How a conference about applied linguistics changed my life

A Conference about Applied Linguistics

I don’t really give it too much thought when I make up my mind: an international conference is happening near my town, a place where I don’t get many chances to gain professional or academic training. Alright, so the conference is on applied linguistics, which is pretty general. What about all those great Spanish as a foreign language courses going on out there right now! But it’s better than nothing, so okay, I decide to go.

The conference starts with plenty of interesting communication going on. By the end of the afternoon, a plenary lecture sounds informative, but I’ve been up since seven in the morning and I’m so drained after six previous lectures that I’m not going to follow any of it. Well, I guess I’ll sit in the back, and if I can’t focus or if it’s not very interesting, I can always just quietly slip out.

The conference is however very interesting, from start to finish. I walk out of there with my head abuzz with ideas, and all the way to the bus stop and while riding home, thoughts and concepts flash through my mind, ideas that are giving me a richer, deeper perspective. It’s like when you see a movie and even days later you keep discovering parallel messages, deeper meanings, and new implications. Like the constant flow of water that gushes from a spring.

There’s still a day left of the conference, more communication, another plenary lecture… more new ideas. The ideas are buzzing. I spend Sunday with family and friends and then on Monday it’s back to the daily grind. I’m asked how the conference went.  It was good, interesting. Anything new? Yeah, I attended a very interesting lecture, I just have to go over my notes because I’ve got so many ideas all mixed together.

I look at my notes and they are a disaster, an unintelligible mess, I can barely read my own handwriting; it’s okay, relax, it’ll work out.

I was in class today correcting an exercise on the chalk board when suddenly everything just came together like a jigsaw puzzle. Of course, that was it! As I wrote on the board, everything started making sense, and not only did I understand, I began changing my way of looking at it all, changing the idea I’d always had on how to focus my classes. As I wrote, I felt the way my beliefs were changing about Spanish teaching. I’ve had plenty of important influences in my life, too many to mention here, including teachers whom I greatly admire, but it had never seemed so clear to me before, so obvious. Teresa Cadiero’s lecture was on the notion of “thinking to talk” (pensar para hablar). She talked about how cognition determines languages and the way in which, for example, the resources for expression in different languages differ. So language acquisition requires learning certain ways of thinking, or certain patterns that are specific to the target language.

Until today, I’d always thought that my students wouldn’t be able to use past tenses correctly until they had reached a certain level of Spanish, assuming that the ability to narrate actions in the past was a phenomenon reserved for telling stories. Today however, as I wrote short texts on the board created by my students, I realized that what I called coherence not only had to do with the way we organize texts and speeches, it also had to do with how we think, how we organize an experience.

That’s how after 25 years of teaching, I’ve found another mountain to climb, because I want to see the horizon on the other side, that other horizon that’s been shown to me in the form of vague sketches, but which has occupied my thoughts for the last 6 hours, filling me with questions and motivation.

Gracias, profesora Cadierno.