Best method for teaching Spanish to business professionals

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bethany27
Posts: 15
Joined: Wed Sep 30, 2009 4:26 pm

Best method for teaching Spanish to business professionals

Post by bethany27 » Fri Oct 02, 2009 7:37 pm

Hi everyone,

I'm actually doing research for my boss in Mexico who teaches private English and Spanish lessons. Right now, I'm trying to find the best teaching methods and materials (textbooks, workbooks, software program, etc.) to use to teach Spanish to foreign business professionals who want to advance their career in Mexico.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions or anyone you could direct me to that could help. Any help is much appreciated. Thank you!

Best always,
Bethany

Sally Olsen
Posts: 1322
Joined: Thu Apr 08, 2004 2:24 pm
Location: Canada,France, Brazil, Japan, Mongolia, Greenland, Canada, Mongolia, Ethiopia next

Post by Sally Olsen » Sat Oct 03, 2009 2:29 pm

I am learning from Penser y Aprender by Franco Esposito and published by Editorial Los Mayas. There are three levels (so far) with tapes and teacher's answer books. I am not too impressed with my Spanish teacher who follows the book slavishly doing exercise after exercise. One week we did 50 pages.

Poor fellow having me in his class to critique but I took it on myself to upgrade the lessons and asked for readings at the end of the two hours so it would break up the two straight hours of exercises. He gave an exercise, told us the translation of the verbs and left the class to chat up the secretary for 20 minutes and did this for three or four times a lesson.
When I asked he gave us children's stories which are really hard as anyone would know from English and had us reading the stories around the classroom one by one. I then taped the stories on my Notebook of my Mac so at least I could hear him read them at home.

I got the teacher's manual so I knew the answers from the textbooks and typed it all out on my computer to give myself extra practice. I also got the tapes and listened over and over while reading and then without the book.

I bought a children's 1000 word dictionary with computer back up and listened to the words on the computer, played the games and practiced with my granddaugter. We also played scrabble type games.

I got an Instant Immersion Spanish Deluxe 2.0 8 disc course for my computer with back up on my mp3 player.

In the end I went back to Rosetta Stone and enjoy that so much more than any of these.

I still can't understand my daughter-in-law when she speaks quickly or her friends when they are speaking at normal speed. More to do.

bethany27
Posts: 15
Joined: Wed Sep 30, 2009 4:26 pm

wow!

Post by bethany27 » Sat Oct 03, 2009 3:10 pm

wow, thank you for sharing your experience, Sally. That helps me out a lot hearing from your experience what works and doesn't work for you. I know Rosetta Stone, but I haven't looked into it close enough yet. At this point, I'm actually looking at the Rocket language learning software for Spanish. It's only $99 if you just purchase the downloadable version, not the physical CD-ROMS. All I've heard is good things about it. But thank you especially for letting me know about your classroom and textbook experience. I know how tedious workbook pages can be especially 50 in a week.

Thank you for your input!

Saludos,
Bethany

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