err... cómo se dice "fruits of the forest" en español?
This Friday Wine Pleasures in collaboration with SpanishinSitges will be leading a Cava Wine tasting for learners of Spanish as a Foreign Language.
Employing the learning methodology “Teaching Through the Target Language” students get to kill two birds with one stone. On the one hand they get to improve the 4 Skills (Speaking, Listening, Reading and Writing) and on the other they learn how to evaluate and taste wine.
The activity improves linguistic competence in the following language functions:meeting people and introducing yourself, asking for information, checking information, making requests, asking for and expressing opinions, suggesting and allows students to improve their grammar: Question formation, present simple/continuous, question tags, present perfect, past simple, quantifiers, and so on. Students get to interact with the teachers, in pairs and in small groups of 4. In all cases there is an information gap and students have to communicate with all available resources in order to achieve an outcome in the activity which is getting agreement on wine colour, aromas and taste. As you might imagine a great deal of new lexis is also presented and hopefully learned/acquired and later practiced outside the classroom.
Group work increases student talk time in class
Needless to say and from experience, with wine on the table fluency in Spanish gets better as the class progresses 🙂
As for the wine tasting part, students discover a series of facts about the wine they are about to taste such as varieties and % used, Nº of bottles produced, price, vintage and then they look at colour followed by aromas then taste and finally food matching suggestions.
To get a copy of the wine tasting note sheet as used in our Wine Tastings please sign up on our home page for your Free copy and get access to a video which takes you through the form completion.
For the upcoming Cava tasting session we will be using Dibon Brut Nature (Bodegas Pinord), Nigrum Cava Brut Reserve (Mascaró) and Ambrosía Cava Semi Seco Reserve (Mascaró).
At our last Spanish for Wine Tasting session Wine Pleasures interviewed Gloria Pedraza, Director of SpanishinSitges and asked her a few question about her school and learning Spanish through wine tasting. Questions in English and answers in Spanish – how much can you understand?
Well, I am a little bit fascinated with this; because I never knew that wine tasting could possibly enhance the Spanish language of students. I better try the wine tasting also.