Lourdes Filicco

Brazilian Portuguese Teacher

Lourdes Filicco came to New York to study English. She fell in love with the city and stayed to teach Portuguese here.

A lawyer and the author of the 40-chapter self-study textbook, Ultimate Portuguese, Lourdes has been a Portuguese language instructor at Rennert's school since 1982. She arrived in New York two years before that, working briefly as a lawyer here. But Lourdes found the allure of teaching too strong.

"The reason I love teaching is because I love people and I love to talk," says the affable Rennert teacher with a chuckle. "The other reason is that you have a chance to meet very, very interesting people. I have had actors and playwrights in my classes. I have even had the lady who owns the company that creates the signs on Broadway in my classes."

Lourdes' most famous student was the actress Phylicia Rashad, who played the part of Bill Cosby's wife on the television show Cosby. Lourdes met Ms. Allen while walking home from a Rennert class in midtown Manhattan one day.

"She was walking her dog and I was kind of scared of it," Lourdes says. The two women struck up a conversation and eventually Ms. Allen said she was interested in learning Portuguese. "She stayed with me for a year," Lourdes says. Lourdes also has taught the British singer Joe Jackson, a Swedish ambassador, a retired judge from Germany, and several lawyers and journalists, among many other students.

Lourdes has been a Portuguese language instructor for the State University of New York at New Paltz's Portuguese immersion program for six years. She holds a Masters Degree in Portuguese and Brazilian Literature from Catholic University in São Paulo, Brazil, and a Juris Doctorate from Estácio de Sá University, Rio de Janiero, Brazil.

Her book Ultimate Portuguese was published in 1999 by the Living Language department of Random House. It is now in its third printing. Lourdes also wrote the dialogues that accompany the book.

When teaching Portuguese at Rennert's language school, Lourdes places a strong emphasis on conversational learning techniques. "I give my students the basics of grammar and try to make it as easy as possible for them," she says.

At the beginning of each course, Lourdes tells her students, "I will give you the ingredients and then we will start putting the sentences together." At that point, she teaches her class how to build sentences that will enable students to carry on a basic dialogue in the foreign language. "For instance, I teach them how to do greetings and discuss nationality, profession, where they live, about personality traits such as intelligence and dedication and physical traits such as eye and hair color, etc."

Lourdes likes working at Rennert because of the people here. "I feel at home when I'm at Rennert because it's such a lovely friendly environment," she says. "Whenever I run into one of my colleagues, we always exchange a few sentences in each other's language. That is very important to me because foreign languages is one of my passions."