It organises this seminar in Maputo together with the AECID and the Spanish Embassy

The Cervantes Institute is holding the first training seminar for Spanish teachers in Mozambique

photo_camera PHOTO/ARCHIVO - Instituto Cervantes headquarters in Madrid

The Spanish Embassy in Mozambique, the Cervantes Institute and the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) are organising a training seminar for teachers of Spanish as a foreign language (ELE) in Mozambique, one of the African countries where the demand for learning Spanish has increased the most.

The Academic Director of the Instituto Cervantes, Carmen Pastor Villalba, is taking part in these training sessions in the capital, Maputo, which are being held until Friday 8, also co-organised by the Ministry of Education and Human Development of the Republic of Mozambique.

This is the first time that a seminar for Spanish teachers has been held in this African country. The objectives are to contribute to the linguistic, cultural and pedagogical updating of the teachers attending, and to build networks of contact with and between teachers of Spanish as a foreign language in that country.

In addition to Carmen Pastor, the course will be taught by Ana Isabel Vargas, currently a teacher at the Cervantes Institute in Munich and previously at those in Brasilia, Prague and Dublin, and Uriel Valencia Guerra, coordinator and teacher of Spanish at the Portuguese School in Mozambique, examiner and head of the DELE (Spanish diploma) in that country and co-author of the article 'Spanish in Mozambique', from the book 'Teaching Spanish in Sub-Saharan Africa' (2014).

The sessions have a practical nature, with a participatory methodology and working with materials used in the classroom, to exemplify the topics addressed.

The teachers enrolled address, among other contents, how to exercise oral and written expression and interaction, learn Spanish through literature and through songs, teach grammar, online resources, exercise reading and listening comprehension, or the particularities of teaching Spanish to Portuguese speakers.

The organisation of this first seminar in Mozambique is part of the strategy of the Instituto Cervantes and AECID to collaborate in the training of Spanish teachers in various countries of sub-Saharan Africa, a subcontinent with more than 1.6 million students of Spanish and a great potential for the growth of our language.

With the aim of strengthening the presence of Spanish and its culture, the Cervantes Institute will soon open its centre in Dakar (Senegal), the first to open in sub-Saharan Africa, whose refurbishment work was visited by President Pedro Sánchez on 9 April, and which will be "a pole of Spanish influence" in this vast area of the world.

Submitted by José Antonio Sierra, Hispanismo advisor

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