Cjrojaseducation

One of my favorite writing activities for language learners is journal writing. Journal entries are tools for student reflection as they can understand links between theory and practice.
This kind of writing assignment is meant to be interactive, as students engage with ideas and experiences that bring about questions, comparisons, insights, criticisms, speculations, and tentative conclusions. Journal entries are less formal than essays, but they should still construct a coherent narrative, use complete sentences and be grammatically correct.
Here 4 ways for students to use them:
1- Writing about their routines, feelings and thoughts. This is particularly useful for A1 and A2 levels.
2- Keeping a record of new words and expressions they learn with examples in context.
3- Setting goals and monitoring their progress for a period of time.
4- Reflecting from readings, films, videos and their own experiences.
Extra Bonus: Students can use social media to post them, even with pictures if they like. This can make it more engaging. Keep an eye on my upcoming stories about it!





Foto de Freepik www.freepik.com

Thanks to you all for being here with me on this journey!!! 🥳🎉
I've got a very useful free gift for you all 🤓 Just like this post ❤️ and tag a friend in the comments who might find this account useful. I'll send the special gift via DM.
Let's celebrate!!!🍾🥂

In April 1994, I had the golden opportunity to be part of the Exchange Programme between Clifton College (Bristol, UK) and Escuela Secundaria Técnica 99 "Amistad Británico-Mexicana" (Mexico City, Mexico). It was a reciprocal travel program where the students got to travel abroad and were hosted by a partner institution. I accepted the kind invitation by Mrs Duke, the Spanish teacher at Clifton College, and by my dear friends Kate and Melody who were studying Spanish A levels at the time.
I lived for a month with my host family, The Gonzalez Pérez, who looked after me like their own daughter and have been my Mexican family ever since then. I could experience their local lives, their customs, their food and lived like a family member during a wonderful month.
Despite most of my companions during that trip were aiming at improving their Spanish, we all benefited greatly from the cultural element which increased our global perspective and also broadened our knowledge of the world. It was an experience for personal growth.
We travelled around gorgeous Mexico: Mexico City, Cuernavaca, Taxco, Guanajuato, Acapulco, Teotihuacán among others. However, the social impact was the most important one. We made lasting friendships, and learn about cultural diversity, tolerance, respect and history.
I recently learned about the passing of a dear professor Mr. José Luis Guevara Sanchez, Pepe, who was a cornerstone of the programme. This made me reflect about how this cultural exchanged changed the lives of many British and Mexican teenagers over the years and even my own life.
Have you ever been part of an exchange programme? Tell me about it!

I used to prefer working with intermediate and advanced students in my first years as a language teacher. Nowadays, I enjoy greatly working with beginners. So I'm sharing a few tips to teach beginner students from my own experience.
1- PATIENCE: this is the main quality any teacher has to develop. Once you understand the student is in a process and needs time, you can take it slowly and calmly.
2- MOTHER TONGUE: there's an argument about using it or not. In my experience, it's useful to use the student's mother tongue to clarify grammar structures, vocabulary and even to build rapport only at the very beginning of this level. Then, you can use the target language more and more within a few weeks.
3- AFFECTIVE FILTER: According to Krashen (1982), students need to have a low affective filter to learn a language easily. Make sure you create a safe and friendly environment where students can feel relaxed and comfortable to speak.
4- SCAFFOLDING: Scaffolding is breaking up the learning into chunks and providing a tool, or structure, with each chunk. Verbal scaffolds include slowing your speech and enunciating clearly among others. Procedural scaffolds can be created through the use of visual tools and also discussion prompts such as sentence frames provide support and structure so that learners can produce sentences on their own.
5- COGNITIVE LOAD: A student can only process so much information at once. Too much information can lead to cognitive overload. Thus, teachers must select small chunks of language to be taught at a time.
Do you like teaching beginners?

The answer is YES, THERE IS!!! 🥳
I used to worry a lot when facing beginners because I thought it would be boring and we could only do short dialogs, drillings, and simple questions and answers. However, I realized that there are many ways of doing fun activities from elementary level. recommended this one to me: The Mystery Person🎭❓. It works nicely every time!!!
It consists of helping each student to choose a famous person or character. Then they will talk about in the first person singular ("I"), using the verb to be and just the simple present tense to describe themselves. They can say their occupation🧑‍🔬🧑‍🎨🧑‍🚀, age, nationality🇺🇲🇧🇷🇦🇷, likes✅ and dislikes❎, routines, talk about family members and even physical description. They are encourage to use costumes🧛🦸 and props🩺🔬🪛 on their delivery. The only thing they cannot say is their name. At the end of each short presentation🗣️, the other classmates guess who the person is.
I always do a sample myself a week before to model the activity. I usually perform Mother Teresa of Calcutta and they get excited about it. Sometimes they write their speech first and I can correct it before the performance. We do this via email individually and they are forbidden to tell their classmates.
This activity can easily be done online during live sessions 💻 and through videos 📹 asynchronous too. It can be done for beginners in any foreign language.
Please let me know if you have tried it out or have a similar one!

Let's reflect on some benefits of knowing several languages:

1- Acquiring a second language improves your memory and increases your attention span. The process of becoming bilingual exercises your brain, challenges you to concentrate and boosts your problem solving skills. Bilingual individuals have also been shown to be more logical and rational, have better decision-making skills and be more perceptive and aware of their surroundings.
2- Researchers are also concluding that multilingual speakers are more creative than monolingual speakers. Learning a foreign language improves not only your ability to solve problems and to think more logically, it also makes you experiment with new words and phrases.
3- Self-confidence increases when a new skill is mastered, and learning a foreign language is no different. The techniques you use to develop a second tongue result in a greater sense of open-mindedness. This, in turn, will expand your horizons, broden your experiences and help you make new personal and work relationships.
Personally, I have experienced all of them by speaking 3 languages. What abou you? Can you mention other benefits?

In our last Wine Wednesday, and I came up with some tips for native teachers who want to teach Spanish as a foreign language.
1- Be well-prepared: Study different aspects of the language, especially grammar and compare it with other languages.
2- Take advantage you are a native speaker: use Spanish in class as much as possible and share about your culture.
3- Pace yourself: Don't speak too fast.
4- Pronounce clearly: make sure you speak clearly and pronunce particularly the final s sound.
5- Be aware of the different varieties of Spanish: Don't just teach the variety that you know, but research and get familiar with other varieties and use the most common expressions, not just regional slang.
Can you share another tip?

I had a great time talking to about Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language. He has over 20 years of experience teaching face to face and online.
One question I asked him was: What do you find most challenging about teaching Spanish?
Here some important points:
1- Complexity of the grammar structures: Spanish has more tenses than English for instance and the conjugations are far more complex. Students find it hard to understand and learn the patterns.
2- European Spanish is more well-known: being a native speaker from Latin America can be difficult for the students to understand at first as they're more familiar with the variety from Spain.
3- Variety of accents: There are many countries that speak Spanish, each one with a different accent, slang and culture. As a teacher, it's important to be aware of that and deal with it.
4- Vast vocabulary: Spanish has a large amount of words and lots of them can have several meanings.
How do we overcome these challenges? I'll give some tips in my next post. Stay tuned!!!
Do you have any experience teaching Spanish? Share your challenges in the comments below.

Our identity is greatly shaped by our mother tongue. We hear it before we're born in our mother's womb. As children, we express our first emotions and thoughts in our mother tongue, so naturally when we use our mother tongue, there is a connection between our heart, brain and language.
Our true personality is really shown when we speak our mother tongue, because the way it sounds and feels gives us confidence. Mother tongue is the language we use for thinking, dreaming and to identify emotions.
Moreover, there is a strong bond between the mother tongue and the culture. We communicate with our parents, family and relatives through our mother tongue. Therefore, it is also the key to our culture, identity and our beliefs.
Finally, I can assert from my own experience that when I need to express my deepest feelings, I would always prefer to do so in Spanish, especially if I am sad or angry.
What about you?

Teaching your mother tongue can be very challenging, even more than teaching a foreign language. Here a few tips to help you out:
1-Study grammar: this is the key aspect. You need to know the grammar rules and the rationale behind some of them to be able to explain them.
2-Study spelling and capitalization: there are many differences in capitalization, punctuation and spelling among languages. You need to know them well in your language.
3- Read a lot: this will help you to focus more on the written forms of the language and reinforce your knowledge of grammar, vocabulary, spelling, etc.
4- Use a dictionary and a thesaurus: it's advisable to enhance your vocabulary as much as possible and to know the different meanings and usages of a word.
5- Play games like Scrabble, Boggle and solve Crosswords: this is a fun way to work on your lexical skills and to reflect on the language.
Have you ever taught your mother tongue to foreigners? Share your experiences in the comments below.

This is one of the most debated questions in our field: Native vs Non-native language teachers. I'd like to share with you a few experiences and my personal opinion on the matter.
This picture is very meaningful to me. It was taken in April 2007 at my farewell party from Simón Bolívar University in Caracas, Venezuela. I was a lecturer there for 7 years and I grew so much as a professional guided by first-class colleagues. I belonged to the Modern Languages Department which meant that there were not only English teachers, but Japanese, French, German and Italian teachers among others.
I started teaching Reading Comprehension in English for Science and Technology, but after a couple of years, I started teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language to our exchange students from Japan, Sweden, Denmark, France and USA. I have to say that it has been my biggest challenge as a language teacher so far. Yes, Spanish is my mother tongue and I had studied Hispanic Literature both in my undergraduate and master degrees. Nevertheless, I hadn't studied Spanish grammar formally since primary school. I had to study hard to be able to explain the subjunctive for instance. There were many times when I didn't know the answer to a grammar question and I had to research it for the following class. Don't get me wrong, I loved it, but it was very demanding all the way through.
To sum up, I found much easier to teach English which is my second language than my mother tongue because I had studied English grammar carefully for many years. In my view, you don't need to be a native speaker to teach a language, you need to know the language very well, particularly its grammar and phonetics. I believe that for beginner learners having a non-native teacher could help as they've been to the process of learning the language. However, it could be beneficial for advanced students to have a native teacher to polish the language and get more cultural background.
What do you think?

I want to share with you all my secret to make learners practice the language a lot inside and outside the classroom, thus improving very quickly. It's to believe in their potential, make them feel appreciated and genuinely care about them. I connect with them in an emotional level, so they feel happy, motivated and don't want to let their teacher down, so they really make an effort.
This is called "the Pygmalion effect" which consists of the strong effect that teachers’ expectations of their students have on their performance. If a teacher increases their expectations of their student’s performance, this will result in better student performance. But it could also work the other way around. Learners will internalize the expectations and labels placed upon them by their instructor and they will, in turn, self-fulfill those expectations, whether positive or negative.
It's that simple!!! No matter the age, the subject, the context, when students feel loved and that you trust they can make it, they will do everything to achieve the goals. I've experienced this over and over in 22 years of teaching. So, like and respect them first and they will do the same to you and will work extremely hard.
Do you agree? Have you had any similar experience?