The Best Practices for Teaching Spanish

Learning a foreign language isn't easy, though some people pick it up better than others. However, for learning Spanish, several practices should be encouraged to make learning the language and learning it well as easy on the students as is possible.

Start Young

Any foreign language, Spanish included, is easier to learn when you're very young and still learning to speak English. If you can teach Spanish to very young children side-by-side with their English lesson, the language will be much easier to learn, practice and remember by the time the students are older.

Total Immersion

It's been proven that the easiest way to learn a foreign language is to immerse yourself completely in it. While it's impractical to speak Spanish all the time in an English speaking culture, you can take short periods of total immersion in class. Watching familiar television shows in Spanish can help students get a handle on the language, for instance. You also could conduct each class completely in Spanish, forcing students to learn and accept the language as a living, cultural practice rather than as a bunch of rules and terms to be memorized and jumbled together.

Cultural Explanations

Language is a product of the culture that creates it. For instance, the idea of the masculine and feminine in language isn't really an issue in English, but it's a very important one in Spanish. Therefore it's important that students know why they have to remember this point. There are also ideas in other cultures that don't translate to English (the idea of glucklich in German for instance, is something that roughly translates to positive mood in English, but it's a very rough idea translation). This concept should be explained to help students understand not just what the language is, but what it is meant to explain.

Grade on Performance

While it is entirely possible to judge how well a student remembers vocabulary terms by issuing simple, multiple choice or fill-in-the-blank tests, the method doesn't show a command of the Spanish language. Instead, test students on how well they can write a simple paper in Spanish or how well they can hold a conversation in the language. Tests should reveal how well a student is grasping and understanding the language in both reading and writing, not how well that student can memorize vocabulary words.

References

• FCPS Teach: Spanish Best Practices
• UNC: Spanish Guides
• Kids Immersion: Best Practice Spanish