Luz, Camara, Accion!

Editor’s Note: This is a report from Model Middle School Spanish teacher William Carvajal on his students’ experiences learning a second language and exploring the Spanish culture in a proficiency based classroom.

“Bretter, die die Welt bedeuten” is a popular German phrase. It incidentally translates Shakespeare’s famous words: “All the world’s a stage.”

Research has shown that acting has a positive impact on personality development and that foreign language teaching can in principle follow a drama pedagogical approach. With this in mind, students in Spanish class at Model Middle School were provided an opportunity to acquire language not only with their heads, but also with their hands and feet. The activity provided room for students who are kinesthetic learners to acquire language by doing what they like best: Learning through experience and physical activity. MMS second-language learners continually reflect on their experiences in different forms of writing as they try to become Bilingual and look forward to sharing in a few sentences their progress toward proficiency for The Spanish Spotlight: “This week one of our learning targets was to improve our Spanish comprehension skills as well as reading skills. The way we tried to accomplish our learning target was by acting (out) a children’s story for native Spanish speakers: El Gato, el raton, y el Ratoncito (The cat, the mouse, and the little mouse). This was an interesting story.

“I loved there was a scary part in the story when the raton almost got eaten by the gato, but there was also an exciting part when the ratoncito and raton said “te amo” (I love you) to each other and then the mama raton acted like a dog to make the gato, whose intention was to eat both mice, run away. It was fun to see how all actors brought the story to life! I feel acting a story actually helped me learn vocabulary and improve my comprehension skills. ” Kiley Gordon, sixth-grader

“For me, the message of the story was that it is advantageous to be bilingual. This was clearly the message because the mouse had to speak a different language, or what I called ‘dog language’ to save her offspring. It was a great story and it helped me not only learn new vocabulary, but also think about the importance of speaking two languages and becoming proficient in Spanish.” Lucas Owens, sixth-grader

Photo contributed by William Carvajal Model Middle School sixth-graders in Spanish teacher William Carvajal stand in their classroom after participating in an acting activity that helped them practice their secondlanguage skills.