We Teach Languages

We Teach Languages is an interview podcast about how languages get taught, told through the people who teach them. Stacey Johnson hosts and produces it. She also treats it as a shared space: language teachers anywhere can contribute episodes, and some interviews arrive through partner organizations. The guests cover a long stretch of the profession. Omar Rachid teaches middle school French at Lakeside School in Seattle, after seven years at an American school in Singapore. Julio Torres is an associate professor of applied linguistics, and Doran Katz is an assistant professor at the Middlebury School of Hebrew. The talk stays tied to specific classroom moves. In a conversation about task-based teaching and heritage learners, Torres describes a task from a graduate student's class in which students wrote a dating ad for someone else in the class, which gave the subjunctive a real job. Johnson relates it to catching herself, a day later, repeating a phrase she heard in conversation. When students do the same, she says, the classroom is recreating real life. With Katz, the conversation turns to language learning myths. It favors small experiments over a wholesale overhaul, casting teachers as scientists who test what happens when a video goes in or when students own part of the experience. That leads to a bigger question: what does it mean to be an empowered teacher? Rachid's interview is partly about scarcity. Singapore has Spanish and French speakers, but nothing on the scale of Spanish speakers in the US, so his program had to create a community for practice itself. It also includes a small, vivid story about finding harina pan in Singapore, at a price best not asked about. Vicky Masson talks through micro-credentials in collaboration and in challenge-based learning. She used the second when a group of seventh graders wanted to start a Spanish club during the pandemic. The conversation with Trudy Anderson sets a mandatory, deliberately generic textbook against recordings of real people describing their own lives, collected from people as everyday as a nail technician. Both of those interviews were recorded live, with Maris Hawkins interviewing alongside Johnson, at a virtual summit hosted by the National Foreign Language Center at the University of Maryland and the Pearl Language Resource Center. Representation is another steady concern, carried by a collaboration with the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition on social justice in the language classroom. In the conversation on Asian representation, a student's request for Spanish books with characters who are not only white or Latin American is read aloud, along with a plea for such stories at level one. A listener comes away with a set of worked examples rather than a single method, each one tied to a particular group of students.