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

Advanced

This course is designed for students who have completed or tested out of a minimum of four semesters (or six quarters) of college-level Spanish. However, students must take a placement exam to determine the course level into which they will be able to enroll.

Superior

This course is designed for students who have completed or tested out of a minimum of 2 upper-division college-level Spanish courses. However, students must take a placement exam to determine the course level into which they will be able to enroll.

Who is it for?

This seminar is addressed to foreign university students that have an advanced or proficiency level of Spanish and that intend to improve their command of the oral language in academic or formal contexts.

Methodology

In this seminar follows a methodology that combines communication practice in situations where reflection and observation of the resources and linguistic phenomena is common.

Evaluation

In order to follow the progress of the students and the achievement of the objectives, there will be activities of constant evaluation. In addition, at the end of the course, there will be a final exam. The final grade will take into consideration both procedures, giving 60% to the continuous evaluation, and 40% to the final exam.

Materials

All the course material consists of a dossier previously prepared by the teachers.

Course description

1. Objectives

1.1.- The capacity to communicate

- Be able to participate in formal oral communication activities in different spheres of use, academic as well as professional.
- Be able to communicate with sufficient fluency and spontaneity, in a way that the interlocutors hold the communication without effort.
- Be able to intervene orally in diverse ways and lengths (presentation, description, argumentation, participation in debates) adjusting the register to the situation and adopting the adequate tone.

1.2.- Linguistic competences

- To have enough linguistic elements in order to perform all the oral activities according to this competence level, using complex sentences without the need of looking up for words to construct the whole message.
- To have a wide vocabulary according to the academic sphere’s use of the language (and of other professional spheres that students often use) from a generic point of view as well as issues related to the disciplines of their own speciality, using it in precise high level.
- Manifest a good grammar control, even if there are sporadic slip-ups, non-systematic mistakes and small errors in the structure of the sentence, rare and retrospectively corrected.
- Clear and natural pronunciation and intonation

2.- Contents

2.1.- Different situations in formal and academic oral communication

- Presentation of a subject
- Public debate and commentaries on a subject
- Negotiation meeting and the assembly
- Interview with an authority or with someone that holds an important position
- The oral exam
- Work session in collaboration with others in equal position

2.2.- Resources and texts in different situations:

-General structure of each text type
-Discursive strategies (argumentation, exemplification, clarification, reformulation, summary)
-Most common syntactic structures
-Most common lexical and phraseological resources
-Pronunciation and prosody
-Gestures and non-verbal communication
-Polite resources and sociocultural conventions

2.3.- Main communication register and mood contrasts in Spanish

-Most frequent structures and lexis in oral Spanish in opposition to written Spanish
-Most frequent structures and lexis in formal Spanish in opposition to colloquial Spanish

2.4.- Notiofunctional and grammatical structures

The course will work on those that recurrently appear in communicative situations and in texts before mentioned, in a degree of difficulty and of active command equivalent to those of the Proficiency level of Spanish language.