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How to teach a 15 year old Spanish? | ||
Tags: Language Teaching | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| nj24 Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4460 days ago 56 posts - 106 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Italian, French | Message 1 of 22 11 September 2014 at 8:13am | IP Logged | ||
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Long story short, a parent who home schools her children and knows that I have self-taught myself Spanish asked
me about tutoring her 15 year old son and what methods/textbooks I would recommend. For the record, I do have teaching experience of students his age though not in teaching Spanish, so this is why I am looking for opinions and suggestions. I learned Spanish entirely on my own and have reached a comfortable level after studying for three years (mainly because of methods I found here on these forums). But I know many of these methods are seen as unconventional, and I'm not quite sure how to adapt them to a 15 year old who doesn't necessarily have the same attention span or self motivation as many of the learners here. (The good thing is that he is homeschooled so he is probably more used to unconventional teaching methods). However, I don't know how many of the books I used would be suitable for a fifteen year old (FSI would probably bore him to tears). Since I never took a Spanish class or had a Spanish teacher (only language exchanges), I am finding it difficult to try and outline a course of study. I really want him to fall in love with language learning, and I want to focus on speaking the language rather than just study study study. So, should we follow a textbook at all? Should we follow a textbook and supplement it with native materials? Any suggestions for textbooks, methods, etc. that will appeal to a younger audience? Also remember that I will probably only be able to meet with him once a week at most. How would you go about teaching the average 15 year old to learn a foreign language? Basically, how would you adapt the methods you've used for teaching yourself? Edited by nj24 on 11 September 2014 at 8:17am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4806 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 2 of 22 11 September 2014 at 9:29am | IP Logged | ||
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Depends on the learner. Most 15 years olds are not stupid or unable to focus just because of the age. A 15 years old is not a child, they are normally using pretty much the same material the adults are. The only huge difference I can see is motivation
So, I would do things like this: -first of all, the teenager needs motivation. "Because I told you so" isn't going to work, neither is "because the school system says you have to". Use native materials as much as possible and as soon as possible. Adapt the choices, a 15 years old is much more likely to enjoy Isabel Allende than Borges. Lyricstraining.com and other sources of music might be awesome for a teenager as well. And there are original tv series and comic books and so on. Don't let Spanish be just the language he or she must learn, convince them to want it :-) -FSI might be a little bit of a shock, I'd choose something "less dry" instead. Something like Teach Yourself won't be bad, or you could use a good quality course meant for classrooms. Many courses in Prague use Nuevo Ven, it seems to be the best among this kind of monolingual courses (I've been using a different series but I've heard good things about Ven) and teenagers go to such classes as well, for example at Cervantes. -A mistake many teachers of teenagers are making is trying to make learning fun at the expense of the needed parts like good grammar and vocabulary base. A 15 years old is likely to absorb those "boring" things much faster than an older learner. So, a grammar workbook, verb drills and an srs may be just the thing your student needs. Anki is great but a teenager might be more thrilled about quizlet or memrise. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| AlexTG Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 4435 days ago 178 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 3 of 22 11 September 2014 at 10:23am | IP Logged | ||
Find out as much as you can about them so that you're not teaching the average 15 year old. They may be an avid reader, maybe of comics, maybe of poetry, maybe airport fiction or maybe they're a cinephile or obsessed with reality TV. All of these will provide great input opportunities and incentive to learn. This is all very important, since you're only meeting once a week. You need him to be reading and watching stuff in Spanish while you're not there. Edited by AlexTG on 11 September 2014 at 10:27am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4706 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 4 of 22 11 September 2014 at 11:24am | IP Logged | ||
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I would second most of what was mentioned above. Media such as TV, music, films, comics are all good, as long as they reflect what the boy is actually interested in. The more they can do things like watch movies together, listen to Spanish-language music together, etc, the better.
Music can be an amazing way to get into a language. If your friend could find a few CDs of music in the style her son likes, and keep these playing regularly, she will find her son will soon know the words (even if he doesn't understand them all). Babymetal has been playing in my car almost non-stop for the past 2 weeks, and even though none of us know any Japanese, my kids are starting to sing along, and one son has looked up the meaning of some of the lyrics. That has tempted me to at least pick up a bit of Japanese. As for courses, I'm using Pimsleur (French I) with my 13 year old son while driving him to school. We listen to 10 minutes of a lesson, then pick up the next section the next day. He's happy with it, and I can see a definite improvement even though we are only on lesson 5 (we've done each lesson twice before moving on). Another course which might be appealing is Duolingo. It covers a fair bit of content, practices spelling, and of course the "gamified" aspects might make it appealing. If I was homeschooling a foreign language, I might set 15 minutes of work on Duolingo as a daily independent activity. When my older son was struggling with French lessons in school, I used a bit of Assimil with him. The main thing he did was read the texts while listening. He would do this a few times, then we would discuss the footnotes together. One more point I would make is that variety is important for most teenagers. One well-known educational theorist (Geoff Petty) recommends that no activity type should last more minutes than the age of the student. So if they work on a textbook for 15 minutes, they should switch to something quite different for the next 15 minutes. By switching activity types, attention can be maintained for much longer periods. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4806 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 5 of 22 11 September 2014 at 11:46am | IP Logged | ||
Actually, I find it wrong to expect teenagers to be stupid or unable to focus. That may be true about really stupid teenagers (and such cases are unlikely to improve with age) but normal ones are expected to keep the concentration for 45 minutes of a normal class. Lowering the expectations isn't helping anyone, it just leads to lowering standards and therefore lowering the results. And being able to focus on an activity for 30 or 40 minutes is not that much. The key is to choose the right activities. Teenagers fail and refuse to focus on something which is neither fun nor useful to their life. Make the activities fit one or both criteria and there shouldn't bee a trouble. Assimil is a good idea, in my opinion. So are things that use the natural competitiveness or interest in playing which is still present in a normal teenager. Gathering points in memrise, completing pages in a grammar practice book, those things can work just fine for some parts of learning. I think the key will still be to find the input sources. My generation made a huge jump in the English abilities with Harry Potter. That kind of incentive (read the story half a year before the translation is available) was a little bit extreme. But you can still find a lot of things your teenager will crave to understand. And there are surely many opportunities for active use of Spanish in the US. Find an activity where the person could join native speakers, promise a journey to a Spanish speaking country in a year or two and so on. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5329 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 22 11 September 2014 at 12:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've only rarely tutored teenagers, and it never had anything to do about language. And I had the luxury of working with exceptionally smart, interested teenagers.
One thing that I found worked well was to challenge them with something fascinating and then appeal to their pride a bit: "Look, the way this subject is taught in high school is useless, and it doesn't apply to you. But here are some amazing online video lectures from a freshman honors class at MIT. They cover ideas that are normally difficult for second- and third-year students at a typical university. But this stuff mind-blowing and I figure you might understand enough to enjoy it." "OK, this next problem is pretty specialized and advanced, but it's awesome." It seems like languages are ripe for a similar appeal: "Look, the way languages are taught in high school is useless. If you take 5 years of honors classes, you might be able to muddle around a tourist (~B1). That's cool, but it's totally possible to get there in a year. And within two years at the most, you'll be able to read real books for fun and understand TV series without subtitles (~B2). And we're going to spend most of our time actually using the language: listening to music, reading comic books, chatting and watching TV. When we run into an interesting bit of language, we'll pick it apart and see how it works. We'll study grammar only when it helps." This approach won't work for everybody. But plenty of teenagers are willing to accept this deal: Do something challenging and unusual, in exchange for amazing results. Adults are often a bit different: Even when they want the results very badly, they're more likely to give up in advance. Few 40-year-olds seriously believe they can suddenly become a prodigy at something new. But many 15-year-olds still believe anything is possible. Of course, neither group will succeed unless they stick with it and do a little bit every day. But that's another subject. :-) Edited by emk on 11 September 2014 at 12:54pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4806 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 7 of 22 11 September 2014 at 12:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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I like emk's approach. It surely works much better than treating teenagers as if they were unable to do anything well or for extended periods of time. I remember the demanding teachers at highschool always brought us to better results and more respect than those who tried to make everything easy. We usually liked them much more than the easy ones as well.
Of course 15 year olds still believe they can do amazing things. Life hasn't taught them differently yet, at least most of them. It's something we, older ones, struggle with. Comparing the 15 years old me and the 23 years old me (now), this is the biggest difference. Failures, some caused purely by myself while others were more caused by "fate", have damaged my confidence and that brings lots of consequences. I think one of the things the wisest people learnt is how to overcome this desilusion, tied to the transfer from childhood/teenage/highschool and university/job/real life. I hope I will get through my desilusion during the years to come. Actually, some of the htlalers are a great inspiration in this area. Thanks, guys. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6394 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 8 of 22 11 September 2014 at 1:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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Consider using Destinos too, and later GLOSS.
Also, make sure they don't actually want to learn a different language! Sounds like the mother chose Spanish because it's "useful" etc, but surely any major language can be used to fill the requirements? Of course if they want to learn a language you don't speak, you can only be a "language learning coach", but there will be far more motivation if they get to choose. (you may want to show them some polyglot videos btw) Edited by Serpent on 11 September 2014 at 1:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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