Scholarship of Spanish Conversation; an experience in the US<

Scholarship of Spanish Conversation; an experience in the US

Who would have thought that I would go to the US for 9 months with a scholarship of conversation that the ministery of Spain offers? Truth is that it was a great opportunity which I couldn`t help but enjoy. I hadn`t ever worked in any school before and only barely had a recent diploma, but this gave me big opportunities on the Spanish labour market.

At the beginning I had no idea how to teach primerary school students Spanish, in my case in the 3rd or 4th grade. I thought their Spanish level would be very low (like in the schools here) so I brought easy books and songs very easy to sing. WHat surpriesed me on the first day was that all of them could ask the questions they wanted to ask without even having them prepared. I had been employed by a school of total linguistc immersion, for the youngest, 1st and 2nd grade they do all the lessons in Spanish, in 3rd grade they do 30% of the lessons in English and in the 4th 40%. They were used to listening to Spanish and they had teacher with a very high Spanish level.

Thanks to them I discovered the world of teaching Spanish. I saw how they improved their pronounciation and how their language got more and more fluent, how they enjoyed learning, at the most the words which are difficult to pronounce about which they laughed instead of feeling frustration over the impossibility to pronounce them the right way.

They were just children learning, children absorbing everything like sponges, who only used Spanish at school and in their normal life spoke English, children who learned another language like anyone else does, it was funny though because they used it as a secret language in front of people who couldn`t understand them. Of course they had their mistakes in their gramar which they solved very solwly, like turtles, but the understood each other, what more can you want? So they got closer step by step to their future gramar clases in highschool.

For the success they had and they showed me I decided to do this course to learn to teach Spanish better and to have more resources when I`d make my own programm and why not? Trevelling to different countries and get to know my own language better makes me really proud.