Eleven-year-old Sofia Devanneaux never expected an optional class project to end in taking the podium at a regional Spanish spoken poetry contest.
But at the 20th Spanish Poetry Contest hosted by the Girls’ Middle School March 11, that’s exactly what happened. After learning Spanish as a fourth language for less than a year, the Los Altos resident tied for second place in the basic Spanish category, which featured 37 contestants from seven schools.
A sixth-grader at the French-American School of Silicon Valley in Sunnyvale, Sofia said every performance was graded in four categories: declamation, intonation, pronunciation and speech. She performed them all successfully in “La Cabra” by Oscar Castro.
To choose their poem, Devanneaux’s Spanish teacher, Veronica Mendoza, gave her participating students a couple of choices, many of which were “out of their regular vocabulary range,” Mendoza said.
“Sofia took this project with her whole heart, and she was working very hard,” the teacher added. “To understand it, she would translate the words into whatever language made the most sense for her, whether to English, French or Farsi. And then after that was declamation, and I didn’t even need to give her any suggestions on her movements since she understood exactly what she was saying.”
Mendoza also pointed out that Sofia’s energy stood out among her peers.
“She put a lot of dramatization on the movement, and her voice was loud enough to communicate and move freely without being attached to a microphone,” Mendoza said. “That became the benchmark for me and her classmates; that was the level of passion and energy I wanted everyone to perform with.”
While Mendoza mainly helped her students clean up their pronunciation and understand vocabulary during class time, Sofia spent many additional hours practicing at home with her mom, Noori Khadem-Devanneaux.
“We practiced and we practiced,” Khadem-Devanneaux said. “We practiced in the shower. We practiced on the way to school. We practiced when she went to bed at night and it paid off.”
Despite competing against many older and more experienced Spanish language students, Sofia trusted the process until the day she was on stage.
“I was so nervous, but when I got on the stage, I thought to myself, ‘I nailed it,’” she said. “And when I got off the stage, everyone was clapping for me, everyone was cheering for me and it was very nice.”
For Sofia, who had never performed poetry or speeches before the contest, much less in a foreign language, this accomplishment may have also helped her find her forte.
“We always wondered what Sofia would be in life, and after this poetry contest, she came through and said, ‘Mom, I think poetry is my thing,’” Khadem-Devanneaux said. “She was like, ‘I just love the feeling of being on stage.’”
Regardless of starting as an underdog, both Khadem-Devanneaux and Mendoza agree that Devanneaux is living proof that “practice makes perfect.”
“When you work hard, does it matter if you are fluent in the language? Does it matter if other schools have bigger (Spanish programs)?” Mendoza said. “Even though she was competing against seventh- and eighth-graders who might have learned the language for multiple years, Sofia’s performance really shined.”
