Making language lessons dramatic

 

There is more than one way to teach a language, as Angel Perea has shown.

Perea, pedagogic and commercial director of the prestigious Spanish publishing house Espasa, introduced a new method for teaching Spanish as a foreign language when he took part recently in the Ontario Modern Language Teachers’ Association Congress in Toronto.

The congress was jointly hosted by York’s Spanish Resource Centre (SRC) and the University of Toronto’s Portuguese Department.

The teaching method, called Es Espanol,  incorporates materials that appeal to students who have grown up with a plethora of movies, videos and reality TV shows. One of the most popular is a new, videotaped TV series. Broadcast by Televisión EspaZola Internacional, it depicts the lives of four young people who share an apartment and study in a drama school.

Es Espanol was designed by specialists from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the University of Salamanca, and is accredited by the Instituto Cervantes. The Instituto Cervantes administers the internationally recognized DELE (Spanish as a Foreign Language Diploma).