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My approach to Language Teaching
I was brought in Barcelona, Spain, in a multilingual environment; my family spoke Spanish, Catalan, English and French, and from my childhood I studied Spanish, Catalan and English. I was always interested in knowing how people spoke differently and I decided to study Languages, Linguistics and Communication at the University of Barcelona (Spanish, Catalan, English, French, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian). I took my PhD courses in Linguistics and Communication and I researched Phonetics, the world of language sounds, and Linguistic Ethnography, I travelled to Senegal to do research fieldwork in a Mandinka community.
I studied Teaching techniques focusing on Language and Expression and I also stepped into Teaching and Coaching for Expression, Creativity, Meditation and Yoga.
I have worked as a Language Teacher and Coach, teaching from children to adults, from Primary School to University settings in the fields of Linguistics, Spanish, Catalan and English and I learnt what people need to feel confident, motivated and embraced when learning a foreign language or understanding language aspects and skills. I have travelled in Spain, Britain, France, Brazil, Senegal and Italy having the chance to communicate and work in different languages.
Most of my students say that my teaching personality is very caring, gentle and clear and I enjoy motivating students to find their own interests, strong and weak points so that the learning process is taken to its best.
To me, learning a Language is like exploring new ways of expressing our realities and it is an interesting cognitive exercise to get to know our inner “foreign speaker” because it broadens our brain skills, our communicative skills and even our capability to produce different sounds for communication. I think it just makes us more sensitive, more flexible and more open.
Learning a foreign language is a process that implies some mimicking, language awareness, practice on comprehension, expression and also creativity. Some studies claim that the way we store languages in our brains is similar to that of data storing in a computer, but, of course, much more human, organic and alive. Languages have different components that need to be acquired and “stored” so that we can start feeling confident and creative in using them.
On the one hand there is the cultural environment of the language we are learning, because, after all, languages lie in the people that speak them. So learning a language is also learning new cultural features, this is the exciting travel-like side of it.
On the other hand, languages are a set of sounds, words (vocabulary), rules (grammar), expressions and even non-verbal language that are acquired both consciously and unconsciously. Conscious learning is a process in which I am extremely interested because it feels as if we are actually helping our minds to store the data so they can be available for us to use. This can be called monitored learning or instruction and it is an important part of the teaching activity: basically providing the tools for the learner to feel comfortable, confident and free using them.
So yes, I love grammar and language diversity and I always try to convey that passion to my students, since all sounds, words and structures have an origin and a history, they are also alive and that is what makes languages such wonderful tools for communication among very different people.
