John Cabral is totally fluent in English, Portuguese, and Spanish and is considered a native speaker of the first two of these languages.

He was born in Brazil to an American mother and a Brazilian father but was brought to the U.S. at the age of nine, after a year in the Panama Canal Zone where he first heard spoken Spanish. After junior high school and high school in San Francisco, California, he traveled with his father and sister to Uruguay where he lived for one-and-a-half years, attending pre-university prep classes in Montevideo where he also played on a team in an amateur basketball league. He then returned to Brazil, joining relatives in Recife, Pernambuco, where he took first place in the city-wide university entrance exams.

John lived in Recife, initially, with his Aunt Zuila. Each of his three cousins played acoustic guitar, and Celso, one of his aunt’s college-student boarders, played exceptionally well. Taking informal instruction from Celso, John began learning the songs and rhythms of Brazilian pop and folk tunes that he sings and plays today. After a brief time studying at the university he married and became a full-time teacher of English as a Foreign Language at several local institutes in Recife. A few years later a one-year overland adventure around South America took him through nine different countries and deepened his understanding of Latin American language and culture. He then taught adult literacy classes in the shantytown neighborhoods surrounding Recife.

His desire for university studies finally took him to Mexico City, Mexico, where he obtained a B.A. in sociology from the famed National University of Mexico. He lived there for eight years and developed the “chilango” (Mexico City) accent he tends to fall back on when speaking Spanish. During all of these years John gave private English lessons to speakers of Spanish in homes and in businesses, including classes for top personnel at RCA Victor-Mexico.

After earning a masters degree in community and regional planning from the University of New Mexico, he worked in the predominantly Mexican-American South Valley of Albuquerque and started a growers market there. Since returning to the U.S., John has worked in several predominantly Spanish-speaking neighborhoods, such as the Mesquite Street District in Las Cruces, N.M., the Fifth-Avenue neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, and most recently in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago.

John returned to foreign language teaching in 2004 when he taught Spanish to third-, fifth-, seventh- and eighth-graders at his daughter’s school, Four Winds Waldorf School in Warrenville, Illinois, a far western suburb of Chicago. This one-year stint was his initiation to the very challenging but exciting job of teaching small children. It was also the period when John embraced the Total Physical Response (TPR) approach to language teaching founded by Dr. James Asher.  John is now using TPR with children, including pre-literate first graders, with wonderful results, at Singing Winds Waldorf, now based in River Grove, Illinois, and at the Childrens School in Oak Park, and in private family classes.

John is very excited to be back in the field of foreign language teaching. He is eager to demonstrate how much easier and productive language classes can be, for adults or small children, when they include activities that generate real, meaningful communication from the first moment on.