English Clase

On an introductory note, "class" is one of the several English words that living in Spanish has made me unable to spell. We filled out course evaluations in our CIEE classes this past week, and several minutes in, a voice broke the silence: "How do you spell 'difficult' - one 'f' or two?" We laughed, but it's a confusion I for one totally understand. In my private journal, I've given up on trying to limit myself to one language or the other. Sometimes I switch back and forth from sentence to sentence, and sometimes it will be completely one or the other with just one word different, often because I just can't think how to write it the other way. "Class", for example - my hand just seems to have lost the muscle memory to write the double 's'. I really have to concentrate. But I suppost that's really neither here nor there...

Because what I was really going to write about was the English class I taught this week. Context: I'm taking a class with CIEE called "Linguistics Applied to Teaching", which is basically a "how to teach a second language" theory class. The práctica, or practical application, part of the class required us to actually teach a second language class. And since we're in Spain, that meant teaching English. Our professor has a connection with a colegio in a neighborhood near the university. It's called Carmelitas, and is a private Catholic school for the equivalent of K-12 that has been around since 1907 - longer than the neighborhood that surrounds it. It's big by Alicante's standards - with somewhere around a thousand students, I think. We received a tour from Patxi (pronounced "Paht-chi" - it's Basque), the resident English teacher a few weeks ago, and this past week, I was the first of our class to venture there on my own to teach an hour-long conversation class to the Spanish equivalent of high-schoolers. Ahhh.

I went last Tuesday, sneaking out of my Literature and Film class an hour early to bus/walk to Carmelitas, where Patxi met me, and helped me set up the various bits of technology - powerpoint and youtube videos I'd prepared. We'd been given a theme to work with according to what day we'd signed up for, and mine had included Advertising, so I picked that up and ran with it, finding some funny TV commercials on youtube that I thought we could discuss, and then setting them up with a scattering of random objects with which to make their own short commercials.

These were the examples I gave them:






I had hoped that afterwards we could have a bitty discussion of the videos, as simple as "What were the differences?" or "What did you see?" but here I ran into a not wholly unexpected snag - namely, as everyone here informs me, a los españoles les cuesta mucho hablar inglés, which literally translated means "it costs Spaniards a lot to speak English". Even if they know vocabulary and grammer, the education here is only beginning to place an emphasis on interaction and communication. So I asked these kids a question, was assured that yes, they understood me, and then faced a room full of silence. Not that, my linguistics professor later pointed out, this is much different than other situations in other classes in any country you can name. The teacher asks a question, and the rooms falls silents. Ha pasado un ángel, Spaniards say. An angel passed by. This situation also related directly to my greatest anxiety about the situation, which was that I basically had no idea what their English capabilities looked like. "They're at about a level A2/B1," my linguistics professor told me. Yeah, I'm not sure what that looks like either. We got through it though - Patxi helped me out, and figuring them out a little bit more, I skipped a slide on the Powerpoint I now knew would be too complicated, and moved straight on to the activity.

The kids split up into groups of four and five, and each of them grabbed a little thing I had brought - my metal water bottle, a Luna bar, one of those dorky little tourist bags that is made to hold your passport and money and not be stolen... They worked on them for about ten minutes while I wandered, answering questions and watching them giggle and joke about what they could do. I had brought my camera, and Patxi played photographer, taking some photos of me in the classroom, and recording videos of the performances of each commercial to finish off the class.
(Note: The boy in the foreground whose face is totally obscured by the head of the boy in front of him? That's my host cousin. I'd only met him once, at my host sister's birthday party, and I didn't talk to him or even really see him that much and I also met a bazillion other family members, so I didn't recognize his face at all until I got home, and showed Ali my videos from the class. "That's my cousin!" she shrieked when I showed her their video, and her mother and father came running. We all agreed it was quite a coincidence.)

Here are the videos of their four commercials, in order of appearance:

1) The passport pouch:


2) The aluminum water bottle:


3) The Luna bar:


4) Aveeno body lotion: