About Joel E Zárate
Thank you for visiting my website! Welcome everybody! I am thrilled that you are visiting my website to learn Spanish through my various resources and podcasts.
I love teaching Spanish, and it is exciting to be able to help you in your journey to learn Spanish or to improve your Spanish as well as information that can help you become a better language learner and understand what you can do to have a good experience learning a language and how to be effective at learning another language.
I also share with you materials, specially vocabulary lessons, to help you learn Spanish and other languages. I love learning languages, and I particularly enjoy learning vocabulary. This is more of a side project that I will be working on as time permits.
Jus to share a little bit about myself with all of you, I was born and raised in Mexico City, and I moved to the United States as a teenager. Having finished High School in Mexico, I continued my studies at the Santa Rosa Junior College in Santa Rosa, California. Since I didn’t speak any English at the time, I began taking English as a Second Language courses.
I enjoyed tremendously learning English, and at the time, I didn’t know that learning and teaching English would be part of my life’s endeavor. While I was studying at the Santa Rosa Junior College and then at the university, I worked as a Spanish and English as Second Language tutor, and that's when I discovered how much I loved helping others learn Spanish and English, and I decided that I would pursue a career as a language instructor.
I won't go into more detail about my education and qualifications because I am sharing that down below, particularly for those of you how are language teachers and listen to my podcast, "HOW TO TEACH A LANGUAGE: A WORKSHOP FOR ONE-ON-ONE LANGUAGE TEACHERS," and who would like to know more about my qualifications to offer advice on how we learn languages, ideas to teach a language and general information from the field of Second Language Acquisition.
In brief, I love teaching languages, I love learning languages, and I love learning everything there is to know about how we acquire languages; that is to say, how we put language in our subconscious so that we can speak fluently without having to think about or analyze what we are saying. I hope you enjoy this space, this universe, that I am creating to help you learn Spanish, English and a few other languages. Little by little, page by page, I am going develop this universe with tons of things to do.
Education
The California State University, Sonoma (Sonoma State University).
Master of Arts in Education with Concentration in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL).
Self Designated Emphasis
in Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Pedagogy and Theory.
The California State University, Sonoma (Sonoma State University).
Master of Arts in Spanish: Literature, Language, and Pedagogy.
Self Designated Emphasis
in Spanish Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Pedagogy and Theory.
The California State University, Sonoma (Sonoma State University).
Graduate TESOL Certificate.
The California State University, Sonoma (Sonoma State University).
Bachelor of Arts in Spanish with Departmental Distinctions.
University of California, Santa Barbara
Summer Workshop on Foreign Language Teaching.
The Santa Rosa Junior College
Associate of Science with Highest Honors.
Emphasis on Computer Science and Web Design.
The Santa Rosa Junior College
Associate of Arts with Highest Honors.
Emphasis in Communication Studies.
Languages
Spanish: Native Speaker.
English: Near Native Speaker.
French: Advanced, Fluent.
Italian: Advanced, Fluent.
Portuguese: Advanced, Fluent.
Japanese: Beginner
Russian: Beginner
German: Beginner