This week we were honoured to welcome Deepika Vasudevan, as our final guest for 2025.
Deepika, an English teacher from India who started teaching around 2013, is currently doing her PhD in applied linguistics and is based in Spain. She has been teaching all sorts of people, ages, and Englishes for almost 12 years now. She is a dedicated language enthusiast, or “nerd,” who particularly enjoys discussing the social and historical aspects of English, including the different varieties that exist and their perceived validity.
Deepika came to Spain in 2022 through a teaching assistant program and eventually stayed to pursue her PhD. She is based in Teruel, a city they sometimes call “the empty part of Spain“.
We discussed the cultural adjustment she faced moving from India to Spain. Although she had previously lived in the U.S. and was accustomed to cultural shock, Spain offered a different kind, particularly in navigating new social situations while learning Spanish.
When we shifted our conversation to advice for our students, Deepika emphasised that learning a language is often mistakenly linked to achieving a “perfect“ native speaker accent. Her biggest piece of advice is to dissuade students from chasing that unrealistic narrative. She stressed that communication boils down to being a two-way street.
The core goal is expressing your ideas, understanding the other person’s ideas, and meeting in the middle.
Deepika strongly advocates for learners to build a conversational “toolbox” to navigate breakdowns. This involves first identifying the specific issue impeding understanding—is it noise, speed, or unknown words/expressions? Once identified, the learner can then reach into their toolbox for the perfect expression to resolve the matter.
She provided a key distinction: rather than simply asking “Can you repeat that?” (which may just lead to the speaker repeating the same unknown words louder and slower), students should ask “What do you mean by that?“ when the difficulty is understanding the definition of a word or expression.
She encouraged learners to embrace their whole multilingual identity and draw on all their resources to get things done in the world, rather than seeking to fit into a standardised “perfect” box.
Perfect advice!
