Finding Your “Spanish Voice” Through Popular Media: Improving Students’ Confidence and Fluency

Abstract

This article shares an innovative course design that incorporates cultural connections and comparisons, interpersonal communication, and a relaxing classroom environment to facilitate learning and language development. By using authentic texts as the medium for learning, it provides a case example of an upper-division curriculum that focused on cognitive skills, elicited conversational dialogues, exposed and promoted the use of different registers, and tapped students’ existing schema around stimulating topics to foster engagement, reflection and enthusiasm. We advance that a curriculum that focuses on the affective domain over discrete academic or grammatical objectives can develop students’ sense of linguistic creativity and language ownership, thus improving their confidence and level of competency in the target language.

The “Eyes” Are Watching You: Social Control in an Introduction to Sociology Classroom

“…Although the findings are in many ways specific to teaching deviance in a sociology course, we believe that the strengths from this project could be adapted in other courses and disciplines and with varying course sizes. First, the use of popular media served us well to connect with the students and get them thinking beyond the classroom or textbook, consistent with other findings from other disciplines including world languages and nursing (Hyde and Fife 2005; Maseda and DeFeo 2014). Through discussions, we found that students were interested and engaged in the discussion of the show The Handmaid’s Tale .…”

“…Prior research suggests that incorporating relevant media into courses across disciplines has beneficial impacts on student learning and engagement (Belet 2017; Maseda and DeFeo 2014). For example, incorporating YouTube examples of Durkheim’s concepts, such as explaining mechanical solidarity using American soccer fan culture, versus verbally giving the example equalized outcomes between disadvantaged and advantaged students (Belet 2017).…”

“…For example, incorporating YouTube examples of Durkheim’s concepts, such as explaining mechanical solidarity using American soccer fan culture, versus verbally giving the example equalized outcomes between disadvantaged and advantaged students (Belet 2017). Another example used authentic Spanish media examples like comics, songs, or film clips to facilitate motivation and confidence in an upper-level Spanish course (Maseda and DeFeo 2014).…”