Spanish Enrichment Program: Creating Multilingual Experience

Reported By: Shelby McCormick

Photographed By: Kelly North

     Professor of English Jessica Hughes got the idea for the Spanish Enrichment Program as she sat in on a parent meeting for the Chehalem Online Academy (COA) last semester. As part of COA, students get $500 for enrichment activities. Many parents were inquiring about foreign language options at this meeting, but none were available. 

“It was one of those moments of like wait, I’ve got parents with money over here who want to pay people to teach their kids Spanish and at work, we have all these Spanish minors who need internships and who would love teaching opportunities and want to make money,” said Hughes.  

GFU had already been hiring student workers and hosting enrichment classes in the Science department, so model infrastructures were in place to refer to as the Language and Literature department began to mold this program.  

Hughes reached out to administrative assistant Susana Barnreuther, who began meeting with members of the science outreach program, running surveys to gauge interest, and working with the Marketing Communication team to get the pilot classes up and running this semester.

Two pilot classes are currently running, a beginner class for elementary students and an intermediate class for middle-school students. Hughes said the team’s original goal for the pilot was eight to ten students. 

“It was just going to be one pilot, but we had so many people begging us to please offer a beginners pilot, so we ended up with 33 students,” said Barnreuther.

The pilots provide invaluable experience to GFU Spanish majors and minors, who create the lesson plans and teach the courses. 

“It’s an exciting idea because it's something new, as we’re the first ones who get to do this. There’s not a curriculum so it’s something we get to create from zero,” said Adelmi Sanchez, one of the students teaching the middleschool pilot class.  

Seeing the students get excited about and engage in learning Spanish has been a highlight for the teachers. “One of my favorite things is you just seeing them light up sometimes when they are playing a game they like, or learning new things,” said Karina Statom, who co-teaches with Sanchez.

  With the level of interest in this pilot program, the department has plans for expanding the program to give GFU students more opportunities to gain experience and bring additional learning opportunities to the community, said Hughes.

“We live in a mutli-cultural and multilingual society. It is to everyone’s advantage if as many people as possible are at least functionally fluent in multiple languages. There's nothing that we lose as society by helping people become multilingual,” said Hughes.