Pecha Kucha: Speaking Spanish Without Fear
“I’m a Spanish teacher,” I say. “Cool! I took 4 years of Spanish in high school and I can’t remember anything.” Cringe. How can this be? I wondered. After hearing this time and time again, from person after person, I began to question my practice, wondering, do my students leave my class feeling the same way? Do they feel like they can communicate in Spanish? Is real learning happening in my classroom or am I helping to create good test-takers? It is important to me that students can produce language after leaving my classroom because otherwise, what is the point? I noticed students had no problem memorizing verb charts and vocabulary, but in turn, they were disengaged and bored. Traditional grammar and vocabulary learning was working to keep their grades up, yet it had very little connection to the real world. The students barely relied on one another for information, hardly collaborated, and almost never were asked to perform a real-world task using Spanish. ...