SPANISH SAMPLE COURSE DESCRIPTION

GS- West

The Spanish program at Governor's School offers students the opportunity to improve their oral proficiency and reading, writing, and listening skills in Spanish while deepening their understanding of critical contemporary issues of Spanish-speaking people. Students are challenged to examine pressing questions from the Hispanic perspective, make personal and interdisciplinary connections, and ultimately apply their knowledge in a broader, global context.

Spanish students collaborate with Social Science students to explore questions regarding immigration in North Carolina. Class time is devoted to readings, lectures, documentaries, feature films, and guest speakers that provide a foundation with which to pursue research in an area of special interest related to immigration. Health care, education, language use, work, family, religious beliefs, cultural preservation, and discrimination are among the topics students research in cooperative groups. For many students the highlight of this project is the field experience component. Students interact with the Latino community in Winston-Salem through weekly excursions to Latino day camps and a Catholic church. Spanish students may also work with Spanish-speaking patients at a local free medical clinic. The culmination of the project occurs the final week of Governor's School when students present their research to the GS community at the Academic Fair.

Additional Spanish Topics:

• Modern Spanish language: regional variations in grammar, pronunciation, and lexicon, idiomatic expressions, language as a reflection of culture, legitimacy of Spanglish as a language.
• Language policy in the United States: Bilingual education, the English only movement
• Marginalized groups: Gypsies in Spain, Indigenous people of the Americas
• 20th Century Spanish and Latin American Literature: Poetry, short stories,and excerpts of novels by writers including Pablo Neruda, Sandra Cisneros, Juan de Dios Ramirez Heredia, Antonio Machado, Laura Esquivel, Jose Antonio Burciaga, Nicolos Guillen, Ariel Dorfman, Luisa Valenzuela, Jorge Luis Borges and Luis Fernandez Caubi.

In addition to fiction and non-fiction readings from textbooks, newspapers, magazines, and the Internet, students listen to popular songs in Spanish. Songs are used in class several times weekly to enhance students' understanding of the themes presented while building vocabulary and studying Spanish syntax in an authentic context. Music used is from Spain and several countries of Latin America. Other teaching materials include the documentaries "Sudando Por Una Camiseta,” "Trinkets and Beads,” "Zapatista,” "Nuestra Comunidad: Latinos in North Carolina," and the films "El Norte," "Bread and Roses,” and "La Historia Oficial.”

Instructional methods include discussion, pair and group work, debate, and oral presentation. Sample class activities include:

• Debate: Should English be the official language of the United States?
• Compare and contrast the notion of identity in poems by different immigrant poets of the U.S.
• Sweatshops vs. The People: A mock trial in which students examine the sweatshop phenomenon from the perspective of U.S. consumers, multinational corporations, poor country workers and poor country elite
• Create original "refranes" (proverbs) in Spanish using fragments of existing Spanish proverbs
• Consider development in the Oriente of Ecuador through a role play in which students represent the Huaorani Indians, a US oil company, evangelical missionaries, and Ecuadorian environmentalists
• Discuss theories of knowledge presented in Area II to explain "El otro" by Jorge Luis Borges
• Write and perform skits in Spanish about the quest for knowledge or simply "a day in the life" at Governor's School