Expanish Blog

Today and Saturday, May 16^th and 17^th, the Asociación de Centros de Idiomas together with the Librería Voces del Sur are holding the first ever Methodological Formation Workshops (Talleres de Formación Metodológica). The event will include four separate workshops and is dictated by the prestigious Spanish editorial EDELSA, leader in the production of learning materials for teaching Spanish as a foreign language. The workshops will propose an area of reflection on the development of teaching Spanish to non-native speakers and different methodological focuses. Expanish director, Luciana Gallego (shown in photo with workshop lecturer, Pedro Navarro Serrano), along with six language professors – are proud and anxious to be attending the workshops. Luciana Gallego comments on the upcoming events:

Training our teachers is an absolute key necessity for Expanish. We celebrate the opportunity to participate in this conference of pedagogical innovation. It is highly motivating for us to take part in these encounters organized by the publishing houses with which we work on a daily basis.

The titles of the four workshops are the following: 1) “Culture with ñ: the development of intercultural profiles of ‘Spanish as second language’ students”; 2) “Areas, actions and competences: Axis of teaching following European levels of Reference and Frameworks (MCER)”; 3) “Patterns for evaluations in second languages: Materials and activities to prepare for the DELE test”; and 4) “Making grammar less complicated: processing, strengthening, and refinement of grammatical contents”.

The fourth workshop is particularly important and useful to us here at Expanish because it will present the relevance of generative theses about the acquisition of language and its application in Spanish didactics. Attendees will participate in three activities during this workshop. The first will encourage discussion of activities aimed at working form, use, and real life contexts of use. The second will present simple forms of teaching prosodic accentuation by means of induction. The third and final exercise will have attendees analyze the possibility of transformation and use of real texts in controlled grammatical activities.

All of the workshops will be an interactive and valuable experience for our professors. As the city’s culture and excitement never allays, this weekend should be a very fun and educational one for Expanish students and teachers alike!