Course Description
A course designed to enable a student to acquire the competences established by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages in Spanish at B1 level in the following areas: Grammar, morphology and phonetics, Oral and written expression, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, vocabulary related with the areas covered.
Course Summary
Spanish for international students was a great opportunity to better my grammar. Under the instruction of José María Rodríguez, he provided the class with many lectures pertaining to grammar rules in Spanish. Learning these concepts was a great challenge to me because most of these rules I had internalized intuitively at a young age. I can write using correct rules but I am unable to identify or explain them. On the other hand, many of the other students that were learning Spanish as a second language were able to easily identify these rules and explain them. On the other hand, they would make common mistakes when accidentally applying their mother tongue to Spanish. Interestingly this was a great example of what I had learned previously in my Intro to Linguistics class. Beyond the lectures the profesor would have us work on many written exercises and he would correct the work for us and explain why it was a mistake and then teach how to correctly fix it. We also watched many videos in Spanish where we were asked to interpret the information and identify any rules that we have learned in class to use examples from the videos to explain them. As part of the final exam, the class was asked to work on a final project where we would pick an underrated location in Madrid and write a description of where it is located and why we would recommend someone to go. Through out the semester we collected information, pictures, and wrote out our practice samples to write for the exam. The professor did a great job at integrating many aspects of Madrid culture to our learning. He seemed very passionate in sharing information to us that would better help us adapt to our new surroundings. He explained many common sayings pertaining to the coloquial language in Madrid and even went as far as explaining the education system. Although the class was principally geared towards establishing better language skills, he incorporated fun and interesting information that helped with our learning.
Work Sample
N/A