I’m a day late on this week’s blog entry (please be gentle!), but I’ve been reflecting nonstop on something that feels too important not to share: the massive, measurable difference between teaching vocabulary through traditional text and teaching vocabulary through film.
As Spanish teachers, we all want our students to remember what we teach—not just for Friday’s quiz, but months later when they truly need the language. For years, I followed the same pattern so many classrooms use: textbook lists, worksheet drills, and the occasional short reading. Useful? Yes. Transformative? Not really.
And then I started tracking something.
đź“Š Tracking the Data: Film vs. Text
Over the past year, I’ve been quietly graphing vocabulary test scores across multiple levels of Spanish—specifically comparing words introduced through written text to those introduced through film.
The results?
An 85% increase in long-term retention for vocabulary reinforced through film.
Eighty-five percent.
And the pattern wasn’t subtle. I even followed up with students months later—sometimes half a year later—asking them to recall phrases from previous units. The film-supported vocabulary consistently came back to them with ease.
Why? Because film activates sight and auditory processing simultaneously. Students not only hear the target phrase, they see it embodied—contextualized, emotional, human. Language becomes a lived experience rather than a list.
🎧👀 Film Is a Sensory Playground for Memory
When a student seess “¡Espérame!” in a textbook, they acknowledge the meaning.
When a student hears it shouted while a character races to catch a bus or runs across a plaza?
They feel it.
The brain stores meaning differently when the learning is:
- visual
- auditory
- emotional
- contextual
- repeated naturally throughout dialogue
Students begin to use these phrases constantly in class, because they don’t just “know” them—they’ve absorbed them. Many of these expressions aren’t even found in textbooks, yet film provides exactly the platform they need to emerge organically.
These are the moments when students start sounding like actual speakers rather than textbook characters.
🎓 A Student Story That Stopped Me in My Tracks
Last week, a former student reached out to tell me about a Spanish film study she’s currently doing at her university.
She said she didn’t need subtitles for most of the movie—because her vocabulary from our high school film studies carried her.
Her classmates actually asked if she had studied abroad in high school because she was so far ahead.
“Imagine their faces,” she wrote, “when I explained that my Profe pushed immersion through film.”
That message meant everything. Not because it validated my teaching (though it certainly did), but because it reminded me of what’s possible when students experience language—not just memorize it.
🌱 What I Wish for Every Spanish Classroom
I wish more students across the country could learn this way. I wish they could feel that spark when a line of dialogue suddenly becomes something they use with their friends. I wish they could experience that almost magical moment when the subtitles become optional.
Film doesn’t just teach vocabulary.
It cultivates thinkers, observers, and communicators.
It gives students permission to live in the language.
And it leaves a linguistic imprint that lasts far beyond the end of class.
