A life-changing experience Learning a new language changes you. Your brain shifts as you begin to think and perceive in a new way. Research shows that people even express personality differently. With this in mind, I wonder why language memoirs are not more popular. After all, many pe
My go-to online resources for writing in my second language Whether it’s a lengthy essay or a simple text message, writing in another language can be quite overwhelming. And while Google Translate is getting better every day, it will never be able to get it all right for you. When stu
As we enter into the fall, I offer you this evocative poem from the Turkish poet Hilmi Yavuz, entitled “Eylül”, or “September”. I translated it a few years ago in a creative writing class at UBC, and I acknowledge the likelihood of mistakes. See what you make o
2015 in Review As I reflect on the past year for Esperanza Education, I recognize that it has been a year of both stability and change. Esperanza Education is now in its 8th year of operation, and our Language, Learning, and Culture Blog has been running for 2.5 years. Our readership
Vallejo y la poesía como experiencia de vida la vida A veces utilizo poesía en mis clases de español. Aunque solo es posible hacerlo con alumnos intermedios/avanzados, resulta interesante exponer a un alumno a un uso del lenguaje puramente expresivo. Resulta artificial siempre utiliza
Another Great Year of Language, Learning, and Culture The last time I sat down to write an end-of-year post for Esperanza Education, the team had only been blogging for six months. Now it has been a year and a half and I couldn’t be more impressed with the passion of our team an
Language teaching in a classroom is so different than tutoring one-on-one. This really hit home last week, when I came back to classroom teaching as an instructor with SFU’s digital communication and advanced English certificate program. You need a whole different set of skills and ac
My final post for Esperanza I have been writing for this blog for just shy of a year, and my words here have been the first that I’ve really let go into the universe. Writing on the internet is scary; anyone (anyone!) can read it, love it, hate it, comment on it, ignore it, shar
What’s does that squiggly line do? At the beginning of the year Nicole wrote about making mistakes in Spanish and how forgetting a little squiggly mark can drastically change the meaning of a word. The little squiggly line, called a tilde, is used in Spanish to make the letter ñ
An online community to correct your target language writing I just registered for Lang-8 a few days ago, and I’m impressed with this website/social platform. It is a genius idea and ripe for our interconnected world: connect a bunch of people from different first languages and l
