I am taking intermediate Spanish for Language and my teacher is Señora Wildfong. We have been taking an interactive approach for learning Spanish by doing projects, watching movies, and playing games. Although we do learn vocabulary and grammar, the main focus is learning fluency and an understanding of Spanish. To help with this, we can only speak Spanish in class. For our understanding, we watch videos and listen to songs of other people speaking Spanish so we can be more familiar with the language. We also have a vocabulary journal of any words that we do not know so that we are expanding the limits of what we can say.
At the beginning of the year, we had to write a Spanish essay where we described our house. We used prepositions and adjectives as well as vocabulary terms. Writing only in Spanish can be a struggle, especially since it is natural to speak in English, but the trick is to think in Spanish so words come more naturally. By doing so, we were preparing ourselves to be more comfortable in the classroom, where we couldn’t use English.
One of our assignments was to record a short comedic video in Spanish. Our video was a joke about how we aren’t allowed to use Google translate, and we had to use Word Reference instead. For context, Señora Wildfong is very firm against using Google translate, since we can copy large texts into it and it won’t produce accurate translations. Instead, she wants us to use Word Reference because it gives accurate translations of words as well as examples.