Note: A placement exam will be required when you arrive on site.

Beginning

There is no language prerequisite for courses at this language level. However, students must take a placement exam to determine the course level into which they will be able to enroll.

General Objectives:

• Develop linguistic competency for the oral production of the standard Spanish Language in accordance with the student's language level.

• Analyze, in contrastive form, the phonetic systems of Spanish and the student's mother language with the goal of eliminating interference of the latter.

Specific Objectives:

• Know, identify, produce and compare the vocal phonemes and consonants of Spanish.

• Distinguish basic aspects of the points of articulation of Spanish phonemes.

• Identify and orally produce words, phrases, sentences and expressions based on Spanish orthography with its rules and exceptions.

• Identify and produce the exact intonation according to situations in different contexts by way of lecture, presentations, dialogues and/or representations.

• Know social and regional variants of oral expression in the different Spanish-speaking countries.

• Analyze and compare Spanish language vocabulary with its different variants.

Activities:

• Presentation of the vocal phonemes and consonants of universal Spanish for their identification and posterior production.

• Contrast the phonemes of Spanish with the student's mother tongue.

• Oral excercises of the following types: lingual, labial, palatine, glottal, maximum facial, lingual-labial, lingual-palatine, lingual-facial, lingual-dental, labial-dental.

• Oral lecture of narrative texts, dramas, poems, and improvised conversations about the proposed themes.

• Production of the Spanish phonemes via oral lecture, tongue twisters, songs, oral presentations and/or dialogues.

• Identification of diphthongs and hiatuses.

• Separation of words and syllables.

• Identification of the tonic syllable of each word for its correct pronunciation.

• Classification of words according to the number of syllables and the location of the tonic syllables(sharp, plains, proparoxytone and sobresdrújulas).

• Apply rules of accentuation and exceptions.

• Identification of the diverse types of intonation by means of auditive activities and oral production.

Evaluation:

The evaluation is based on the types of exercises outlined above: formal evaluations in class and cumulative evaluations averaged into the final grade.