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Spanish Language Course Perspective
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by Bonnie Bowen
Faculty Consultant
Adjunct Professor of Spanish
Ventura College
Ventura, California
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| | Please note: The official College Board® Course Description is available below in "More."
AP Spanish Language offers a world of opportunity and a challenging focus for every high school Spanish program. The basic question posed by the May exam is whether students read, write, speak, and understand Spanish at a level that would permit them to use their skills successfully in a Spanish-speaking country. What other goal could define so well what every Spanish teacher wants from every Spanish student? The fallout from a school's strong AP Spanish Language program, whether every student goes on to the AP level or not, is an added excitement that enhances each and every year of their Spanish-language experience. What other elective satisfies such an immediate student need as the honing of practical Spanish-language skills in an increasingly bilingual part of the world? You will thrill when your students report the new world open to them through immediate results on the job, travel abroad, and, best of all, the academic and personal interconnectedness that AP Spanish offers them in their school and community.
A strong beginning Spanish program is essential to a strong AP Spanish Language year. AP Spanish students simply aren't made in one year. Successful programs are the concerted effort of all Spanish teachers at all levels, in the high school as well as in the feeder schools. They are the direct result of all Spanish teachers' awareness that, in fact, whatever level they teach, they, too, are AP teachers. Indeed, it is advisable for those who teach the advanced level leading to the exam to continue to teach beginning levels, and that teachers of all levels become acquainted with the AP exam. Practice must begin in first year with each of the skills to be fine-tuned in AP Spanish. In the most dynamic programs, with today's proven communicative methods, students hear Spanish for communication, and they themselves communicate, on their own level, from their first days of Spanish-language study. Paso a paso, se va lejos. Given the proper environment, your students' Spanish acquisition will be consistent and pain-free over an average four-year period, and your school will see its program grow by leaps and bounds.
To teach an AP Spanish Language course, it is important for you to be familiar with the format and expectations of the exam. Know that you are not alone! The College Board sponsors many Saturday workshops, which not only offer practical guidance from the experienced teacher-consultants who lead them; but also give you an opportunity to meet your community's other AP Spanish teachers and to continue the exchange of ideas beyond the end of the day. Attend more than once. Each workshop will afford a wealth of perspectives on how your class time can become more productive. Each one will supply you with valuable College Board publications, including The Teacher's Guide to AP Spanish Language, which offers wonderful support and planning ideas. There are also summer workshops posted on the AP Central Web site, because, although a one-day workshop is an excellent beginning, it is rarely enough to make a teacher feel completely secure in beginning an AP course. Make use of the bulletin boards available through the AP Central Web site, and find the immediate answers you need for tomorrow morning from the many hundreds of AP Spanish teachers who subscribe.
Students' skills at the beginning of the AP Spanish Language year should include their willingness to use basic working vocabulary and previously learned structures to express, however imperfectly, their thoughts, needs, and wishes in Spanish, with classmates as well as with the teacher. They need an awareness of all tenses of the indicative and subjunctive to express present, future, and potential activities and plans and to narrate past activities, and a basic knowledge of reflexive constructions and of direct and indirect object pronouns and their placement. Spanish-language skills, when measured by the AP exam in May, should demonstrate an intermediate command of the language in speaking spontaneously, in writing a good essay without help on an everyday topic, and in reading and understanding advanced-level prose.
Of all the things that you can do to help your students achieve these goals, a few are vital. First, you should always use Spanish to communicate with your AP students, and you should banish all use of English from your classroom. This is critical to your program. Second, read with your students frequently; read for enjoyment and without interference from English. Readings should include formal and informal prose. Your enthusiasm will be contagious to your students, so pick your own favorite choices from literary and journalistic sources. Don't neglect popular and folkloric music to sweeten their reading tasks. Everything you read and sing will provide a new opportunity for class discussion -- in Spanish, of course. Third, emphasize idiomatic expressions. Idiomatic uses are a common source of the multiple-choice cloze and error-recognition sections of the exam. They bear repeated attention throughout the year.
At least every two weeks, have your students write an in-class, timed expository essay on a familiar topic. Evaluate these essays for their effective use of a variety of structural and vocabulary resources as well as for their organization. Pay particular attention to their comprehensibility. Teach your students how to recognize a good essay when they see one. One effective way to do this is by your grading them yourself according to the rubrics of the most recent AP Spanish Language Exam. Share sample essays with your students, and hold in-class discussions on the reasons these essays merited the grades they were given. By May, your students' writing skills should be effective if they have done these things regularly during the year. A bonus from all the reading you do is that it also improves student writing.
Finally, you will heighten both your own and your students' enjoyment of AP Spanish if throughout the year you employ a few simple rules:
- When clarifying anything for students, clarify for meaning but not for the accuracy of their Spanish. When a class overall appears to mistake the correct use of a given item, and the matter is serious enough, call it to the attention of the entire group. Perfect Spanish isn't necessary, either to enter the AP level or to pass the exam in May, and the best correction comes from further experience in Spanish.
- Do whatever you can to encourage questions on specific items that continue to puzzle students: the contrast between the imperfect and the preterite, for example, or placement of direct and indirect object pronouns. Take their questions very seriously. At this level, they very often have a good sense of what they themselves need, and grammar requires no rigid order of presentation in an AP class.
- In each day's lesson, incorporate frequent changes of activity. Consider the whole battery of AP expectations in your daily and weekly plans from the very beginning of the year. Plan to practice first one skill, then move on to the next, and the next, and do this repeatedly over time. Provide many opportunities for students to speak to one another spontaneously in Spanish. For example, perform a play -- the experience is valuable for the rehearsal process more than for the final product. Or stage debates and put historical or cultural figures on trial. These are wonderful ways to hand the floor over to students.
- Be clear about your expectations, and make certain that your grading system reflects them. If, for instance, you value students' ability to communicate their thoughts daily with you and other students, reward it with enough points to make that expectation clear. If you value students' ability to understand a reading without using a dictionary, pour points into it. Points help your students understand what behaviors are important to you and to the AP exam.
Finally, be assured that when May has come and gone, all your hard work teaching AP Spanish will have been exciting and fulfilling beyond your imagining.
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