About Tacoma Language Academy

Tacoma Language Academy was founded in 2024 to help bring the joy of language learning into the lives of members of the Puyallup community. Our mission is to provide exceptional learning experiences that promote true acquisition of the target language. We want to facilitate your journey to becoming bilingual and biliterate.

The Founder’s Story

Andrew started learning Spanish in high school in 2001. Fate was on his side when, in his second year of study, he landed in a class with a teacher that used stories as a foundational pillar for language acquisition. Andrew would listen of a level-appropriate story over several days in class, read the same story at home, write a summary of the different sections, and then tell the story out loud to the teacher. This cycle lasted two school years. Over that time, Andrew felt himself becoming steadily more fluent in Spanish. In fact, he was falling in love with the language.

In college, Andrew’s passion for Spanish grew. He studied abroad. He earned an BA in Spanish and entered graduate school. He taught Spanish while he studied, and his favorite two courses were the intensive language pedagogy classes.

Yet, his students weren’t getting the same experience. He wondered why almost no one seemed to learn grammar from grammar explanations. And, most importantly, he missed the stories.

After earning his Masters in Spanish, Andrew became a Spanish instructor and has never looked back. It was time to start adding stories back into the mix. He become obssessed with making himself a better teacher. He attended storytelling workshops and teacher trainings. He devoured books on storytelling, teaching, and leadership. He started learning new languages to experience what it is like to be a beginner with fresh eyes. He did anything and everything that might make teaching Spanish more effective and enjoyable for his students.

The result of all that time and energy was the creation and evolution of a highly effective, engaging, and fun language learning system called CI Immersion™. It is this system that is the foundation for instruction at Tacoma Language Academy.