The new role of a professor in teaching Spanish<

The new role of a professor in teaching Spanish

Having finished the advanced course for ELE teachers, I feel really satisfied that I had been able to analyze several situations that I was in as a Spanish teacher in France. I have been working in various environments, like colleges, institutes, companies, courses for adults as well as for youngsters. This advanced course allowed me to, inter alia, get to know the specifity of pedagogical work with adults as well as of teaching Spanish to immigrants and workers. I analyzed various situations based on real happenings and to confirm the reasonableness of pedagogy that I was doing at an intuitive level. Furthermore, I got to know the new theories about the role of professors, and their quality of educating and teaching people in a world that asks for new technologies that allow us to vary on the contexts of the courses and not to compellingly teach people from-face-to-face anymore.

I found things of some of my colleagues who are no native speakers and who had many difficulties in holding a conversation because they were not told how to communicate properly, only to read and understand written texts. Currently, the official programmes of the universities and colleges in France are changing. People want to get to know how to orally express themselves as well as how to interact properly but there is still so much to do to reach this goal.

One important aspect that I would like to highlight is that you need to listen to the needs of the students and to understand their motivations as well their environment in order to give them an education that suits their desires and that broadens their cultural and linguistic horizons. Another aspect is the “interlingua” and the dealing with the mistakes that our students make so that they learn how to solve their problems with the language and to orally communicate with other people properly. Oral communication is almost impossible for me because generally, students in France don’t learn how to speak a language. Thus, for them it is very difficult to communicate properly. Before finishing my studies of all modules, I was able to practise some of the things that I had learnt with my students. I learned how to speak with them and not just making them repeat conjugations as I did before and above all, I learned how to adapt myself to innovations without being afraid of them because now I know that they are useful and motivating.

Currently, I am teaching Spanish individually to adults who work for companies and I have some students of universities or colleges that I have to get prepared for their exams. I am really passionate about doing this because now, I have a really close relationship with my students and I have experienced that many of them had negative experiences with learning Spanish before.

I wanted to attend this course because I don’t have philological training (I am a sociologist) and my knowledge is based on my four-year experience as a Spanish teacher in France (from 1994 to 1998), without having any positive results of my experience in teaching this language for 15 years. I have to say that I don’t regret that I’ve made an effort and I hope that I will be able to go on applying everything that I’ve learned to my students. The proposed bibliography will help me to complete my knowledge.