Dr. Olúwafẹ́mi Adékáyọ̀dé
Olúwafẹ́mi is a professor of Spanish and Hispanic studies based in the UK. Born in Nigeria, he came to Spanish through his own multilingual upbringing and has spent his career studying intercultural communication, dialect variation across the Spanish-speaking world, and what it takes to teach Spanish well in contexts where neither teacher nor student is from a Spanish-speaking country.
- The intelligibility principle
- Pragmatic competence
- Authentic resources
- Intercultural communication
3 pieces in the archive.
The intelligibility principle, why accent reduction is the wrong goal for your students.
Murray Munro and Tracey Derwing ran a study in 1995 that should have ended the accent-reduction industry. It did not. The study is the empirical foundation for what pronunciation teaching has called the intelligibility principle for thirty years.
Authentic resources, how to find them, level them, and use them without breaking them.
Vicki Galloway gave the field a working definition of authentic resources in 1998. We still cite it. Three decades on, most Spanish teachers can name a few good sources and have no system for finding, leveling, and using them with their actual students. Here is the system.
Pragmatic competence, the part of Spanish your textbook never taught you to teach.
Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig spent two decades documenting an uncomfortable fact about second-language teaching. Advanced learners can have near-native grammar and pronunciation and still sound rude, distant, or weird because they have never been taught the pragmatics. The fix is small. The omission is large.
Meet the rest of the team.
All ten educators →