already own and to acquire the linguistic capabilities required for a wide and varied range of vital experiences. A third context could be found in books: one learns from them new words and structures without having to use a dictionary; the context, here (and differently from the primary context, in which implicit learning operates through human senses perceiving the relationships between sounds and physical objects) is made up of the other words, the ones one already knows. Although this is an abstract process and the former is a concrete one, both involve implicit learning.

When an adult decides to study a foreign language, he or she finds himself in the same situation of a newborn child; unfortunately, though, what I've called primary context is absolutely lacking here. School (in the shrunk version of a language center) becomes thus the only possible context —mainly an explicit one. Explicit learning is far much tougher and fragile than the implicit one. Besides, the student --far from being submerged-- spends there no more than four hours a week. So, if he's been diligent enough, he's likely to know --after six or seven years-- as much English as an average six years-old English-spoken child knows when entering school; and he should even consider himself a lucky person!

If this kind of reasoning is correct, one can object the adequacy of a certain English learning methodology that puts the emphasis on structures better than on vocabulary. Linguistic structures differ from words in one crucial point: whereas there is no way of learning the structures but explicitly memorizing them (we have no context at all), words are liable to be grasped and acquired implicitly by their only presence in discourse, since this one becomes their own context. Thus, a student knowing the words connected by a structure may deduce the significance of such structure, and eventually know how to use it; the contrary, i.e., the learning of the words by the only previous knowing of the structure, is, if not impossible, largely far-fetched.

To sum up, I esteem necessary a new and strong emphasis in the direct and explicit learning of a large amount of words; the best way, in my opinion, of allowing students to approach a foreign language implicitly, through multiple and varied readings and listenings.

I had arrived on the wrong evening and the house was empty

(Note: The composition had to finish exactly so: I had arrived on the wrong evening and the house was empty.)

I knew Peggy for the first time in Samoa, many years ago. My job as a civil servant in the US Consulate there it was far from being exciting, so I found in her the spirit of adventure which my life was lacking. She was happy living out of law: her little tricks and offences let her feel alive and young. Risking and defying were the motive of her life. She was certainly witty and methodical: strange mix that make her so successful those days. Who could guess that, eventually, her exactness would be precisely the cause of her fall.

I had not heard of Peggy since I left Samoa. I had almost forgotten her when the phone rang, two days ago. It was her. She said she was seriously in jeopardize, and that the only way she had to escape the police was getting away. She needed a passport, and knowing I worked on the emigration department, she desperately asked for my help. She said as well she had not never forgotten me throughout all these years...

I agreed with her to meet in an old country-house, on the following Thursday at 1.30 AM. She pleaded for my punctuality since she had to catch the train to Mexico two hours later. It was her last opportunity.

I got up at eight o'clock on Thursday willing to drive there to help her... and see her as well. Two hours before arriving, though, I noticed my fatal error: as every other ordinary people in the world, I had implicitly understood we had to meet at the end of Thursday, in spite of doing it at the end of Wednesday. Poor Peggy surely had been uselessly waiting for me the night before, thinking I had betrayed her. Tears came to my eyes, when, at last, I got to the old house. I had arrived on the wrong evening and the house was empty.

She walked along the corridor and got to the kitchen —just wearing a pair of tiny panties

The year I spent in Madrid was quite peculiar and indeed important for me. There is a socio-psychological assertion establishing that the more physical distance between two people, the less emotional distance between them. In Madrid, I discovered that my friends were in Castelló. Madrid is a great open city, fully self-confident, kind and warm despite its cold weather; a sort of melting pot where everybody is welcome. That notwithstanding, I didn't let myself get assimilated by the city and its overall atmosphere. Being eighteen years old, I felt I didn’t belong there.

I didn't mean to speak about Madrid, though. It simply came to my mind following my viewing yesterday, once again, of Hitchcock's excellent Rear Window —so celebrated, in my opinion, not only by its magisterial control of an increasing thrill, but because by means of identification with James Stewart, one becomes to play the God's role and can thus safelysatisfy one of the most exciting, universal and persistent habits of human beings —curiosity.

Coming back from Madrid, in route to my parent's house in Castelló, I used to manage to spend the night in some of my friends' flat in Benimaclet, a rather miserable and dim-lighted working-class Valencian district near the campus, where most students outside Valencia city used to live in. One evening, I was looking through the window, just waiting for my friend Vilu to go out, when the light switched on in the apartment opposite mine. What I saw there, alas, was the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, gently taking her clothes off. After a while, she walked along the corridor and got to the kitchen —just wearing a pair of tiny panties. Once there, she opened the fridge and drank directly from a bottle of milk. Finally, she came back to her bedroom and missed in the darkness.

I didn't say anything to my friend.

But no matter how ethereal and casual my vision was, I can assure you I’ll never forget that amazing minute of secret disclosure and harmless transgression.