About the Podcast
Last updated: April 8, 2021
Welcome!
Thank you for visiting this page to learn more about the podcast, the concept behind the podcast, and the philosophical frameworks, the theories, that inform my approach. I am thrill to share information with you about the podcast and help you get the most out of the episodes you listen to.
I am honored that you are giving us an opportunity to help you learn and improve your Spanish and be confident that we do our best effort to apply researched based strategies to make the episodes effective; we plan our conversations to make them easy for you to understand, and we do our best to make them natural, fun, and enjoyable.
Mission
Our goal with the podcast is to offer you natural and authentic conversations in Spanish that are easy to understand about everyday topics, and that can help you learn how we use language to communicate in everyday conversations. In addition to that, each conversation includes vocabulary and activities to help you increase your vocabulary and build your vocabulary and colloquial expressions in a communicative context.
I also include from time to time, conversations in French, Italian, and Portuguese. I also love learning languages, and I also want to share with you how fun it is to learn another language, and you can see me practice in the way I am teaching you. I believe the format of the podcast is a great format to have a conversation to learn a language, and I also want to walk the walk with you and share with you conversations in other languages. These episodes give me perspective to improve the effectiveness of the podcast, and it is also intended for other language teachers to get perspective on how fun it can be to use this approach to offer conversation lessons.
Who is this podcast for?
This podcast is for those of you who speak Spanish at an intermediate and advanced levels. I originally intended to have episodes for beginners as well, but I came to the realization that it was not practical to include episodes for beginners in this podcast. Beginners need a different kind of podcast that provides different tools to help them learn Spanish or any other language. For that reason, I am focusing on episodes for intermediate and advanced learners in this podcast. I have in mind making a podcast for beginners in the future if time permits, but right now, I don’t have the time or the resources to get it going.
Although I am mainly focusing on episodes in Spanish, I share episodes in French, Portuguese and Italian from time to time for those of us who enjoy learning other languages as well as those of us who enjoy teaching languages. These episodes are intended to give us perspective as language teachers as to how a conversation lesson can be planned and executed.
Getting the most from the episodes
Every episode comes with a webpage with the supplemental content that contains the vocabulary, activities and questions that we cover during the conversation. I strongly suggest that you spend five minutes going over the vocabulary, activities and questions, and I can confidently say that it will help you understand the conversation better and experience the conversation better. Going over the supplemental content before listening will give you a good overview, and you’ll be able to retain more vocabulary, phases or expressions that we use.
The conversations are designed to be very comprehensible on their own, but the supplemental content gives you more tools to improve your comprehension. You don’t have to go over the supplemental content to enjoy, learn, and get a lot from each episode, but it can improve your comprehension.
The episodes are usually about one hour in length give or take. The goal is that you can have conversations that you can continuously and consistently understand for prolong periods of time so that you can really get immersed in the conversations and build your implicit knowledge of the language (I explain more on the section about the conceptual framework).
One very essential element to learn a language is that you listen to conversations that you can understand and have opportunities to listen to how we speak in different contexts with different people about the same topic. For example, if you think about it, we have many conversations about the same topic with different people in our daily lives. We talk about family, food, school, routines and many other topics with family, friends, or acquaintances. We experience our first language in different context with different people, and that is essential to build our command of our first language. For that reason, I offer you around 3 conversation at the intermediate level and 2 conversation at the advanced level in the some topic, but with different native speakers from different countries so that you can have this experience of listening to different voices, styles, accents and genders. This will give you an opportunity to train your ear well and improve you comprehension.
You don’t need to sit down and study religiously. My intention is for you to able to listen to the episodes as if you were listening to the radio on your free time or when are doing another task. These are episodes that you can enjoy while you are going out for your morning one hour walk, while you are exercising at home or at the gym, while you are cleaning your home or apartment, while you are waiting for an appointment, and for all of those times when you can listen to the podcast
Once you finished an episode, I also suggest spending 3 minutes skimming through the supplemental content one more time, and it will help you to improve how much you can retain from the conversation.
Can you help us grow?
I am producing this podcast to give you a powerful tool that you can add to your toolbox in your journey to improve your command of the Spanish language, and my goal is to reach as many people as I can who are looking for a tool like this to help them in their journey to understand Spanish with ease and achieve fluency in the language.
If you find our podcast valuable, if you love the podcast, and you feel that it is helping you, please recommend the podcast on your Facebook page, Twitter, Instagram any other social media that you use. You can share your favorite episode and write one or two sentences about the podcast to share why you like the podcast. I am confident that you have at least one friend who also wants to learn Spanish and is perhaps looking for a good resource to help them learn Spanish. Please let recommend the podcast.
Conceptual and Philosophical Framework
Many learners struggle to achieve fluency even when they have studied Spanish for a long time. They feel like they are not making progress, and they struggle to use their Spanish or the language they are learning when they are trying to have a conversation with a native speaker. Many students have asked me why they struggle, and why it is hard to achieve fluency. The main reason is because you usually don’t have the opportunity to listen to language that you can consistently and continuously understand for prolong periods of time.
We know from the research and studies on how we learn languages from the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), the field that conducts the research, studies, and produces literature about learning languages, that input in the language you are learning is central to develop your subconscious command of the language. Input refers to communication, conversations, or messages that you hear in the language that you are learning. Our ability to speak a language fluently develops in our subconscious or what is commonly known as implicit knowledge. We speak our first language from the language that we possess in our implicit knowledge, our implicit linguistic system. Input that you can consistently and continuously understand for prolong periods of time is essential to helping you build your implicit knowledge.
The field of SLA strongly indicates that getting input in the language you are learning, also called Target Language (TL), is the very necessary element that you need to have in order to develop your implicit knowledge of the language, to develop your ability to speak a language fluently and naturally just the way you use your first language. Many learners struggle to reach fluency and to speak a language with ease because they spend a lot of time practicing isolated sentences or memorizing rules or sentences, and they don’t spend a lot of time listening to the target language in a format that is easy to understand.
Most theories and studies in the field of SLA suggest that in order to develop your subconscious command of the language, your implicit knowledge of the language, you need to hear a lot of input. One of the most important theories in the 1960s that changed the course of how we understood language learning was Universal Grammar (UG) proposed by professor Noam Chomsky. Professor Chomsky is considered the father of modern linguistics, and he has been one of the most important linguists of our time.
Before professor Chomsky, it was believed that we learn a language by practicing repeatedly in order to form perfect sentences. The notion of learning a language was greatly influenced by a professor of psychology and human behavior at Harvard University by the name of B.F. Skinner who was widely known for proposing Behaviorism. The behaviorist perspective argued that we learn a language by receiving stimulus and responding to that stimulus in order to form language habits. In very simplistic terms, they argued that we learn language by training. Professor Chomsky debunked that theory, and he indicated that we don’t learn by training, but by the large amount input that we get around us. To put it in very simple words, he proposed that we possess the biological ability to learn a language and the input around us provides the data that we need to build our implicit knowledge of the language we are learning, and for our brain to understand the parameters and rules that govern the language we are exposed to.
Professor Stephen Krashen at the University of Southern California proposed in the 70s that we not only need input to learn a language, but we need what he described as “comprehensible input.” In simple terms, comprehensible input is conversations, messages, language that we can continuously understand. He suggested that if you hear conversations or messages that you can understand, you would be acquiring the language, you would be building your implicit knowledge. He also proposed the Monitor Model which consisted of 5 hypotheses. One of the most important hypotheses was the “input + 1 hypothesis.” This hypothesis described that if you engage in communication that is just a little bit beyond your level, you would be building your implicit knowledge and advancing to the next level. In other words, if you understand 80-90% of what you are hearing in a conversation, you would be in the ideal environment for you to make progress and improve your command of the language.
Many other theories support that you need to get a lot of input that you can understand in order to build your implicit knowledge. Professor Bill VanPatten, who worked on many prestigious universities and who is also known for his theory in input processing and his processing instruction intervention, consistently points out on his podcast “Talkin L2 with BVP” and “Tea with BVP” that comprehensible input in the necessary element to build you implicit knowledge of the language. Without comprehensible input, your progress will be very slow.
Professor Rod Ellis, who is also one of the top researchers in SLA, points out in his article Principles of Instructed Second Language Acquisition that, “In the view of most researchers, competence in a second language is primarily a matter of implicit knowledge… Given that implicit knowledge underlies the ability to communicate fluently and confidently in a second language, this type of knowledge should be the ultimate goal of any instructional program (pg 2).”
Another interesting theory is “Connectionism” which suggests that we store language in our brain through new neurological connections that are created to store vocabulary, phrases, chunks of language or sentences. The more we encounter these vocabulary, phrases, or chunks of language in the input, the stronger these neurological connections become and the easier it is to understand and use the language. This is an interesting theory because it also explains why people who speak another language have more protection against memory loss. Medical doctors are discovering that people who speak another language may have a greater array of neurological connections, and that is probably which people who may experience memory loss or Alzheimer’s disease, can delay these conditions for up to 5 years.
I can continue with more theories that point out the importance of getting input, but I think you have now a pretty good idea that getting comprehensible input is essential. For that reason, my goal with this podcast is to apply approaches and strategies to make sure that the conversations are easy for you to understand and are relevant to our everyday interactions. I do my best effort to put my knowledge from the field of SLA, apply the research, and pedagogical approaches into the planning of the conversations so that you can have a very powerful tool at your disposal to help you in your journey to improve you command of the Spanish language and build your implicit knowledge.