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Learning Spanish with Pen Pals
They say you truly know a language when you start to think in that language and no longer need to consciously translate for yourself. Well, SA’s Spanish II, III, IV, V and Advanced Placement students are on their way, testing their grasp of vocabulary and sentence structure by corresponding with pen pals (amigos por correspondencia) in Barcelona, Spain, since late November. The learning is working both ways, as the 73 high-school aged students in Spain are practicing their English as they reply to our students’ questions about cultural and linguistic differences and similarities.
Students are handwriting letters, scanning them, and “sending” them via a shared Google folder. Some have shared individual and group photos as well. Their letters must include the date, an opening and closing, an introduction including interests and activities, at least one thing the student has learned about Barcelona, Catalunya, or Badalona, a question about music or what the pen pal enjoys doing, and three additional questions. The overall goal of the project includes analyzing, appreciating, and empathizing with the cultural and linguistic differences and similarities between cultures. Students will be successful if they can read, interpret, and discuss the letters, videos, and articles that are shared with them in Spanish.
Furthermore, SA students are working on a video tour of the academy’s campus, narrated in Spanish, and which they will edit while understanding Spanish technology vocabulary for use in programming in Adobe Premiere, a video editing software program.
Through their correspondence to date, the students in SA’s Spanish classes have learned more about the Catalan culture of their pen pals. They have also discovered that the classes in Spain concentrate on speaking “British English” which has added an interesting flair to their conversations.
