Have you ever sat in a language lesson, just staring at the clock? Do you tune out because you have no idea what the teacher is saying? We’ve all been there, and it’s hard not to find yourself thinking: I really don’t want to be doing this. Languages are an incredibly important skill that will get us by when we’re working or travelling in other countries. Colleges and Universities look for them in applications and employers want to see them in our CVs. But they’re so hard to learn! It’s crossed my mind many times that languages would be so much easier if we each had more attention from the teacher.

I recently got back from a Spanish residential trip with about forty other students. It involved excursions to Spanish towns and villages, tours of these places entirely in Spanish, buying things in Spanish, speaking to people in Spanish and having Spanish lessons in classes of ten to twelve people.

One particular incident I will always remember is when a woman came up to me in the street and quite forcibly tried to sell me a sprig of rosemary. I almost went through with it before I realised she wanted five euros for it and I managed to make her give my money back to me. In Spanish. After that, I realised that if I knew enough Spanish to stop myself getting swindled, I could definitely handle a controlled assessment.

We came back to England having learned a lot more Spanish and being generally much more confident when speaking it. Currently, my school (Waldegrave School for Girls) does this trip every other year. I, personally, was surprised at how much I’d learned and wish I could go again next year.

Of course, we can’t go abroad every week, but there’s definitely more that can be done to make learning languages a lot easier and more fun. After our three hour Spanish lessons in small classes, I heard several students mention that they’d “learned more Spanish in those last three hours than in three years of normal Spanish lessons.”

While this might be a slight exaggeration, there’s certainly something to be said for learning in smaller classes. As it is, we have two one hour language lessons each week in classes of approximately thirty. From my experience in a class of twelve, I think we’d learn much better if we had only one language lesson a week, but in classes of fifteen rather than thirty.

I am not a qualified teacher, nor do I know a lot about the budgets and technicalities involved with planning residential trips, but I do know from my five days in Spain that trips like these are truly amazing for learning languages.

Molly Campbell Simmons Waldegrave School for Girls