Midyear Madness Part III

24 February 2012

This morning started with individual presentations made by both graduate researchers and teaching assistants. There were nearly 20 presentations so I can't write about all of them--though they were all extremely interesting! Instead, I'll write about a few that caught my attention.

The first of which was a presentation from a fellow TA in the region of Valencia. Since he is in a Valencian dominant school, he has tried to use the Valencian language as a tool in teaching English pronunciation. Spanish has a one-to-one correspondence between vowels and their sounds--meaning that each vowel only has one pronunciation. However, in Valencian, there are a few more vowel sounds. Using this as a tool, he´s been able to make comparisons that have helped facilitate the kids´ understanding of English pronunciation.

Another friend of mine talked about her international pen pal project. She began by talking about Krashen´s theory for language acquisition and the affective filter. Krashen´s theory about the affective filter argues that your emotional state has a lot to do with you ability to speak and understand a language. For example, when I´m at school and I´m nervous about speaking Spanish in front of native speakers and not wanting to make an error, my emotional state inhibits my ability to speak to Spanish. However, with the pen pal letters, students are highly motivated and excited to read them so their affective filter is lowered and they can actually understand more.

She also shared that there has been a dramatic increase in geographical knowledge since the first letters. Like my class, she had her fair share of kids that thought that the United States and England are the same place. However, in the second set of letters, their drawings became more accurate.

I only hope this happens with the pen pal letters for my class! I've gotten plenty of letters that have the British flag on them.

There were many other incredible presentations, and I wish that I could share them all here. Unfortunately, I don´t have the time to devote to writing about all of them.

In addition to Valladolid being the cradle of el castellano, it's also well know for its wines. So after lunch, we had the opportunity to go to a wine tasting! We visited the Protos (which means "first" in Greek) Winery. There we had a tour of the facilities and then sampled the products.

In this room, there is a bottle of each type of wine produced each year. It's mostly of sentimental value--since most of the wines are likely bad by now. 

Front of the winery

 Look at that castle! Just hanging out next to the winery!

Amazing view!