EP Xavier launches Business is fun: Shopping in Valencia

Good news! When we presented in the teacher’s meet in Galapagar our experience implementing the BEDA Programme, the E.P. Xavier decided to launch some of our Business is fun projects in their classes.  

We were really excited with the idea and started exchanging materials. Asunción Esteso adapted the project with lots of enthusiasm and the Students of the Commercial Activities Degree really got involved in the activity.  The result: a wonderful Shopping in Valencia project.

The challenge: finding out if Valencia’s commercial area is oriented to tourism. The students visited the city centre area taking pictures of the signs they found in different languages and analysed the information afterwards.

Asunción Esteso, the teacher who ran the project, says: “We enjoyed the activity very much. Thanks for sharing it! It is a different approach to English that increases motivation and communication”. You can read a more extensive reflection on her experience on EP. Xavier's blog.

CONGRATULATIONS from E.P. Javeriana to the students that participated in the project and of course, to Asunción for the initiative and for sharing all the materials with us. You did a great job! 

We are just posting a sample of the student’s work but you can read the whole document by clicking on the image. Please do, it is very interesting!!

 "We made this work because we wanted to know if Valencia is a city oriented to tourism. The purpose of this work is to take photos of what we consider shops oriented to tourists. We assess the written signs in different languages. 

Valencia is a very multicultural city, in special it is oriented to northern Europe tourists. The majority of tourists are British, Dutch and Germans, but there are also Japaneses and Italians, so we can find that in most of the shops, English is widely used and we can see some signals written in Italian also. 

Here we have a cardboard where we can see a typical British menu oriented to that kind of tourists, It was located near Plaza la Virgen and it was surprisingly successful.

As you can see in that panel there are mixed words in both languages, Spanish and English so local people and everyone that speaks English can understand what kind of food they are offering.

  

It’s very important to local shops owners to find a way to communicate with those clients because they can mean an important income for their economy in a city oriented to tourism as Valencia. In the last photo as you can see it doesn’t take much effort to write the words “fast food” but it has a powerful impact in people that speak English.

(Alvaro Roca and Raul Fuset)