PCAL Modern Languages

“… From agriculture to construction to the medical field, you will not find any career path that does not put you into contact with native Spanish speakers.”

Western Kentucky University is one of the few institutions in the Commonwealth of Kentucky where students can earn a bachelor’s degree in a world language and achieve initial certification for teaching at the elementary, middle, and secondary levels. While many Kentucky universities offer degrees in teaching Spanish, WKU also offers similar pathways for students in Chinese and Arabic, providing more opportunities for high schools to offer world languages in Kentucky.

Yertty VanderMolen, Professor of Spanish at WKU and supervisor of student teachers, interviewed with WKU Modern Languages about her experience in helping develop future educators. She explains that by going out into the community and observing different teaching methods, she can connect with Spanish teachers in the region and looks at the methods that they create. “I observe and evaluate everything,” VanderMolen said, “from their use of authentic resources to their originality in the classroom.”

According to Vandermolem, she uses various evaluation forms from the Kentucky Department of Education to evaluate teachers, but she also pays attention to how much of the target language is being used in the classroom, the interaction with the students and instructor, and the approaches to language being used. Through such evaluation, VanderMolen can share tips and help pinpoint areas where student teachers can improve, overall contributing to the value of world language teaching in Kentucky.

World language teaching, especially in Spanish, is very important in VanderMolen’s eyes. “There is a large Spanish-speaking community in Bowling Green and the United States overall,” she said, “that from agriculture to construction to the medical field, you will not find any career path that does not put you into contact with native Spanish speakers. Thus, bilingualism is a necessity.” Moreover, VanderMolen commented that language teaching truly does enrich the local community and that linguistic and cultural understanding born in the classroom provides a bridge for communication between students and communities which speak other languages. For this reason, VanderMolen believes that augmenting the number of world language teachers in Kentucky is a must moving forward, as it will provide a number of valuable assets to students of the next generation.