NEWS | Wednesday, 25 July 2007

Malta benefits from Spanish student flood

Gerald Fenech
and Sarah Attard Gialanze

A large influx of Spanish students which have put hotel and host family occupancy at record levels has had an extremely positive effect on the tourist industry this year, sources told Business Today.
Speaking to this newspaper, Malta Hotels and Restaurants President, Josef Formosa Gauci said the Spanish government has come up with the initiative of offering students a scholarship where they are being given the opportunity to study a language in different country.
The president of MHRA added “the Spanish students coming to Malta are of a better quality due to the fact they are more concentrated on studying, especially when compared to other groups of foreign students.”
Formosa Gauci also said that Air Malta and Clickair are being used by the Spanish students at a frequent rate, boosting passenger numbers to the island.
The students are mainly residing in a number of hotels, although there might be some who are being hosted by local families. Asked whether the residents of the hotels lament about the students, the MHRA president said the fact the Spanish students are more mature and focused results in the lack of disturbances at the hotels.
The Spanish Government is offering up to 53,000 scholarships for Spanish students aged 18 - 30 to study English overseas. The total value of the scheme will reach approximately 85 million Euros. This is the first time a scholarships opportunity of this size has been made available by the Spanish government.
The Spanish government led by Prime Minister Zapatero has been attempting to increase the level of English fluency amongst the population. It released a working paper in September 2004, called Quality Education For All And Between All: Proposals For Debate where the government outlined its reasons for wanting to lift Spain’s low standard of English proficiency.
“We’ve made a strong case for teaching foreign languages from an early age,” the education minister, María Jesús San Segundo was quoted as saying. “This proposal is consistent with the goals established by both the EU and European Council.
“Our objective is to see students fluent in two foreign languages by the time they finish secondary school. This will come on top of their mother tongue [Castilian] and in the case of some regions the official language of that territory [for example, Catalan]”.
However, the economic imperative behind the government’s moves is equally apparent. Recent surveys have highlighted the economic opportunities being lost because of Spain’s English-language deficiencies and its failure to compete with other EU countries that are more proficient in English.
According to a survey by Employment and Global Media Consultants, only 1.4% of Spanish university students graduate with the second-language levels (almost always English) necessary to find employment in multinationals. Yet, according to the Department of Philology at the University of Salamanca, 90% of companies in Spain want graduates to be fluent in English as a basic requirement of employment.
The perception that the state school system is failing has fuelled a big increase in the demand for private EFL training.