From Theory to Practice: My Learning Journey as a Spanish Teacher<

From Theory to Practice: My Learning Journey as a Spanish Teacher

My name is María Ripoll, and I would like to reflect on my experience taking this course as a teacher of Spanish as a foreign language (ELE).

 The decision to take it arose from a personal and professional motivation that I have always felt, even since my school days. This motivation led me to study English Philology at the University of Salamanca, where I put my dedication and interest in languages into practice.

Currently, I reside in the Netherlands, which has given me the opportunity to observe firsthand, in a non-Spanish-speaking international context, how the Dutch community shows a growing interest in learning Spanish, as the Netherlands is a highly globalized country.

Learning Spanish implies an improvement both professionally and in the workplace, as well as personal enrichment, since Spain is a highly sought-after holiday destination. On the other hand, throughout the course, I have been able to contrast the different second language teaching methodologies that have been implemented over time.

I have thus understood the importance of adopting a communicative approach that entails teaching the student to learn the L2 (second language) in order to achieve real-world use of it. Compared to more traditional methodologies, the "Communicative Method" allows for the development of real skills useful in everyday life contexts, including the four skills of the Spanish language: reading comprehension, listening comprehension, oral expression, and written expression. This is what makes the communicative approach stand out, as some of the methodologies that preceded it do not fully integrate these four skills. Likewise, on a personal level,

I have learned to value the importance of planning and designing activities or tasks, adapted to the needs and interests of the students. I have even understood the relevance of taking cultural diversity into account, because depending on the different countries and cultures, people communicate differently. From my own experience, I must say that the Dutch have a somewhat more reserved attitude compared to the Spanish. This is simply a cultural fact, and therefore, it is necessary to create an atmosphere of familiarity and trust where students feel comfortable, in order to foster class participation, as well as student-student or student-teacher interaction.

I must also emphasize that this course has helped me put into practice aspects of my future teaching work that I had never done before, and which are highly relevant, such as creating rubrics and even my own assessment proposal. This has encouraged me to start gradually creating my own identity as a future teacher. Because of this, this ELE course has been my first approach to the field of second language teaching, which is my vocation and my main goal right now.