The first day I rode on a plane, I caught three flights over a 24 hour period to Buenos Aires, Argentina (the country chosen because of my obsession with tango dancing). The skies were clear, and I felt surprised noticing the patchwork snow on mountaintops more than the quilted land everyone mentions when they’re up in the air. Arriving, I searched with rising desperation for someone in my program who spoke Spanish better than I did, or who had already traveled abroad—someone literate in being abroad internationally. Exhausted, anxious, and nervous, I found two other people, neither of whom spoke much of any Spanish. Everyone I managed to ask for help in finding our other student group laughed at me. Eventually, a facilitator found us and shepherded us to join the rest of our group. The first days in the city, I was shocked to learn that my Spanish was as good as the best speakers in my study group. I figured this would give me a position of sponsorship, able to make friends easily as people would need my assistance to accomplish basic tasks. This was not the case. Everyone else already had the confidence to navigate this new world of impenetrable bus systems and subways, while I struggled to find a better balance well outside of my comfort zone.

My roommate, John/Juan in Buenos Aires already spoke Spanish so well that I thought he was our host mom’s grandson. While his abuela does speak Spanish, she’s from Spain and, he grew up in Texas. He already had spent plenty of time in the country, and made a group of friends he went out with regularly. Since I could speak some Spanish, he started to bring me out to eat with his friend Gabriel, a Swiss-German man who was studying in the city his porteño father was from. In a restaurant brimming with warm light, over copious glasses of wine Gabriel moved our conversation to the question of why we wall spoke in English. Neither Juan nor I spoke German, but all of us spoke Spanish. We offered to shift the language to Spanish, but Gabriel’s frustration didn’t come from the fact that we shared two languages, but that somehow the group, him included, assumed that we would use English as a lingua franca. This push helped me be more aware of the language and even the jargon I used in conversation to make sure everyone felt included and that I wasn’t help block someone from participating in a conversation.

The journey to Argentina, which started as a way to dance tango and master Spanish, evolved into a desire to attend Woodring Educational School. I came back to Western to become certified in teaching Spanish and English at the secondary level. This required several education classes that focused on helping students learn rather than forcing information down their throat. By this point, I’d been teaching Argentine tango for about 6 years, often following the class style of workshops or other instructors I had personally attended and found helpful. The idea that there isn’t a specific “right” way to dance, now was beginning to apply to language acquisition and English grammar, which opened up my eyes to all sorts of prejudices in language I’m embarrassed to admit I’m still learning about. Around this time, one of my students in his seventies needed to learn how to communicate what he wanted from his partner—not just rote moves in the dance. Being able to communicate your needs effectively (move over here, help me with this), is more important that communicating it in a rigid, inflexible way that some people might deem is the most correct. There is a point where people can’t understand each other between a language gap or dance experience gap, but those gaps are smaller than we think, certainly smaller than I thought when I studied abroad. The more people can let go of an arbitrarily correct way to speak to each other, or arbitrary sequences in dance that are used for instruction, the more smooth and flawless their communication becomes.

The idea of seeking solutions that worked was reinforced by Professor Shaw Gynan, who taught the introduction to teaching world languages classes at Western. His area of study was in Paraguay, right next to Argentina in South America, where a study was being done on the benefits of full immersion Spanish courses. The education system in Paraguay is special because they recognize two official languages in the country, Spanish and Guarani. Guarani is the first language of the indigenous people who live across the border of Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina. Professor Gynan’s studies found that students who spoke Guarani at home, but attended a Spanish immersion school, spoke Spanish with less proficiency than students from similar backgrounds who took Spanish classes at a Guarani speaking school. This brings up many questions in the way we teach predominantly English immersion classes across our country, which means we are not giving the best sponsorship to 4.8 million students[1] across the nation.

 

[1] National Center for Education Statistics https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cgf.asp