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VANESSA FANELLI

ITALIAN LANGUAGE TEACHER

MY TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

Synestesia in language teaching

Central to my teaching philosophy is the concept of synesthesia. As an ex-professional actress and passionate supporter of all the arts, I believe the process of language learning involves more than voice, memory, and a hand to write down sentences. In other words, I think that learning is a process that does not involve only visual and auditory support, but also kinesthetic ones. Students have changed during the century as a resulting product of socio-cultural changes; consequently, teaching methods have adapted too from a grammar base approach to a communicative one. Nonetheless, I believe in a performing art approach to learning languages, which involves mind, body, voice, and gesture at 360 degrees.
What I have learned in my teaching experience is that students love visual reinforcement, but they do remember longer in time when a gesture is added to vocabulary, grammar, or cultural material. I undoubtedly believe in the importance of communicating meaningful information when learning a language, isn’t this the primary goal of all languages, communicating? To do so I expose my students to all kinds of inputs (visual, audio, kinesthetic) and I encourage them to go beyond their limits in the production of outputs. My role as a teacher is to support my students and make them believe in themselves because they can do it!

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