SP 402 Fourth Year Spanish
Raquel Flores is in her first year of teaching advanced Spanish in Middlebury College's summer language program. She believes the web is an obvious tool for foreign language instruction and was frustrated with older modes of foreign language instruction used in her graduate program. She would like to use her online course to bring Spanish alive for her students.
The curriculum is developed around various texts that illustrate the use of Spanish in various Spanish-speaking countries. Grammar principles are reviewed through extensive spoken and written use of Spanish in context. Raquel likes to encourage outside research and interpretation
of cultural aspects of the course. She finds students learn more when they evaluate each other and are more motivated when they work together on projects.
Pedagogical challenges to address in the online environment:
- Students must use Spanish 24 hours a day and posts to the online course environment may only be in Spanish.
- Students must ask all questions to the class, using one of the Sakai tools.
- Students must submit weekly essays for review
- Students are often asked to participate in online surveys or take pop quizzes through their course environment
- During their second semester, students must work in groups on a current social issue facing young people in a Spanish speaking country today.
They must also present their findings to the class. Projects may be in the form of text, images, blog entries, multi-media narratives or vlogs.