Mass Academy offers foreign language courses to students. Students can pick between a Spanish or French immersion course. As I am in the Spanish immersion course, this description will largely focus on Spanish. In this class, students speak in the target language, and they interact with the culture of the target language through various ways. For example, students listen to music and watch movies in the language. Students also work on projects that are fully in the target language, such as essays and short films.
In this class, students wrote essays about their Niñez – their childhood. We learned vocabulary related to childhood and read excerpts about childhood in Spanish. We reviewed the preterite and imperfect word forms in order to better describe our past, and to review necessary material for the coming year.
My essay focuses on my fear of flying, and how I slowly lost it more and more as I flew more often. As a child, I had moved many times, and much of my family lives on the other side of the world. This made flying a big part of my life growing up. I was terrified of it at first, and my essay describes various experiences I've had with flying and how that affected me – my fear isn't completely eliminated, but today, my fear doesn't compare to my awe that flying is even possible.
Every term, students are required to listen to 10 sources of media in their target language. Two of these sources in each term have to be musical, while the rest can be any sources over 20 mins in length. This helps add a useful cycle of listening and writing practice to our language learning curriculum. Furthermore, they help us discover new vocabulary terms and phrases that help us speak more like native speakers.
The attached file has my combined listening logs from my first two terms at Mass Academy. Included are various forms of media, from podcasts to music to television. I have written detailed descriptions of each source on the rightmost column. Read the file for more details about what types of sources are permitted and how listening logs are formatted.