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Do you want to learn Spanish? You can with "Communicative Spanish."
Last class in Taos, NM meets October 24, 2006
Classes begin in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, in December, 2006
Communicative Spanish is a powerful
instructional method for students with a semester or two of Spanish in their
past (perhaps their far distant past) who stumble through simple sentences and
have trouble understanding the replies. It also works for people who took
Portuguese, Italian, or French at some point in the last century but never
studied Spanish, as well as for those who have spent time in a Spanish speaking
country.
Instead of memorizing long vocabulary lists (and
not being able to pry words from your memory banks on command), students learn about
words that sound alike in Spanish and English.
Once they learn Spanish pronunciation and understand the patterns, they can read, understand, and
create an estimated 44,000 comprehensible words as needed. Students are able to read and converse about
art, music, literature, culture, politics, science, religion, and philosophy in
short order.
With this method, there's no struggling to memorize all 17 verb tenses, then trying to figure out which to use and still getting the verb wrong as often as not. With just the present, a simplified past, and simplified future tenses, you can communicate most everything.
Traditional language classes are taught in Spanish, which can be confusing and cause students to miss important information. Being constantly corrected creates self-consciousness and discouragement. In communicative classes, most teaching is in English. Mixed levels can be in a classroom without boring more advanced students or embarrassing those with less background and experience. Instead of having to rely exclusively on logical reasoning as required by traditional language teaching methods, the approach works equally well (perhaps even better) for intuitive types.
Instead of endlessly listening to and repeating taped words and phrases to grind them into long-term memory (a major challenge for the over 40 crowd), students watch a series of engaging episodes of a telenovela (soap opera) on DVD or online for homework. The shows are from the most widely used college Spanish course in the U.S. You may think the drama is so cheesy, you won¹t care whether Don Fernando finds the one true love of his life - the girl he knew before he married his now deceased wife, had four kids, fell ill, and.... Well, you get the idea. Rest assured that you’ll want to keep watching to learn whether Raquel and her winsome Argentine flame hook up for a happily-ever-after ending.
The accents of students over age 18 tend not to improve a lot. By then, most brains are hardwired for language. (However, you may actually be able to learn to roll your Rs - sort of. If you think you can't, be sure to ask what the trick is.) The goals are to help you
accept that you are probably doomed to be instantly pegged as a foreigner by native speakers, and
concentrate on what matters most: learning to communicate!
Weekly activities include:
Understanding word groups and patterns
Reading practice
Building conversational skills through discussions, songs, poems, jokes, proverbs
Other fun stuff
If in addition you want to master grammar, you will have to
do written homework assignments (provided on request), or
supplement communicative lessons with a traditional foreign language class.
The last communicative Spanish class in Taos, NM meets October 24, 2006 at El Taoseno Restaurant (on the main highway across from Wal-Mart). New students arrive at 2 p.m. for an introduction to this method; the regular class runs from 2:30-4:00 p.m. The fee is $15.
The first class in Miguel de Allende meets in December, 2006. Days, times, and fees to be announced. Private, semi-private, and family sessions will be available by appointment.
For more information, phone (214) 556-6311 or email LSonna@Yahoo.com. Put the word "Spanish" somewhere in your message to ensure it gets past the spam, junk, and bulk mail filters.
--
Linda Sonna, Ph.D., holds a B.A. in Spanish, an M.Ed. in Educational Psychology, and a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from the University of Illinois. She began her career teaching Spanish in public high school. She developed and tested this powerful approach while tutoring and teaching private classes in Taos, NM over the last 10 years.