Spanish Courses School Blog

Advice from a Mexican Spanish teacher

Hi, my name is Izabel, I’m from Mexico City and I’m 32 years old. I graduated as a primary scool teacher in 2005 and for the last three years I have been teaching Spanish to adults in Denmark. I decided to study the Spanish as a Foreign Language teacher training course with the idea of learning new things and improving my style of teaching, and have come out of it smiling because thanks to this course, I have been able to make my classes more dynamic. Now, I try to apply the communicative method to my teaching, because I completely agree with what it proposes:that students aren`t experts of a foreign language until they can use it successfully to communicate and interact in any situation that might come up in their social context.

Here are some teaching tips, which I offer you from the heart.

- Carry out your work responsibly, whether you’re a teacher by choice or be circumstance: work hard at preparation, plan your classes in advance and investigate the topics which you want to explore in class. This will make you feel more secure and confident. Students can always tell if you’re prepared or not.

- Be honest, when students ask you a question that you don’t know the answer to, or that you don’t know how to answer, it’s better just to accept it and tell the truth. It’s happened to me before, and I usually say something like: you know what, I’ll go and look it up and next time we’ll talk about it.

- Be humble, accept it when you’re wrong, if you’ve, say, explained a grammatical rule and you got the information wrong, it’s important to set it straight to avoid confusion later.

- Have a Plan B ready just in case, not because you’re pessimistic but because sometimes things go wrong. The tape recorder won’t turn on, the CD won’t play, the photocopier is broken… For this reason, have a few back-up plans ready so that you can overcome any situation. A while back, I forgot to bring in an old watch that I use to teach the time, so I ended up drawing a watch on the board and got each student to come up to draw on a time and say it out loud.

- Make sure that all of your students take part; there’s almost always a shy one that is too scared to speak. I tend to sit my students in a horseshoe shape, and include rounds of questions in my classes in which everyone must answer once. For example, in the first class with beginners, I start by saying “Me llamo Izabel, ¿cómo te llamas?”, and the first student might answer “Me llamo Rubén”. He would then have to ask his neighbour the same question, and so on until the question arrives back to me.

- The “My mate the crocodile” game: This is a game in which I bring in a small stuffed crocodile which the students pass around themselves. I turn my back and start clapping, and as soon as I stop clapping I turn around and the student who is left holding the crocodile has to answer one of my questions. I also use this game when I need to choose someone at random to explore a topic or to revise material covered in previous classes. This game has served me well, because the students have a great time trying to escape my crocodile. You can use some other toy or object for this game.

- Promote a friendly atmosphere in the classroom: promote values such as respect, tolerance and solidarity between students, and reject any kind of offense or discrimination between them. Don’t forget that we work with people, not objects. We all have the right to be treated with dignity.

Finally, I would like to thank my tutor, Alfredo Orive, for his feedback, support and above all humanity during all the months that I studied the course. I was always behind and he was the key to my development on the course, which I hugely recommend.

I wish you all the best of luck and every success!

Course for Spanish as a Foreign Language teachers| 0 | Izebel Sánchez Hernández

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