The subdelegate of the Government in Ourense, Eladio Santos, visited this morning the facilities of the Official School of Languages in Ourense to get to know first-hand the program ‘That’s English’, financed by the Ministry of Education, Vocational Training and Sports. During the visit he was accompanied by the director of the center, Nancy Casielles Iglesias, who knew first-hand the work that is being carried out in this center in relation to the aforementioned program.
The ‘That’s English’ program has been taught in Galicia since its creation in 1993, through the official language schools of the Autonomous Community. Throughout its history, the program trained nearly 50,000 people and 312 tutors, with tutoring being done by teachers from official language schools and secondary schools specializing in English.
Eladio Santos stressed that this program “has an excellent endowment of technical and training resources” and stressed “the impact it has in the province of Ourense, where it is valued very positively by the people who opt for this system of training in languages”. Good proof of this is that Ourense “is the Galician province that has the highest number of students, reaching at this moment to 446”.
The subdelegate explained that the English language training program “evolved both the media and the content, completely updating its y-learning platform in 2019 and incorporating the C1 level of its training offer in the 2020-2021 academic year, in addition to the creation of a free app with all the audiovisual content of the course in 2018.” At the same time, from the academic year 2023-2024 a 100% online exam preparation course was incorporated into the academic offer to prepare the certification tests of the B2 and C1 levels of the official language schools.
Finally, Eladio Santos wanted to value the “work and effort of the Government to bet on training and education through programs such as ‘That’s English’, which allow the population to immerse themselves in knowledge and language training.” In this sense, he also pointed out that “the number of students in recent years and the improvement of the offer, allowed Ourense to have a first-line training and that allows citizens to retain new knowledge in such an important subject as languages”.