Course Offerings in Spanish
Spanish 100 Listening Comprehension & Verbal Fluency Development
This is a fast-track, 100-hour program consisting of 60 hours of Listening Comprehension development and 40 hours of Verbal Fluency development designed to enable the participant to understand much of what is spoken in Spanish in normal face-to-face conversations, and to be able to speak it with passable fluency that can be understood by a native speaker of Spanish. The course is ideal for those who wish to test out of 2nd Year college Spanish, for those who wish to travel to a Spanish-speaking country and move about with reasonable ease, and for those seeking to interact more with Spanish-speaking friends, colleagues and acquaintances in South Florida. It is not designed to enable the participant to successfully perform job duties in Spanish; for that purpose, we recommend Spanish 200 -A & B, outlined below.
Spanish 200-A. Listening Comprehension Development
Phase A of the 200-hour acquisition program for Spanish consists of 100 contact hours of natural language acquisition in a performance-based environment where all students are constantly engaged in the interactive learning process. All of the grammar of the language is systematically acquired in the classroom through listening comprehension development without the use of reading, writing, homework or textbooks. Participants are trained to distinguish perceptually where one sound-to-image segment ends and the other begins, and to process spoken Spanish into meaning immediately without translating from the native language. Perception is the basis of all instruction in the classroom. Language mapping is the systematic association of the sounds of Spanish to the images they represent, and it is the process through which the participants acquire the correct word order, the correct sounds, and the associated meanings; they are constantly engaged in the mapping process during class. This phase of the program covers all 20 lessons with our proprietary listening comprehension assessment that accompanies each lesson. These assessments track improvement and Spanish language acquisition before, during and after completion of this program.
Spanish 200-B. Verbal Fluency Development
All participants in Phase B of the 200-hour acquisition program for Spanish must have successfully completed Phase A, Listening Comprehension development. This phase consists of 100 contact hours of instruction in a performance-based environment where all participants are constantly engaged in the interactive learning process. Participants are now ready to begin developing their verbal fluency in the language. Images are created in the classroom by the participants which are then encoded verbally in Spanish. The focus is on correctly mapping the situations with the corresponding sounds of Spanish. Fluency is achieved through the development of spontaneity in Spanish and the exercise of individual creativity through activities such as situation role-play, creative story development, vocabulary building exercises, circle dialogue, and personal experiences. After 200 hours of instruction, the participant can function on the job in Spanish in terms of understanding and speaking the language.
Spanish 300. Writing Development for Business
This is an optional course that does not depend on having completed the first 200 hours. Although the course is geared to participants who are native speakers of Spanish, those participants whose primary language is not Spanish will be given the Perception-Language Acquisition Test (PLAT) for Spanish, and they must score at least 75% in order to take this course. If they do not, then we invite them to participate in the 200 hour program of Listening Comprehension and Verbal Fluency development.
This course is conducted entirely in Spanish, and consists of 100 contact hours of instruction in a performance-based environment. It is designed for individuals who absolutely need to employ writing skills in their jobs. Participants learn by doing, i.e. they begin writing sentences and paragraphs from the first day; there are no mindless grammar exercises. There are four components that form the principal focus of the course which is to craft a well-organized and coherent message that is clear and concise:
- Learn to organize ideas into a coherent message by developing an outline which serves as a roadmap for those ideas.
- Understand the structures of sentences & paragraphs, learn to combine simple sentences into complex sentences, develop transitions between paragraphs, and concentrate on the flow of the written message.
- Learn what is correct and incorrect grammar usage through actual experience in writing letters, reports, memos, etc.
- Learn to keep the message brief by focusing on its clarity and conciseness.
Participants will choose writing topics that are of interest to them. Participants are given constant feedback on their writing performance in which they will readily see their mistakes and learn how to correct them.