Course Objectives

Upon successfully completing this course, you will be able to engage in the following actions:

  1. Listening: The student will be able to understand sentence-length utterances on a variety of topics including personal interests, leisure activities and cultural events in Spanish-speaking countries. Students will be able to understand a native speaker speaking slowly on the telephone, and short radio and television announcements.
  2. Speaking: The student will be able to initiate, sustain, and close a general conversation with a number of strategies appropriate to a range of circumstances and topics. The student will generally be understood even by native speakers who are not accustomed to conversing with non-native speakers, although some repetition may still be required.
  3. Reading: The student will be able to read consistently with full understanding simple connected texts dealing with basic personal and social needs about which the reader has personal interest and/or knowledge. The student will be able to read brochures, articles from Spanish-language newspapers and magazines, and short examples of literary prose and poetry by Hispanic authors.
  4. Writing: The student will be able to meet most practical writing needs. S/he will be able to take notes in some detail on familiar topics and respond in writing to personal questions. S/he will be able to write simple letters, brief synopses and paraphrases, summaries of biographical data, work and school experience. The student’s writing, though faulty, will be generally comprehensible to natives used to the writing of non-natives.
  5. Culture: The ACTFL standards include Culture, Connections, Comparisons and Communities as part of foreign language instruction and assessment. Within these areas, students will be able to:
    • Demonstrate an understanding of the relationship between the practices and perspectives of the culture studied
    • Demonstrate an understanding of the relationship between the products and perspectives of the culture studied
    • Acquire information and recognize the distinctive viewpoints that are only available through the foreign language and its cultures
    • Demonstrate understanding of the concept of culture through comparisons of the cultures studied and their own
    • Use the language both within and beyond the school setting
    • Read, discuss and write about topics concerning the Spanish-speaking cultures featured in textbooks and in target language media at the intermediate level