Monday, April 22, 2013
Fluency
My graduating Spanish majors do not feel they are fluent enough in the language. They are justifiably frustrated. Some of them are better than they think, but in some cases that perception is valid. I feel I do enough when I have students in my courses, but there is no system to get each and every student to that level.
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You've seen some of my (worst) senior majors. It is not that they cannot talk, it is that they cannot read. Hated Larra - !Larra! - because he was writing in "old Castilian Spanish."
p.s. this is after semesters of *claiming* they could not talk or write and alleging that they "did know" Spanish because they "could read" it.
I never found Larra difficult. They are short texts. I really learned Spanish by reading thousands of pages of Galdós. You really need that immersion in reading and that feeling of being absorbed completely in a long narration. I've done similar things with Jorge Amado to try to keep my Portuguese up, but found it rather sexist.
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