Intermediate Conversational Spanish: Daily & Practical Uses

The purpose of this course is to improve your fluency at the intermediate level in order to interact more comfortably with the host community. Grammar foundations developed in your previous Spanish courses will be reviewed and new grammar structures introduced to develop stronger oral communication strategies.

As a student in linguistic immersion you have a unique opportunity to engage local people in order to increase both your linguistic and intercultural skills. Designed for students who have at least a beginning understanding of Spanish, this course offers a structured learning environment for directed study of Spanish phonetics and the acquisition of intermediate-level and action-based conversations appropriate to the immersion experience such as: discussing current topics and news, going to the doctor, planning a trip, giving opinions or advice, and accepting and refusing invitations. Over the course of the semester, you will hone your intermediate-level competences in oral communication through an interactive and intercultural approach that will also enable you to further develop your personality and sense of identity in your communications and engage more deeply in the enriching experience of otherness in both language and culture.

Your goal, therefore, is to systematize competencies related to listening and oral production so as to effectively achieve acts of speech such as "talking about preferences","expressing feelings in specific situations", and "explaining personal anecdotes and future expectations and plans". This course also focuses on pronunciation to improve your accent. You will practice Spanish sounds improving your tone, intonation and rhythm. While vocabulary and grammatical competencies are not formal objectives in this course, reviewing them is a necessary step to making progress in this course. This course is also appropriate for students with greater writing and reading competence in Spanish but who are lacking equal proficiency in listening and speaking.

Conducted entirely in Spanish, this class requires daily preparation as well as a high level of personal engagement during class meetings. While the instructor does not expect you to understand every word said in class, you should listen/look for patterns and contextual clues to gain an overall understanding of the situation and meaning. Learning to achieve a general understanding from speech and text that you may not entirely understand is a powerful tool that will hone your ability to understand your environment as you navigate your way through Spanish-speaking cultures.