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My name is María Ripoll and I decided to take both the initial "Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language (ELE)" course and the advanced ELE course at the "Instituto Hemingway", since I have always been interested in language teaching and wanted to expand my training as a philologist. I studied English Philology at the University of Salamanca, and I currently reside in the Netherlands, so this course complements my training to be able to teach Spanish to foreigners.

On the other hand, the knowledge acquired has been of great help to me, since I am currently completing my Master's Degree in Teacher Training, which is highly related. My goal is to have methodological tools that allow me to plan communicative, participatory, and cooperative classes, adapted to the needs and interests of the students, and not merely focused on mechanical grammar explanations. When I started the course, I had a more traditional conception of teaching, but throughout the course I have understood that language teaching is much more than endless vocabulary lists or repetitive automation exercises. Having completed the course, I have placed a greater focus on analyzing the students' needs, as well as on paying attention to the diversity of profiles, the communicative approach, and the most accurate way of providing feedback to the students.

Making mistakes is part of the learning process and serves as a way to learn from them, which makes it extremely important to prevent the student from feeling frustration or anxiety about making mistakes. Furthermore, due to the society we live in, where technology and computing are becoming increasingly relevant, I must highlight that I found the use of so-called "ICT" in the classroom particularly interesting. "ICT", that is, "Information and Communication Technologies", are the technological tools and resources that facilitate teaching and learning. In the classroom, they can be used, for example, through an interactive whiteboard. They serve to make the sessions more interactive and dynamic, but with the aim of promoting learning. For example, through gamified activities, in which the student can reinforce prior knowledge through tasks that usually pose a challenge. Being a "game", it is motivating, even though they might actually be putting lexical or grammatical knowledge into practice.

This course has allowed me to discover these resources (wikis...), which must be used within a coherent didactic sequence. If I had to teach a Spanish class for foreigners, I would combine the different "ICTs" depending on the purpose of each activity. For example, using an authentic video to offer comprehensible input, an activity created with "Genial.ly" to present vocabulary, or a "Quizlet" to encourage independent review by the students. In conclusion, this course has helped me understand the importance of teachers selecting the most appropriate tools to promote language learning in a real context, just as the communicative approach advocates.