Introduction to Spanish

In this introductory Spanish course, I will use all year a classical TPR, a method based on teaching language that focuses on the systematic instruction of vocabulary in a highly comprehensible, personalized and contextualized manner that leads to increased student engagement. Student will be reading storytelling-like scenarios during this classical TPR phase, acting out and answering questions to stories from the very beginning. This course will be guiding the students toward functional communicative proficiency in Spanish. This course is not designed to replace a first-year Spanish course for high-school transcripts.

Hand out the entire chapter vocabulary list the first semester and tell the English meaning of all the words on the list. Students write the English meanings on their vocabulary lists. I believe that this pre-teaching of the vocabulary list enabled students to know exactly what was going on in class. The words are grouped by week. Students knew what we were going to do the next week, what we had done if they were absent, and what to study.

The first semester story is about a boy called Felipe, I wound up writing this story in 10 episodes. The second semester is a story about a girl called Isabella and her adventures; this is a book that I will buy with the material fee asking for this course.

Homework: Will be assigned in each class section as well as from course handouts.