On speaking Spanish and eating pastries

Every language teacher tries to come up with creative, authentic and fun ways to get their students speaking in the target language. After all, communication, not conjugating verbs in the past perfect tense of the subjunctive mood, is the point of learning a foreign language.

So where is it that you usually find the intrepid foreign travelers trying to hone their language skills? They are meeting in the coffee houses and pastry shops of the world, hunched over a thick, black mug of java and a croissant , rubbing elbows with the locals and parsing utterances that may or may not resemble speech.

The upper-school Spanish speakers at the Mountain School have taken this idea to Cindy Bread in the form of talleres de conversación, conversation workshops. There is only one rule at these gatherings: no English. The incentive of a home-made baked good in the middle of a school day makes adherence to this rule successful. Kids often call each other out, in Spanish mind you, if they hear someone breaking the rule.

What do we talk about? The possibilities are numerous: pick a topic from a hat on which to speak, student presentations , improvisation scenarios, chat about weekends past, present and future, friends and families, plan an upcoming experiential trip. Students get a little taste of what it is like to try to figure out how to say what they want really want to communicate but might not have the language skills to do so. A little bit of immersion right here in Telluride, Colorado.