Stylistically the type of audio lessons we’d like to create are similar in structure to Language Transfer and Michel Thomas. Although, the content of our lessons will vary significantly, we appreciate the general way they present information. Essentially, you take an example student through a scripted lesson (scripted on your part, not on theirs), you guide them gently through the information you want them to know, let them answer your scripted questions, and you lead them to finding the right answers.
We want to create lessons where no complex grammatical terms are brought up (preterite, subjunctive, etc.). Although, simple terms such as subject, object, verb, future and past tense are fine. We want lessons to feel natural and effortless to listen to, almost as if you were sitting down with a friend who was walking you through the basics of the language in a digestible and clever manner.
Imagine that your friend, when teaching you, they:
Guide you through the most critical and important concepts for you to know in order to start having proper conversations.
Bring up how you might already be familiar with a certain concept because of X or Y thing English speakers already do.
Mention how a certain concept or way of expression came to be in Spanish (history / etymology).
Can notice when you are confused and trying to find the word they’ve taught you and they can bring back the history surrounding the concept or mental imagery that aids you in find your answer.
Notice when you try to rush out an incorrect answer and get you slow down and break down your response word by word.
Bring up the words/concepts you learned in previous lessons in order to refresh them and connect them to new words/concepts being taught.
That the general vibe we’d like to have and the lessons we’d like to create.
At a fundamental level, language is simply a way for humans to express concepts to one another. The concept of something “being/existing,” or something having happened in the past, etc. Yet, the way we express the same concepts varies from language to language. I.e. In English it’s “I love you” where in Spanish it’s “te quiero” (to you I want). A good course creator would highlight that difference in a way that’s easy to understand, a great creator would do that AND explain why Spanish puts “te” or the pronoun in front of “quiero.”
As a course creator your role is to show how to express the concepts in Spanish that make up everyday speech. Your job is to clearly explain what those concepts are, why they are important to know, how certain concepts relate between languages, how they are expressed in Spanish vs. English, any special reason why those concepts are expressed differently and to tie them to what the student already knows in English.
In more practical terms, we are looking for someone who can intelligently choose the 20 or more concepts/topics they feel are the most important for the student to know. Arrange them in the optimal order and create 20 fun/interesting lesson scripts (5-10 minutes each) explaining those concepts/topics in the style we mentioned above....with the goal of getting the student forming full sentences and speaking quickly.
Lastly, we’d like the course creator to use common vocabulary as tool to help the student learn how to construct sentences and express themselves. You won’t need to make learning vocabulary a main focus of your lessons at all, since we’ve got something else for vocabulary. That said, we’d prefer that if you are explaining how to say I/he/she likes something, that you might say “He likes fruit” and not “He likes geometric shapes”. If you introduce new vocabulary to help you explain concepts make sure that they are words that you believe would be within the most common 3000 Spanish words.
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