Best Ways to Improve Your Spanish
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There are two categories we’re going to address on how to be a better Spanish teacher. Let’s start with the first one, which is improving your own Spanish! Sometimes you might be wondering how to improve your own Spanish because you’re coming back to take a licensure test that you haven’t taken yet, or maybe you wound up teaching Spanish 1 for awhile and you feel like your Spanish is getting rusty. Maybe you don’t have anybody around you who speaks Spanish that you can just spend time chatting with. Let’s look at the best ways to improve your Spanish!
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Communication Over Perfection
Before we get into the ideas for best ways to improve your Spanish, I want to address a fear or limiting belief that I have seen (and felt!) in action. If you’re not a native speaker, you might feel like your Spanish isn’t good enough, or will never be good enough. You might struggle with feelings of inadequacy or overwhelm when you see words or phrases you’ve never heard before.
Please remember – no one is perfect! My English certainly isn’t perfect, even though I’ve been using it for decades. My Spanish isn’t perfect – same thing. Language is always growing, developing and changing. We focus on communicating and supporting our students and our own language journeys.
I wanted to share this post from my friend Josefina at Mrs. Cabello’s Spanish Class:
In case you don’t have Instagram, the video is that someone commented on her post that she must not be fluent in Spanish, because she used a term that they don’t use. Her response is perfect!
Best Ways to Improve Your Spanish
Listen to Spanish Podcasts
If you are a podcast fan, this is the blog post for you. I have listed as many different podcast recommendations as I could find in various Spanish teacher Facebook groups. Some of them are going to be too low for you, but some of them are going to be just right and I tried to break them out by level so you can find the right fit.
Listening to podcasts that you find engaging and interesting is a great way to brush up on your Spanish skills!
Watch Shows in Spanish
Another option is to watch shows in Spanish. Allison over at Mis Clases Locas has a ton of blog posts with different recommendations for Spanish shows you can watch, like this one.
If you don’t want to start a new show, you can also just change movies into the target language. As you’re going to watch a new movie, switch the language over. I like to put on subtitles too, although it’s not uncommon for the audio and subtitles not to match!
Just a note, I don’t like doing this with movies where I already know what the voice actor is supposed to sound like, but I do like to do it with like a cartoon or like a Disney movie that I haven’t seen before. It just makes it more enjoyable, in my opinion!
Read Books in Spanish
You knew I was going to talk about reading! I talk about reading a LOT here on the blog, but it’s just so good for Spanish skills that I can’t skip it.
I do like to read readers (like what I would hand to students) of all levels. This is because I always recommend reading a book before making it available to students, but also because I like to know what I could or should recommend to a student struggling to find a good fit! This series is one of my favorites I’ve read recently:
You can check out my whole playlist of sneak peeks inside books here!
Sometimes it’s fun to go back to some of your childhood favorites and read those in Spanish. Your local library might even have a selection! Check it out and see.
I’ve also done I call my book club nights. If you’re familiar with Fluency Fast, they have authors and teachers host what is essentially a book club with one of their books! So I’ve done a couple from Adriana Ramírez, and I have talked about how much I love her books before.
Her books are great and they’re so much fun when you get to hear about it from her.
This option is honestly amazing because you’re reading the book, being held accountable to read the book like you said you were going to do, you have a mini conversation group to chat about the book AND you get professional development on how to teach a novel by experiencing an expert doing it!
Improve your speaking with Spanish Conversation Groups
I mentioned how the book club works like a conversation group, but you could also find a conversation group to join all on its own! Check your library and local Facebook groups to see if there’s any interest in your community, or if there’s one that already happens.
There are also a few different Facebook groups that are great for this. There is one that’s for conversation, and we have done video chats, and we just kind of hang out and catch up, but it’s all in Spanish. It’s also all world language teachers! Check it out here.
Change your Cell Phone Language
If you haven’t, switch your phone language to Spanish! It’s such a simple step and you’ll see your apps, options, all sorts of things in Spanish! You’ll see so much content and it’s all designed to be very intuitive and very user friendly to navigate. You might also start getting served ads in Spanish – built in listening & reading practice!
Listen to Spanish Music
Last but not least, and this is probably my go to and my all time favorite, is to listen to music in Spanish. Of course, you can listen to whatever genres you want! Personally, I like to listen to the playlists that come out every March for the March music tournament that Spanish Plans hosts. The thing that I really like about his playlist is that he is very careful to include a variety of genres, a variety of artists, and new music.
Some of my favorite songs that I have “discovered” over the years have come from his playlists because it forces me to try out things that I haven’t heard, and often different genres than my usual. While I love Pandora because it just kind of mixes in new songs, but it does seem to sometimes fall into kind of that same rut that I fall into!
Best Ways to Improve Your Spanish
I hope that this post has helped you as you’re looking for ideas and resources to improve your Spanish, whether it is for yourself, or because you’re suddenly going to be teaching an upper level of Spanish or a heritage Spanish class next year. If you have any other tips you’d like to share, please don’t hesitate to drop a comment below!
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