- Seminar: 4hrs/week
Class activities may include: conversational activities, discussions of readings and audio-visual materials, oral and aural comprehension and pronunciation exercises, interactive oral presentations, review of syntactic and lexical structures, vocabulary building activities, and one-on-one exchanges with native Spanish speakers.
This course is also intended to increase students’ community engagement and knowledge of the Hispanic culture and may include an experiential learning component.
Only Spanish is spoken in class.
1 Participation in communicative activities in class: conversations, dialogues, group discussions, interviews and interactive presentations.
2 Analysis of audiovisual materials (e.g. films, short documentaries, videos showing authentic language interactions) by completing comprehension and communication activities relevant to their content.
3 Completion of oral tasks such as describing events, experiences and wishes, and expressing opinions and doubt, as well as agreement and disagreement.
4 Study of the vocabulary in context, as well as idiomatic and colloquial expressions.
5 Brief review of grammatical structures as introduced by the materials presented in class.
6 Increase of cultural awareness through the materials analyzed in class and/or participation in a community-engaged learning experience.
By successfully completing this course, students will:
1 Improve their oral communication skills, i.e., intonation, pronunciation and conversation patterns in Spanish and gain confidence when interacting in the target language.
2 Gain fluency in Spanish to describe experiences, events, wishes and to express opinions and doubt, agreement and disagreement.
3 Expand their vocabulary and knowledge of idiomatic grammatical structures in Spanish in order to apply them to a variety of conversational settings.
4 Become familiar with different Spanish accents, social registers and regional uses and able to use intonation and pronunciation patterns appropriately.
5 Expand their cultural knowledge of the Hispanic community and the cultures of the Hispanic world.
Upon successful completion, students are expected to demonstrate oral and aural skills and abilities as independent users of the language.
Evaluation will be based on learning outcomes and course content. Evaluation may include, but need not be limited to, the following tasks:
Class attendance and participation; individual or group oral presentations in class on an assigned topic; community engaged (experiential learning) hours and short reflections on the experience; vocabulary diaries and quizzes, and oral exams.
Sample grade breakdown for this course:
Participation, attendance and preparation: 20%
Oral presentations: 20%
Experiential learning participation and reflections: 20%
Diary of Expressions/Vocabulary: 10%
Mid-term oral exam: 15%
Final oral exam: 15%
Total: 100%
No single evaluation will be worth more than 20%.
The instructor may choose either an intermediate level conversation textbook such as:
Sandstedt, L and Kite, R. (2013). Conversación y repaso: Intermediate Spanish (Eleventh edition). Boston: Cengage Learning.
or compile his/her own materials.
Minimum Grade of C in either Grade 12 Spanish or MODL 1152 (or Assessment).