Beliefs & Practices

I believe that a communicative approach to language learning helps students improve all skills: speaking, listening, writing, & reading. For this reason, my goal is to speak Spanish 90% of the time in my classroom in order to create as many opportunities for comprehensible input as possible. I use vocabulary in context with lots of visuals, imagery, stories, skits, movies, gestures, and cognates. Students are encouraged to speak Spanish as much as possible in my classes without the fear of making mistakes.

I believe that interest and motivation are key in language learning. With this in mind, my lessons mimic real-world communication through engaging listening, speaking, reading and writing tasks such as, writing a message on Instagram to their friend in Peru, working as a day laborer in a simulation banana plantation, pitching a new invention idea to an entrepreneur on Shark Tank, or teaching a Gallo Pinto cooking class.

In my classroom, we use a communicative approach that follows Krashen’s input hypothesis and Swain’s output hypothesis. Spanish grammar and vocabulary is taught implicitly, which means that students learn structures through seeing multiple patterns that are given in context. Some explicit grammar is briefly explained only after students have seen the structural patterns and practiced them in context.

In the past, I taught culture as knowledge about various countries' products and practices. Now I work to expand students’ world-views beyond the material part of culture and help students embrace new attitudes towards other people groups. We engage in discussions about interacting with people from different cultures, the beauty of differences and how we can care for others that are different from us.