It’s not common to find someone with a 336-day learning streak on the Duolingo language learning app, however, that’s not the case for Upper School Spanish teacher Mr. Esteban Longoria.
Mr. Longoria is dedicated to his language learning craft. Last school year, Mr. Longoria received the Jennifer Hicks Memorial Fund of Faculty Continuing Education. The fund honors the memory of Jennifer Hicks, a member of the class of 1998, and provides a grant supporting a member of the Kinkaid faculty in an activity or study that will enrich his or her teaching, advising, or working with students outside of the classroom.
As a Spanish teacher who is bilingual, he wanted to expand his knowledge by picking up another Latin-based language: French. “I’ve always wanted to learn a third language, and I thought this would be the perfect opportunity for me to do so,” said Mr. Longoria. Through the grant, Mr. Longoria had the opportunity to spend five weeks in Normandy, France this past summer. “Not just for my work as a language teacher, but also to enrich my experience in France as a chaperone in the French Homestay trips of which I have been a part. I chose this program by the recommendation of one of the members of the Kinkaid community as being an excellent program”.
The 5 week program at the Université de Caen was an intense course of six hours a day, with four block periods a day of 90 minutes each.
Mr. Longoria is fluent in both English and Spanish, learning the former at age 11. French has been challenging because it is not a phonetic language and it is difficult to memorize so many sounds and how they are spelled.
“I was really struggling the first week and couldn’t understand what the teacher was saying because I was in a class with students who had had two to three years of French, which was very frustrating,” he said.
He spent two hours a night completing his assignments for class, and then gave himself more work in order to learn additional vocabulary and verb conjugations. Through this, he began to adjust to the course and it became much more enjoyable for him.
The fact that French and Spanish are both derived from Latin, so Mr. Longoria found that, after initial hiccups, learning French was not too difficult. This was another helpful factor for him because of his Spanish and English fluency.
“English has a lot of French words. Spanish [helped me] understand a lot of the grammar parallels, but not everything.” He added that the grammar in Spanish was very similar to French. “What’s a little frustrating is that some words that are cognates like ‘miel,’ which means honey, are feminine in Spanish and masculine in French.”
Mr. Longoria said his summer experience helped him sympathize with students who take a little longer to learn vocabulary and who struggle in language classes. “I’m definitely more sympathetic,” he said. “I try to do more activities to reinforce the vocabulary for students to learn.”
As for the language-learners in the Upper School, Mr. Longoria said he learned that a good way to improve your skills is to practice every single day. “That’s the fastest way to becoming fluent, so you don’t forget vocabulary.”
Mr. Longoria encourages all students to be passionate, resilient and patient about their language-learning journeys. He ended with a quote from a famous German author, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. “He who does not speak another language does not know his own because you learn a lot about your language as you’re learning another.”
