SpainCosta RicaPeruSpanishMarch 1, 2016 | 4 min read
Spanish is the fourth most spoken language in the world by total speakers, the second most spoken in the United States, and one of the six official languages of the United Nations. For Spanish teachers making the case for enrolment, these five reasons give students something concrete to hold onto.
The reasons to learn Spanish go well beyond grades, and students respond to arguments that connect the language to the real world.
With over 500 million native speakers across 21 countries, from Mexico and Colombia to Spain, Argentina, and Equatorial Guinea, Spanish is the dominant language across an enormous and varied part of the world. Students who travel to Spanish-speaking countries without the language tend to stay within tourist infrastructure: the hotel, the tour bus, the recommended restaurant. Students who arrive with functional Spanish can navigate independently, have conversations with people who are not paid to be patient with them, and access parts of a destination that do not cater to non-speakers. The difference in what they bring home is measurable. Prométour offers school group tours to Spain, Costa Rica, and Peru, each fully private and designed around your Spanish programme.
Spanish is the second most used language in international business after English, and demand for bilingual Spanish-English speakers continues to grow across healthcare, law, education, social services, business, and government. In the United States, where the Spanish-speaking population exceeds 40 million, Spanish fluency is a practical professional asset in almost every sector. In Canada.
Spanish-speaking immigration has increased significantly over the past two decades, the same is increasingly true. Students who reach functional fluency before entering the workforce are better positioned than those who begin the language as adults.
Spanish and English share Latin and French roots, which means a significant portion of advanced English vocabulary, including words ending in -tion, -ible, -al, and -ous, has a direct Spanish cognate. The orthography of Spanish is consistent and phonetic, so reading and pronunciation follow predictable rules once they are learned. Verb conjugation is more systematic than in French or German. For English-speaking students, Spanish offers a faster path to functional communication than most other widely spoken languages.
Matters for maintaining student motivation through the early stages of language acquisition.
Research in cognitive neuroscience consistently shows that bilingual individuals demonstrate stronger executive function, including attention control, task-switching, and working memory, compared to monolinguals. Studies have also found that bilingualism delays the onset of dementia by an average of four to five years. Learning a second language, particularly one with a different grammatical structure from the first, exercises the brain in ways that build long-term cognitive resilience. The earlier the language is acquired, the more significant the neurological effect.
Spanish-language literature, film, music, and art represent one of the largest and most varied cultural traditions in the world, spanning García Márquez, Borges, Neruda, Lorca, Almodóvar, Frida Kahlo, Shakira, and Celia Cruz. Students who develop Spanish fluency gain direct access to this tradition without the mediation of translation. They can also access the living culture of Spanish-speaking communities in their own cities, including Latin American music, food, film, and neighbourhood celebrations, in a way that is more engaged and more reciprocal than tourism.
Spanish is also the entry point to an unusually varied set of travel destinations. The Spanish-speaking world spans temperate Europe, tropical Central America, the high Andes of Peru and Bolivia, the Patagonian south, and the Caribbean. Each destination offers a different encounter with the language, with different accents, different vocabulary, and different cultural contexts.
Means that learning Spanish does not lead to one kind of trip. It leads to many. For Spanish teachers looking to bring a destination into the curriculum, Prométour’s Costa Rica: Adventure Tour and Peru: Cultural Tour are built specifically around the kind of immersive experience that enrolment in a Spanish class makes possible.
The most effective argument for Spanish enrolment is a destination on the horizon. Prométour builds fully custom school group tours to Spanish-speaking destinations including Spain, Costa Rica, and Peru. Each tour is private, fully customised, and designed around your programme level and curriculum objectives.
