Spanish

Continuing development of the fundamental aspects of modern Spanish as in SPA 101 with more emphasis on vocabulary/ expressions and grammatical structures.

Aims at further developing students’ Spanish language proficiency in the six aspects of listening, speaking, reading, writing, grammar, and cultural understanding.

Continuation of SPA 201 while further enhancing students’ proficiency level in listening, speaking, reading, writing, grammar, and cultural understanding. Relevant linguistic, sociolinguistic, and cultural information to prepare students for Study Abroad studies is included.

This course is designed to enhance students’ oral fluency and comprehension in Spanish while at the same time increasing their own intercultural awareness. In addition, it is specifically tailored to prepare students for their study abroad (SA) semester. As such, the main objective of the class is to use Spanish as a vehicle to promote their awareness of key concept related to interculturality (e.g., essentialism, stereotyping, otherising). In each class students will be invited to reflect on different types intercultural encounters and how these encounters shaped/will shape their upcoming SA experience: these encounters will be real ones (from students’ own experiences meeting new people) mediated (through videos, narratives, readings) and improvised (through roles plays and improvisations).

This sociolinguistic course expands understanding of the historical development of Spanish and awareness of the great sociocultural diversity within the Spanish-speaking world and its impact on the Spanish language. It surveys Spanish as a language which has undergone a series of transformations since its birth in the Iberian Peninsula, and as the offspring of Latin, in order to explain the diversity and regional variety that exists across the Spanish-speaking world today. In addition, this course revises traditional narratives and explores the notion of ‘Spanish’ as a collection of speaker-based language systems that have been shaped historically by many different forms of multilingual and multidialectal language settings.