Ana M. Pérez-Gironés

Adjunct Professor of Spanish and Education Studies
Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
College of Education Studies 
Wesleyan University

I always wanted to be in the classroom. I started preparing to be a teacher of English in my native Spain. That changed when I came to the United States to be a TA for a year. It turned out that a degree in English was an excellent preparation to understand my students’ needs in Spanish.

What I experience with my students in the classroom becomes the basis for what I publish. I have worked on a diverse array on pedagogical materials that respond to different needs of the language learning process. I am co-author of the programs Puntos de Partida, for elementary Spanish, and Más, for intermediate Spanish (both published by McGraw-Hill).

Language acquisition and cultural competence are the core of my professional interests.  They also came together in the project En una palabra (Georgetown University Press), a series of three CD-ROMs with annotated interviews conducted in three different cities of the Spanish-speaking world. 

The development of open educational resources is also of great interest to me. That’s the motivation for  Wespañol, an open-source program for learning Spanish (with the Wesleyan community in mind,) that I developed with my Wesleyan colleague Louise Neary.

My students at Wesleyan have always been the inspiration for my publications. I want the classroom to be a home and an experiential place for my students and myself—a place where wonderful things can happen while students as well as instructor are engaged in learning.