SPAN 110: Elementary Spanish

SPAN 110-010: Elementary Spanish
(Fall 2018)

04:30 PM to 07:10 PM MW

Innovation Hall 137

Section Information for Fall 2018

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

SPAN 110: Elementary Spanish is a six-credit semester program for beginning students of Spanish, and it starts the basic language requirements for Bachelors of Arts students at GMU. This course is designed around the national standards of foreign language education: communication, cultures, connections, comparisons, and communities. We address those standards through a variety of listening, speaking, reading and writing activities in class and online. We put into practice the FLIPPED-CLASSROOM approach, a pedagogical model in which the typical lecture and homework elements of a course are reversed. In other words, in this class, students are expected to study new material outside of class and be ready to practice in class.

Major Topics to be Covered: Basic greetings; salutations and leave-taking; expressions of time; dates and prices; academic life and subjects; descriptions of people, places, things, and events; likes and dislikes; daily, free-time, and weekend activities; food; family and other relationships, daily routines; housing and household activities; shopping; and accessories and articles of clothing.

Main Grammatical Structures to be Covered: The present tense, personal pronouns, articles and nouns, prepositions, adjectives, adverbs, possessive adjectives, demonstrative adjectives and pronouns, the immediate future, the present progressive, the preterit, and object nouns and pronouns.

LEARNING OUTCOMES:

Upon successful completion of the course students will be able to:

1. understand basic speech such as simple statements and questions, and high-frequency commands used by Spanish speakers in simple conversations;
2. participate in basic communicative exchanges, making statements, formulating commands, and answering and asking questions;
3. understand and analyze the main ideas and some details of texts such as advertisements, announcements, brochures, schedules, restaurant menus, and articles;
4. apply the acquired vocabulary and basic grammatical structures to write short texts with a reader in mind, such as email messages, postcards, announcements, advertisements, simple notes, descriptions, and short narratives;
5. demonstrate a basic level of knowledge and critical understanding of the products, practices, and perspectives of the Spanish-speaking world;
6. use several online tools to learn new material and to practice the four skills.

COURSE PREREQUISITES: This course is for students with no previous knowledge of Spanish or who have had less than two years of Spanish in high school.

PLACEMENT:

If you have studied Spanish in high school (2+ years), you are recommended to take the placement test regardless of how long ago this took place. The only exception is for students enrolling in SPAN 115 AND who have not learned the language outside of the classroom. Students who place into 300-level in the language are awarded 3 credits. Please discuss the foreign language requirement for your degree with your major advisor.
About the placement test: This test is free, does not require advance registration, and is administered in the Modern and Classical Languages Lab, in Aquia Building 336 (Fairfax campus). You should take it prior to the first day of classes in a new semester. For more information, access: http://mcl.gmu.edu/placement-testing or call 703-993-1220.

You do not need to take the placement exam if you have submitted AP, IB or CLEP exam scores to George Mason University as proof of your proficiency in Spanish.

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Course Information from the University Catalog