TEACHING

Traditionally, learning has been seen as the delivery of information from teacher to student, where the teacher takes an active role in presenting content area knowledge and where the students are seated at their desks receiving the knowledge provided by the teacher. Quite the contrary, my experiences as both a student and a teacher have convinced me that there is a more effective way to increase student learning: students learn best when they take an active role in their own learning. Thus, I conduct an interactive classroom where I provide opportunities for students to become engaged with the material in class and to apply the material to their everyday lives. Students are encouraged to participate in all aspects of the course and on a variety of levels.

To encourage students to take responsibility for their own learning, I often utilize collaborative and group activities that have students interact with others in the class in order to foster a sense of "classroom community" and to allow me to devote more time to individual students. Since teaching opportunities not only occur in teacher-student interactions but in student-student interactions as well, group work provides students the opportunity to share their knowledge with each other. Students must be respected for the individuals they are and for the myriad of life experiences, knowledge and personalities they bring with them to the classroom. I share with students not only my knowledge of French and Spanish literature, language and culture, but also my enthusiasm for the content area and for teaching as well.

I am interested in engaged my students in learning language but more importantly in having them use language to be able to communicate in real-life situations in a culturally authentic context. I consistently encourage them to express their own meaning early on in instruction and to practice using the language in a variety of settings. I show students the functionality of language and the meaning that is carried through the language they use. I adapt my teaching to the individual personalities and cognitive abilities of all students; each student must be seen and respected as a unique individual with his/her own preferences and learning style. My goal is to have students learn through the study of language that culture is an integral and inseparable part of language; they must be shown that each culture operates on its own particular value system and hence is different in specific ways from their home culture but is similar in many respects to the home culture as well. I attempt to teach them to value all cultures and to see them in an unbiased manner. True learning happens when the roles of teacher and students are reversed, and consequently I am constantly learning from my students on how they approach learning in general and how thus to adapt my teaching to their learning.

I am continually updating and improving my teaching style through course evaluations, observations of other instructors, discussions and conversations with fellow colleagues, doctoral coursework, affiliations with several national foreign language organizations as well as reading various journals connected to my discipline, including Foreign Language Annals , The French Review , Hispania , and The Modern Language Journal . My ultimate goal as a foreign language teacher is to know how each one of my students thinks and to see the world as they see it in order to adapt my teaching and make it relevant to their daily lives. As a specialist doing doctoral work in second language acquisition, I am interested in conducting research on students' learning styles and on how these styles, in combination with the instructor's preferred teaching style, interact and consequently impact one another in order to improve the overall quality of foreign language instruction.

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