Celebrating Language Diversity and Linguistic Rights Origins of International Mother Language Day Did you know that today is International Mother Language Day? In 1999, UNESCO declared that the day would be celebrated annually on February 21st in order to commemorate a 1952 student de
A Website for Translators, Interpreters, and Learners What is it? Spanish for Social Change is a blog by Sara Koopman, “a feminist political geographer who does collaborative research with international solidarity movements to support their efforts to decolonize the relationship
How to Make the Spanish Subjunctive a Little More Relevant I have written before about how to teach social justice through grammar lessons. Today’s lesson is on the subjunctive in Spanish. Most English speakers groan at the mention of the dreaded “subjunctive”, that
A Great Supplement for Language Learners My partner, Gabe, is here with me in Peru. He had never studied Spanish before coming here and enrolled in classes when we first arrived. But the classes were too expensive for us to maintain long-term so Gabe has had to find other ways to impr
Some Tips for Spanish Learners Ready to Take Risks It’s a new year and the time when many of us set new goals. Perhaps your goal is to learn a new language or to take the language you’re learning to the next level. If that’s the case, I encourage you to take some ris
A Journey in Multilingual Blogging On July 1st, 2013 we launched the Esperanza blog: Language, Learning, and Culture. Five women with a love for progressive language education, but different backgrounds and interests, came together to share their ideas. Today we have a growing archive
A Song by Kukama Children in Defense of their Native Language This video features a beautiful song and rap by the children of Nauta, Loreto in the Peruvian Amazon about saving their native language, Kukama-Kukamiria. The children go around removing the tape that covers each other̵
A Year Was Not Enough to See it All in Spain In 2006, I got a job teaching English in the small town of Cuenca in Spain. I had never heard of Cuenca before and it was a long and nerve-racking journey to get there but it was definitely worth it. Although at times it was difficult livin
Dedication in Rural Education Over the last two months, I have been travelling to small communities in the Cusco region of Peru for our (UNICEF) research project on intercultural bilingual schools. It has been a beautiful, educational, and humbling experience for me. The goal of Inter
The Wonder of WordReference What is it? WordReference.com is a great set of online dictionaries to translate between English and fifteen other languages. It also has dictionaries for Spanish-French and Spanish-Portuguese, as well as verb conjugators and games for several languages. It
