SPAN 204: Intermediate Spanish
•
Introduction and Course Objectives
•
Required Text and Materials
•
Assignments
•
Final Exam
•
Grading
•
Academic Policies
INTRODUCTION
Aside from the obvious reason of obtaining college credit, there are many important reasons to
continue your study of Spanish. It is now the second most common spoken language in the world
(behind Mandarin Chinese). Of the approximately 400 million native speakers worldwide, almost 40
million live in the United States. By the year 2050, it is estimated that one of every four Americans
will be Latino. Improving your Spanish will enable you to meet new people, explore different cultures,
and participate in growing business opportunities.
Course Objectives
Unlike Spanish courses that are designed to teach Spanish to tourists, this course centers on
communication. Created by linguists who have studied how people best learn to communicate in a
foreign language, the ¡Anda! Curso intermedio textbook and related materials will help you to perfect
your grammar and enhance your vocabulary through the study of the people, culture, and literature
of the Spanish-speaking world. Instead of learning Spanish through a study of its grammatical rules
or through phrases from a guidebook, you will be reviewing grammar while reading and hearing
about cultural issues, debating world issues such as ecology, and analyzing samples of literature. By
the end of the course, you will have gained a much broader appreciation of the culture of Latin
America.
While this course will strengthen your reading, writing, and listening skills, it will give you very little
practice speaking. Several times during the course, you will record yourself speaking in the
MySpanishLab activities. As valuable as this experience is, however, it cannot take the place of a
real conversation. I encourage you to seek out any and all opportunities to speak Spanish! Go to a
Mexican restaurant, speak to neighbors and co-workers, and find conversation partners. This
practice will not only reinforce your work for the course, it will also help you to improve your spoken
Spanish.
REQUIRED TEXT AND MATERIALS
Please see the course description for an up-to-date list of materials.
ASSIGNMENTS
SPAN 204 is comprised of twelve lessons. Each lesson will require you to read, complete grammar
exercises, listen to the audio files or watch a short film on MySpanishLab, and write. You will answer
reading comprehension questions, use grammar points in a variety of exercises, and write about the
content of the lesson. Always think carefully about what you are going to write in Spanish before
beginning. Translating from English does not work and often creates sentences that make no sense,
such as, "Between and drink a chair" (Entre y tome una silla, in Spanish, or "Come in and take a
seat").
Do not use online translation services. Besides being academically dishonest (and it is a violation of
the honor code in this course to use them), you will be cheating yourself out of genuine learning and
practice. In addition, it is always obvious to someone fluent in the language that such a service has
been used (if you doubt this, just read the instructions to some common household products
manufactured in other countries that say things like "Please to not use beneath water"). By the end
of the course, you should find it much easier to express yourself in written Spanish.
The amount of time you need to spend on each lesson will depend on how strong your background
is in Spanish and how long it has been since you last took a Spanish course. If you were taking this
course on campus, you would spend about nine hours per lesson each week (three in-class hours
plus six hours of homework). Make sure that you budget enough time to complete the course within
your time frame! Spending a lot of time on the first few lessons will help you to re-familiarize yourself
with Spanish, and the time required to complete each later lesson should diminish.
Each lesson contains a list of the grammatical and communicative objectives, a discussion of the
topics to be addressed in the lesson, and a detailed list of the assignments. Not all the work you
complete will be graded. Graded work will include completing assignments in the textbook, writing
exercises, and answering reading comprehension questions.
Study Suggestions
The first few pages of Capítulo 12 (pp. 530–531) in the required textbook have some excellent tips
on how to assimilate what you have learned and organize it into a useful review of the course. I find
tip three on page 530 (under “Overall Review Techniques”) to be particularly helpful in thinking about
what it takes to become fluent in another language: "Learning a language is like learning any other
skill, such as playing a musical instrument, playing a sport, cooking, or doing a craft." Just as a
tennis player must spend hours working on a serve, students must spend time on another language,
practicing conjugations.
This is only the beginning, however. A language is much more than its verbs and tenses. Knowing
them is essential to being able to speak fluently, but knowing them is not enough. Language learners
must be able to take the next steps toward building fluency, which means incorporating linguistic
strategies such as paraphrasing, making inferences, and using circumlocution (learning how to find
another way to say what you mean, especially if you cannot remember the word you need). ¡Anda!,
a textbook created by linguists who study how students learn best to speak another language, will
help you to enhance all these skills in your goal to become a fluent Spanish speaker.
Each lesson in SPAN 204 contains reading, writing, and listening assignments and is prefaced by
objectives to help guide you. Be sure to read the objectives, the discussion, and the complete
assignments in each lesson before you begin your work.
As you begin a reading assignment, first look at the pictures and the passage’s title. Learning to read
in a foreign language is difficult because the tendency is to stop at each new work and to look it up.
This is not a good idea! Stopping so frequently will actually impede your reading comprehension.
Before attempting to read a new section, try to form an impression of its subject matter based on the
title and the accompanying pictures or photographs. First, skim the passage, trying to form a basic
impression of what the author wants to convey. What is the central point? Are there characters, and
if so, who are they? What perceptions do you have about the reading? Skimming will help to orient
you to what you are about to read.
Only after skimming the passage should you try reading it with more attention to detail. Although you
will be tempted to look up every unfamiliar word, try to resist the impulse; instead, make inferences
about the content of the work based on what you do understand. Often we learn more by focusing
on what we do understand than on what we do not. If you find that you still do not understand the
passage because of a few words, look them up, paying special attention to context (media hora, for
example, does not mean "stocking hour," but "half hour." Never write the English word over the
Spanish one—underline the word in question and define it at the bottom of the page. The extra effort
required by moving your eyes will help you to remember the word better. Plus, your text will remain
clean enough to read later, after you have memorized the word!
You should employ a similar technique when you read or listen to material online. Before beginning,
first look at the accompanying picture and read the title of the passage to help orient you to what is
to come. Pay attention as well to the different accents represented on the audio clips. Maybe the
next time you're in the grocery store, you'll hear someone speaking in that accent and be able to tell
where he or she is from!
FINAL EXAM
The final exam will be similar to the assignments in the lessons: vocabulary exercises, grammar
exercises, and some brief essays. A careful, thorough review of each lesson will be very profitable in
reviewing for the final. Consult the Final Exam page in the Sakai menu to get a clearer idea of the
format for the exam.
You will need to schedule your supervised final exam through Self-paced Courses at the Friday
Center. No reference material (dictionaries, grammar books, verb conjugation books, computers, cell
phones) may be used during the final exam. You must pass the final exam in order to receive
credit for the course.
GRADING
Your final grade in the course will be composed of the following:
•
Written assignments: 75 percent
•
Final exam: 25 percent
Each assignment will be graded according to the rubric below.
Length and
precision
A: Exceeds
expectations
B: Meets
expectations
C: Approaches
expectations
D or F: Does not
meet
expectations
Includes the
requisite number
Includes the
requisite number
Includes fewer
than the requisite
Supplies fewer
than the requisite
of sentences per
exercise and
contains all the
required
information
of sentences per
exercise and
contains all the
required
information
May have errors,
but they do not
interfere with
communication
May have errors,
but they rarely
interfere with
communication
Grammatical use Makes excellent
and
use of the
sophistication
chapter’s new
grammar
Uses a wide
variety of verbs
when appropriate
Does an excellent
job of using
recycled grammar
to support what is
being said
Makes good use
of the chapter’s
new grammar
Uses a variety of
verbs when
appropriate
Does a good job
using recycled
grammar to
support what is
being said
number of
sentences per
exercise and
contains some of
the required
information
Has errors that
interfere with
communication
Makes use of
some of the
chapter’s new
grammar
Uses a limited
variety of verbs
when appropriate
Does an average
job of using
recycled grammar
to support what is
being said
number of
sentences and
little of the
required
information
If communicating
at all, has
frequent errors
that make
communication
limited or
impossible
Uses little, if any,
of the chapter’s
new grammar
Uses few, if any,
of the chapter’s
verbs or
grammatical
structures
Relies almost
completely on
grammar from
beginning
Spanish course
Vocabulary use
Uses many of the
and
new vocabulary
sophistication of words
use
Uses review
vocabulary, but
focuses
predominantly on
new vocabulary
Uses a variety of
the new
vocabulary words
Uses some of the
new vocabulary
words
Uses few, if any,
new vocabulary
words
Uses some review
vocabulary, but
focuses
predominantly on
new vocabulary
Uses mostly review
vocabulary and
some new
vocabulary
Vocabulary is
almost
completely
review
vocabulary
Effort
The student made The student made
a good effort
an effort
Clearly the
student made
his/her best effort
Little or no effort
went into the
activity
ACADEMIC POLICIES
By enrolling as a student in this course, you agree to abide by the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill policies related to the acceptable use of online resources. Please consult the Acceptable
Use Policy on topics such as copyright, net-etiquette, and privacy protection.
As part of this course, you may be asked to participate in online discussions or other online activities
that may include personal information about you or other students in the course. Please be
respectful of the rights and protection of other participants under the UNC-Chapel Hill Information
Security Policies when participating in online classes.
When using online resources offered by organizations not affiliated with UNC-Chapel Hill, such as
Google or YouTube, please note that the Terms and Conditions of these companies and not the
University’s Terms and Conditions apply. These third parties may offer different degrees of privacy
protection and access rights to online content. You should be well aware of this when posting
content to sites not managed by UNC-Chapel Hill.
When links to sites outside of the unc.edu domain are inserted in class discussions, please be
mindful that clicking on sites not affiliated with UNC-Chapel Hill may pose a risk for your computer
due to the possible presence of malware on such sites.
Honor Code
As a Carolina Courses Online student, you are responsible for obeying and supporting an honor
system that prohibits lying, cheating, or stealing in relation to the academic practices of the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Honor
System also requires you to refrain from conduct that significantly impairs the welfare or the
educational opportunities of others in the University community. You are expected to do your own
work in all aspects of your course.
Academic dishonesty in any form is unacceptable, because any breach in academic integrity,
however small, strikes destructively at the University’s life and work. Outside help of any kind on
any assignment that is to be turned in for a grade is considered academic dishonesty. With
the exception of consultation with your instructor, no help may be received on any homework
assignment or composition. “Help” includes any aid received from personal tutors, friends, native
speakers, or anyone other than your instructor on any assignment. Doing so is a violation of the
honor code.
Please view this brief Plagiarism Tutorial created by the librarians of UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke
University, NC State University, and NC Central University.
Office of Accessibility/Special Accommodations
If you are a student with a documented disability, you can receive services through Accessibility
Resources & Service. You must self-identify through Accessibility Resources to receive services or
accommodation from either of these offices. Accessibility Resources works closely with programs,
offices, and departments throughout the University to help create an accessible environment.
The office is located in Suite 2126 of the Student Academic Services Building (SASB), 450 Ridge
Road, Chapel Hill, NC, and is open from 8 am to 5 pm Monday through Friday. You can contact
them by phone at 919-962-8300 or 711 (NC-RELAY) or by email at [email protected].