Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to Haverford College and Provost David Dawson for granting me the “Teaching with Technology Award” to create this interactive grammar web page.

My heartfelt thanks and admiration go to the talented student aid Laura Perlberger, who is responsible for giving shape to my ideas; she designed the entire web page and, in so doing, exceeded all my expectations. Thank you to Anirudh Suri for giving us a head-start with the design of the grammar exercises. Laura and Anirudh graduated from Haverford College on May 14th, 2006.

Professor Amalia Schweizer deserves special acknowledgement and my sincere thanks for her meticulous proofreading and valuable suggestions.

Hiroyo Saito, of the Language Learning Center, and Barbara Mindell, Jeff White and Sharon Strauss of the Academic Computing Center, at Haverford College, gave me their support and encouragement, for which I am extremely grateful.

To my colleagues in the Spanish Department, I want to express my deepest appreciation for their inspiration and warm collegiality.

Many, many thanks to those friends who translated my English summary of La Mujer into [Catalan], French, [German], Italian, and [Portuguese].

I want to acknowledge José Ávila, General Director of Discos Pueblo, Difusora del Folklore, in Mexico, D. F., for giving me the official permission to use La Mujer in this website. (view letter of permission)

I dedicate this entire project to Ramón García Castro in celebration of his retirement.

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ABOUT THIS PROJECT: A personal account

This webpage was developed by a generous grant from Haverford College in support of “Teaching with Technology.” It was put in its current shape with the valuable assistance of Anirudh Suri and Laura Perlberger, Haverford College graduates (May 2006). We are pleased to share this site with thousands of students and teachers worldwide, hoping that it will ease the confusion that accompanies the double past in Spanish.

One day, while I was listening to Mexican singer Amparo Ochoa I heard La Mujer. I have been using it since then to reinforce the explanation of the Spanish past. La Mujer has been a “favorite” and I have received positive feedback from my students, who continue listening to it during the semester and beyond. La Mujer serves as a useful teaching tool for explaining the difficulties of the two Spanish past tenses in the indicative mode: preterite and imperfect. With more than 30 verbs —both regular and irregular—, this song lends itself to establish the basic differences between one tense and the other. I used to play La Mujer during class while students would fill in the blanks. However, being a long song, there was not enough time to check the grammar and listen to the entire song. I had tried different approaches, including Blackboard, just before the creation of this site.

I have been intrigued by the fact that, even after many years of study, people still have trouble differentiating between the preterite and the imperfect, similar to the difficulties I and Spanish speakers in general have when it comes to short and long vowels. Having studied English since Kindergarten in Ponce, Puerto Rico, I finally started to learn it by listening to popular music. After many years of intense verb conjugation and spelling, I could not speak English, although I was able to read it fluently. It was during the late 1960s that I began to learn and understand the language of Shakespeare, Whitman and Poe. Thanks to the Beatles, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan, among other big hit singers and groups of the time, I started making sense of English. I would sit endless hours listening to their latest songs over and over again until I had written all the lyrics. Of course, this method had two major problems: I failed to write the correct words and I did not understand what they were singing. Occasionally I would take my transcriptions to my English teacher who would decipher what in many instances I had transcribed phonetically, no meaning whatsoever.

Thus began my true understanding of English spelling and grammar, followed by the deeper metaphorical meaning of the words. What sounded to me like chi-lo-viu-ye took real shape and meaning: she loves you yeh. After long hours of playing the same song –lifting the handle of the compact record player with steady pulse–, I would switch to another, then another, and so forth until I had transcribed the entire album. But above and beyond this tedious transcription task was the fact that I began to comprehend and, therefore, to speak English, something we never did in the classroom. The transcription of songs became effortless and enjoyable as I continued listening. Eventually I stopped transcribing as lyrics were being printed on record covers or inserts. With the conviction that listening to popular music undoubtedly had given me a better understanding of the English language and its grammar, I began to incorporate Latin music in my language courses.

Grammar, as I learned it, is the true backbone of language, its rules must be taught, and students must learn them if they want to go further. Coming to terms with this fact was the turning point in my own experience with “el difícil” (the difficult one) as Puerto Ricans refer to English. To my chagrin, I have perceived a decrease in the teaching of grammar in the United States. We, the teachers of “foreign” languages, sometimes find ourselves having to explain the functions of subject, predicate, adjective, in English so our students can grasp the logic behind the language and understand grammar better.

It is quite early in the semester when the itchy past tense is presented to students of Spanish in the double form of preterite —the definite and absolute past as in José met María (only once, at a specific moment)— and imperfect —a moving, continuing, descriptive, and active past as in when they were in the library (they were already in the library before they met; we don’t know how long they were there before nor after they met). The conjugations for the imperfect are “nice and easy.” However, the preterite comes with a whole package of irregular verbs, making this the first complication our students encounter; the second is which past to choose?

We know there is a plethora of materials for teaching Spanish literatures, cultures, and grammar. There is no doubt that the younger generations, today's Digital Natives, having been raised fully immersed in technology, will learn better through the means with which they are totally familiar: web pages, blogs, wikis, etc. Regardless of the time period, popular music incorporates the pulse, the rhythm, and the heart and soul of language. By listening to music, students have the opportunity of experiencing the living expression of the language and the culture they are learning. Be it the preterite and imperfect tenses, subjunctive mood, reflexive verbs, along with struggles of social and political import, human relations, immigration and displacement, there is always a particular song that can illustrate the subject, as it reaches the pupils beyond the confines of the classroom.

May La Mujer guide you smoothly through the sometimes rocky path of grammar. May you too –whether you are a learner or a teacher– find this song and this entire web page useful.

¡Saludos!

Asima F. X. Saad Maura
http://www.haverford.edu/span/spanish/Docs/saad.htm
Haverford College
370 Lancaster Ave.
Haverford, PA 19041-1392

Email me your suggestions/comments.