Vanderbilt Master's Student: English and Spanish Tutor

Lilly M.

Hello! My name is Lilly M, and I am a senior at Wake Forest University. I will earn my bachelor's degrees in Spanish and English and will pursue a Master's in Education at Vanderbilt University after graduation. I am currently writing an honors thesis in Spanish, which compares education systems in Spain and the United States. This research project was inspired by my time studying at the University of Salamanca in Spain in a full-immersion program. I also have experience substitute teaching middle school Spanish and tutoring at the high school and college levels. Additionally, I have volunteer experience in paper editing, and I am certified to teach K through 6 in Florida.

When it comes to second language acquisition, I have found that students benefit from comprehensible input through differentiated instruction. I utilize scaffolding methods and multimodal content to maximize language comprehension and ultimately increase proficiency. In my early years as a Spanish student, I found it overwhelming when teachers would throw out rules to memorize. I intend to build context around those rules and provide multiple avenues to understanding in an effort to make lessons more engaging and digestible. In my time as a 7th and 8th-grade Spanish substitute, I selected a graphic novel and incorporated audio and video to accompany the reading. I found this approach successful and accommodating to diverse learning styles.

As an English major, I have honed my writing skills to be versatile for research papers, creative writing, and literary analysis. A paper workshop with me would look like brainstorming a thesis statement, developing an outline, and creating a list of action verbs and transitional phrases appropriate for the writing assignment. Once you have the structure of the paper, it is much easier to fill in the rest!