Language teacher

Teaching and learning go hand in hand. My most powerful experiences as a language learner were those in which I practiced the target language in a meaningful and challenging way. For instance, journaling in my English writing class or giving an oral presentation about runaway kids who I had interviewed. In my view, good teaching is authentic and connects with the students’ needs, it takes place in an interactive and constructive setting, and it fosters language learning through effective pedagogical methods and multiple resources. For this, a teacher needs to remain a curious explorer, an enthusiastic learner, a reflective professional looking for challenges and opportunities. Below, I describe my teaching philosophy, illustrating it with examples of my own practice.

Combining Spanish teaching with contents that are meaningful for my students is essential for me. Since at the University of Kiel most of my students are prospective Spanish teachers, I create courses that respond to specific language and pedagogical needs. For this reason I conceived the Spanish practice and advanced didactics seminar La competencia interaccional en el aula de ELE. Here, the participants observed classroom interaction with a magnifying glass, learned basic concepts of conversation analysis, discussed video sequences, video-recorded their own role-plays, and provided peer-feedback. My aim was to facilitate Spanish learning in the language classroom context, to enhance my students' interactional awareness in Spanish, and to provide opportunities for practice and collaborative reflection. The conception, design, and evaluation of content-based courses excite me! I love the creative process of producing a syllabus with a coherent course program and its lesson plans. I interact with experts and search for information that help me to elaborate useful course materials. This process continues in the classroom, when I observe how it works, and when I evaluate the course in order to improve it. 

In my Spanish courses, I have worked with different methods that include the communicative approach, task based learning, and content and language integrated learning. Experimenting with these methods in different contexts has taught me that there is no one-size-fits-all method. I have had adult learners who felt more secure repeating dialogs, while others enjoyed engaging in classroom debates. I address this complexity in different ways: gathering information from my students about their learning styles and experiences, offering diverse opportunities for language practice including digital resources, or designing tasks and activities for individual practice and group work inside and outside the classroom. In this process, I dialogue with my students in order to identify what works for them and what not, so I can make adjustments accordingly. Obtaining anonymous and open feedback (analog and digital) is essential to consider my learners’ needs. In this way, I aim at making my students co-designers of the course. 

Digital technologies are a great aid for language teaching and learning, and I integrate them to foster language practice, group cohesion and a clear course structure. During the pandemic, I used online tools and activities to enhance individual learning with self-assessment activities. In order to foster group cohesion as well, I invited students to introduce themselves with videos. This kind of activity is not very usual in the German context, and to be able to motivate my students, it was important for me to be explicit about the learning goals and benefits. Another useful way to support language learning and social connection included audio-recorded feedback, as well as synchronous and asynchronous collaborative activities. The two-year online teaching experience allowed me to identify best practices for creating an interactive and engaging learning atmosphere, which is fundamental for me.

Reflective practice is an indispensable part of my teaching and continuing professional development. I welcome opportunities for team-teaching and reflecting with pre-service teachers and colleagues. I enjoy growing professionally by interacting with colleagues and students, and my doors are open for video-recorded classroom observation. For example, a graduate student, who had attended a content-based Spanish course focused on interactional competence, collected video-recorded data from my classes for her master thesis using a conversation analytic approach. The collaborative interpretation of the data revealed interactional patterns I was not aware of, so that I could address similar situations more mindfully. An additional benefit of reflective practice has been sharing my insights with other practitioners, for example, in conferences, and in the university’s blog on teaching practice. 

I envision new learning opportunities to enhance my practice. Next to my interest in classroom interactional competence and reflective practice, I am willing to combine Spanish teaching with the Service-Learning approach. This would add another dimension to my teaching, which includes designing projects with my students, collaborating with other disciplines, and interacting with community organizations. My goal is to facilitate Spanish learning while engaging in purposeful collaborative efforts that benefit the community, and to investigate how language learning can take place in this arrangement.

My first school visit was at the Menntaskólinn í Reykjavík, a traditional upper secondary school founded in 1056. I met a Spanish teacher who showed me the school facilities and invited me to two of her classes. The teacher conducted the lesson in the target language and used Icelandic as a resource for vocabulary and grammar explanations. After a warm-up activity, the pupils were asked to work in pairs to practice asking and giving directions. As soon as some pupils were done, the teacher assigned an online activity for further practice. For those who were ready with the first assignment, the change to the next activity went pretty straight forward: they opened their laptops or took their mobiles in order to work with the suggested online activities. This illustrated the use of digital tools for differentiation in the classroom. My second school visit took place at Framhaldsskólinn í Mosfellsbæ, a modern upper secondary school established in 2009. The pedagogical approach at this institution is learner-centered and project-oriented. Two Spanish teachers invited me to her classrooms, where the pupils received instructions for their next learning project. Since learner autonomy is an important value in this school, the pupils were asked to plan and work on their projects on their own. Support and feedback was offered, but it would take place in the following weeks according to the needs of each group. This less guided and less structured approach to teaching was challenging for me given my educational background.