Eduardo González
The philologist and expert in teaching Spanish to foreigners, Álvaro García Santa-Cecilia, has been appointed academic director of the Instituto Cervantes.
The appointment of Álvaro García was published this Thursday by the Official State Gazette (BOE), just one day after the meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Instituto Cervantes, held at the Royal Palace of El Pardo in Madrid and chaired by the King and Queen. The position had been vacant since last July, when the then academic director, also a philologist, Carmen Pastor, was appointed to direct the Cervantes centre in Munich.
Specifically, the director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, referred in his speech before the Board of Trustees to the work of Carmen Pastor and the new academic director. “Carmen Pastor has been the Academic Director of the Instituto Cervantes for the last few years,” explained García Montero.
“He has just left the headquarters to strengthen our presence in Germany from Munich and to launch an extension at the University of Zurich,” but “before leaving, together with the new director, Álvaro García Santa-Cecilia, he prepared a report on current events in which a continuous growth curve in teaching, training and certification can be observed,” he added.
A doctor in Hispanic Philology from the Complutense University of Madrid and a graduate in Philology and Law from the same university, Álvaro García Santa-Cecilia has been a professor in the Department of Spanish for Foreigners at the Official School of Languages in Madrid (since 1986), a visiting professor at the University of Rostock (Germany, 1989-90) and a technical teaching advisor at the Ministry of Education (1990-91).
Ávaro García joined the Instituto Cervantes in 1991, the same year it was founded. Since 1995 he has held the position of head of the Department of Academic Planning and until now he has held the position of academic deputy director. During all these years at Cervantes, he has been responsible, among other tasks, for the design and development of the curriculum and the coordination of the academic activity of the teaching teams of the network of centers of the Institute.
In addition, he has been the general coordinator of the three-volume work ‘Plan curricular del Instituto Cervantes. Niveles de referencia para el español’, published in 2006. He is a regular contributor to training courses for teachers of Spanish as a Foreign Language (ELE) at universities and teaching centers specialized in language teaching and the author of various publications on the teaching of ELE.
According to the balance sheet presented by García Montero to the Board of Trustees, academic activity in the period 2023-2024 has left “good numbers”: 4,431. 605 hours per student, 116,467 enrolments and 68,161 permanent students in the network, 132,256 candidates for the Diploma in Spanish as a Foreign Language, 170,601 candidates for the Certificate of Knowledge of the Constitution and the Spanish social and cultural reality, 16,551 candidates for the International Service for the Evaluation of the Spanish Language, 120 candidates for the Diploma of Teaching Accreditation, 215 new centres accredited in the assessment of their quality as Centres for Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language and 11,833 attendees at the Cervantes courses for training Spanish teachers. These figures, he assured, “exceed the bankruptcy of activities that occurred in 2019 due to the pandemic”.
