More on Newt Gingrich's Spanish Lessons
Joe DeSantis, the director of communications for a public relations firm working for Newt Gingrich, passed on some additional information about the former House Speaker's study of Spanish.
The classes are being provided by an Atlanta-based institute, Bilingual America. (The institute's name seems a bit ironic, given that Mr. Gingrich reportedly said last weekend that "allowing bilingualism to continue to grow is very dangerous." But of course, I have to remember that he's offered a clarification for what he said last week.)
Mr. DeSantis says that Mr. Gingrich has studied 100 hours of a 280-hour Spanish course offered by the institute. In the first 120 hours, he is focusing mostly on vocabulary development and structure. After that, he'll focus on pronunciation, speech flow, and advanced structure. "When he finishes the course," Mr. DeSantis wrote in an e-mail, "Bilingual America projects him to communicate at a professonal level of Spanish or at the advanced-plus to superior level as rated by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages."
Comments
So, Newt Gingrich is studying Spanish online: What's Next?
Go onto the Bilingual America website to see the method he's using to learn Spanish. Guess what? Basically, it's a bilingual model.
Click on: http://www.bilingualamerica.com/main/faq.htm
1. What's the difference between the Spanish PowerT courseware and other programs I can buy?
A. Methods. Most programs use an immersion approach to training adults. Spanish PowerT uses a progressive bilingual approach in which you are taught first in English what you are doing and then how to do the same identical thing in Spanish. >
So, let's get this straigh. Newt Gingrich, a right-wing conservative Republican, is learning Spanish using a "progressive bilingual approach" while publicly bashing bilingual education, pushing English immersion for the ELL masses, and associating bilingual education (by extension, Spanish, the language of the majority of ELL students) with "the language of living in the ghetto". And, he wants to be nuestro Presidente.
Newt may learn Spanish; but, will he learn not to "speak with a forked tongue"?
Luis O. Reyes
New York City
Posted by: Luis O. Reyes | April 8, 2007 12:35 AM
I'LL WAGER A SMALL BET THAT IN 10 YEARS ALL TRUCKERS IN THE USA WILL OVER. NAFTA ALLOWS MEX TRUCKERS FREE TRAVEL ALL THE BUSINESS THEY WANT. THE NEXT STEP WILL BE TO OPEN PORTS IN MEXICO TO ALLOW MEX TRUCKERS TO DELIVER EVERYTHING TO US COMPANIES BECAUSE ITS CHEAPER. WE WILL BE ALLOWED TO PAVE ALL THE ROADS DOWN THERE TOO. YOU ARE 4
RIGHT. WE HAVE A 100 YR, WAR ON OUR HANDS. THE DEMS ARE "PC" WHICH SPELLS A DOWN FALL LIKE EURABIA. GIVE THEM HELL, NEWT.
Posted by: O.L. RUSS | September 10, 2007 1:00 PM