Purpose: Attend a three-week intensive Spanish immersion program in Madrid, Spain in order to strengthen our verbal and written communication skills with our Spanish speaking parents, students, and greater school community.  Becoming students ourselves will allow us to be more aware with the struggles and frustrations our English language learners (ELL’s) face in English-speaking classrooms.

Rationale: No one expects to become a professional ballroom dancer by simply watching episodes of “Dancing with the Stars.” In order to perfect the steps involved for each dance, one must immerse themselves in the intricacies of the dance moves, learning when to forward change, open promenade, and reverse fleckeryll. Learning the basic movements and lingo of dance does not produce dancers; it is mastering the development of each step to music and timing it through choreography that one can begin to call oneself a dancer. The final achievement of a great dancer is to be able to dance with a partner or with a troupe. Anticipating and reacting to a partner’s movements and spontaneity are integral to the production and successful communication of a performance.

Just as merely watching and studying “Dancing with the Stars” will not produce professional ballroom dancers neither do traditional American foreign language classrooms produce proficient bilingual students. Traditional foreign language classroom settings provide the foundation in which to learn a language: vocabulary acquisition, grammatical and syntactical structure, and if the teacher is themselves fluent, pronunciation and intonation. However, students in these settings are hindered from acquiring fluency due to the English-rich world in which they are surrounded. In order to become a proficient speaker of a second language, one must immerse themselves in the sights, sounds, and words of the language in which they wish to master.  This language-rich cacophony of foreign sights and sounds will result in the choreography of classroom-based knowledge and field based experience.

Studying Spanish at both the high school and college level and growing up in Texas where the Spanish language and culture plays an integral part in our state’s identity, has helped us establish a sturdy foundation in the language. The 20-classes-per-week intensive Spanish curriculum designed by the don Quijote School in Madrid, Spain incorporates a variety of skills which will help support the fluency we are seeking. By immersing ourselves in the culture and language of Madrid, we are now the language learners struggling to master a tongue that is not native to us. This first-hand experience as a language learner will only strengthen our advocacy for our ELL students and their families. We know the “steps” needed to perform the dance, but we are missing the choreography and music a full immersion program in Madrid, Spain will provide in order to be proficient in the language.

We will keep this blog to record our growth as Spanish speakers and to record the many experiences we will have as non-native speakers in a foreign country. Many of the students and families we have the opportunity to teach endure these difficulties every day.

We look forward to becoming students again...