AP Spanish Language Syllabus



AP Spanish Language Syllabus SCASD: D. Webber 2006-7

Background

State College Area High School is located in central Pennsylvania near The Pennsylvania State University. It is a public institution whose population is fed by ten elementary schools and two middle schools. Total enrollment for the district nears 7300. The high school comprises grades nine through twelve, approximately 2400 students. Two separate buildings, situated across the street from one another, between which the pupils travel from one period to the next depending upon subject area and regardless of grade level, are used for instruction. Courses range from regular to honors and advanced. The graduation rate is 96%, and about 86% of those graduates move on to institutions of higher education.

SCASD offers around fifteen advanced placement courses, three of which are for the German, French, and Spanish languages. It is during the sixth grade middle school year that SCASD students typically begin to explore which language they would like to learn. After that, they normally attend and every-other-day program for seventh grade and level I for eighth grade, in order to be prepared for level V by senior year. Some students elect to take the AP® exam during level four, and some not at all. Classes for Spanish V 2006-7 are expected to be three sections of twenty students each.

Course Description

This course consists of skill building toward communicative competence using a communicative language teaching format as described by Savignon (1983, 1997). This naturally involves practicing the oft-mentioned ‘four skills’ of reading, writing, listening, and speaking, plus culture in preparation for the Advanced Placement® Spanish Language Examination. A wide variety of instructional activities and assessments are employed to ensure a highly interactive and stimulating class. Students navigate a cross-curricular review of message mechanisms present in a multi-genre, international selection of works spanning recent centuries and modern times. They will use what they learn in practical applications with an eye toward constant improvement and an attitude of lifelong learning, demonstrating cognizance of the value of conference.

Course Objectives

Students will regularly participate in discourse involving a continuum of variations in personal contacts and attempt to analyze the significances which hone critical thinking, reflective observation, and self-evaluation skills. In the process, they will apply personally relevant decoding and disquisitive strategies with regard to several content areas and props to increase accuracy of expression and reception of information. In so doing, they will convey and interpret meaning through several vessels of colloquy, exploring culturally-associated themes and common threads through a multitude of exercises. Students will gain exposure to available and appropriate Spanish language media to the maximum possible extent.

Rationale

First priorities are helping students to personally connect with the material and building classroom community. Focus is on development within the four facets of communicative competence: sociocultural, strategic, discourse, and grammatical. Understanding of the social context, using coping mechanisms to avoid communication breakdown, maintaining the interconnectedness of the dialogue, and attending to grammar are essential to interchange. Through specially designed events, participators negotiate meaning as they share information while keeping in mind their social roles and the function of their interaction. They attend to turn-taking, appropriateness of content, tone of their message and nonverbal cues. They ask for information, clarify, circumlocute when necessary, and use other unique resources depending upon mode of communication . . . and other linguistic agents to maintain contact with their partner(s).

This method of ‘talking’ permits language evolution – ways of speaking construct ways of understanding, and vice versa. Learners process information in top-down and bottom-up fashion, using the gist to interpret particular pieces of the message while at other times considering the discrete items in the text to determine meaning of the whole. And nurturing coherence (relation of sentences to topic) and cohesion (local connectors, structural links) during the exchange can be especially challenging depending again on mode of communication and number of interlocutors involved. Of course, they employ rules of lexicon, morphology, syntax, and phonology to facilitate comprehension and expression.

Savignon’s Communicative Language Teaching Model includes the components of Language Arts, Language for a Purpose, My Language is Me (personal use of the language being learned), You’ll be – I’ll be (theatre arts), and Beyond the Classroom.

This format allows for gradual student development within Spanish. It provides an atmosphere in which students are able to learn through errors, converse about current events, cross-curricular issues, and personal interests, nurture their own Spanish identity, and revert to English when necessary rather than to constantly strive toward an imaginary ‘native-like’ communication style. The teacher guides while the student functions in Spanish managing messages.

Activities

Students perform and/or view skits, dialogues, plays, vignettes, pantomimes. They socialize with Spanish speakers and explore all available media pertinent to Spanish. They participate in short informal debates, interviews, question-and-answer sessions, peer presentations, elaborations, summaries, translations (if desired), vocabulary-building, self-revision, brainstorming, revising according to teacher and peer feedback to include pinpointing errors, cuing, providing sample answers, rephrasing, directly correcting, and so on. Other classroom events include intralevel and interlevel peer revision, monitoring one another and sometimes suggesting corrections, public rewriting using LCD projector, games, word play, inventing, creating, and demonstrating. Students use teacher made materials, magazines, the internet, manipulatives, classroom displays, artifacts, and any other resources available.

Communicative competence is measured in terms of fluency, comprehensibility, effort, and amount of communication in unrehearsed tasks. Evaluation is ongoing and emphasizes abilities of learners. It takes into consideration the dynamic negotiation of meaning in addition to written, spoken, paralinguistic, and non-verbal aspects of output. Although this is not precisely consistent with perhaps more stereotypical pedagogical approach, it is believed that students will achieve acceptable scores on the AP test via the experience they gain through this course.

The instructor supplements text units to include various genres of literature, art, music, and foods pertinent to each major Spanish-speaking country. Students have some choice in studying pieces and people from times which most interest them. They are not limited to instructor suggestions, which are not meant to be exhaustive and which are based upon materials most immediately available in our educational context. The chart below is intended not to be the end all and be all but rather used as a starting point, for reference.

Of course, typical grammar exercises, practice sheets, and paper-and-pencil text-based tests are used along with multiple choice reading comprehension, multiple choice listening practices, in-class essays, and picture story practices recorded on computer, commensurate with the AP® exam sections.

The AP® exam is held usually during the first full week in May, which is a month before final exams begin in our school district. Also, not all students take the exam. Therefore, presentations and senior speeches are given during the last month of class and commensurate instruction and evaluation continues. All students participate in the culminating activity for the year during final exam time.

Course Outline

|Mo |Less |Vocab |Grammar |Culture |Literature|Commun |

|1. |¿ Has hecho la tarea? |[pic]0 |[pic]1 |[pic]2 |[pic]3 |[pic]4 |

|2. |¿ Has hablado en Español con la Sra.? |[pic]0 |[pic]1 |[pic]2 |[pic]3 |[pic]4 |

|3. |¿ Usaste el Español durante actividades? |[pic]0 |[pic]1 |[pic]2 |[pic]3 |[pic]4 |

|4. |¿ Lo usaste en la clase con los compañeros? |[pic]0 |[pic]1 |[pic]2 |[pic]3 |[pic]4 |

|5. |¿ Tuviste una actitud buena? |[pic]0 |[pic]1 |[pic]2 |[pic]3 |[pic]4 |

Bottom of Form

Vocabulary and Grammar - Regular textbook-type tests.

Culture points - Range from 0-20 depending upon complexity of student

choice for project done.

Resources

Gomez, Aurelia. (1992) Crafts of Many Cultures. New York, NY: Scholastic, Inc.

Jarvis, A.C., Lebredo, R., and Mena-Ayllon, F. (2003) ¡Continuemos! Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co.

Kauchak, D., Eggen, P., and Burbank, M.D. (2005). Charting a professional course: Issues and controversies in education. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Person Prentice Hall.

National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project, Standard for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century. Lawrence, Kansas: Allen Press, 1999

Pennsylvania Department of Education. (2002) Proposed Academic Standards for World Languages. . Accessed July 16, 2006.

Sandstedt, L., Kite, R., and Copeland, J.G. (2004) Literatura y Arte: Intermediate Spanish. Boston: MA: Heinle.

Savignon, S. (1983). Communicative Competence: Theory and Classroom Practice, Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.

Savignon, S. (1997). Communicative Competence: Theory and Classroom Practice, 2nd ed. New York: McGraw Hill.

Terzian, Alexandra. (1993) The Kids’ Multicultural Art Book. Charlotte, VT: Williamson Publishing Co.

Wiggins, G., and McTighe, J. (1998). Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

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