Revised 5/2025

SPA 101 - Beginning Spanish I (4 CR.)

Course Description

Introduces cultural awareness, listening, comprehension, speaking, reading, writing skills, and emphasizes basic Spanish sentence structure. Part I of II. This is a UCGS transfer course. Lecture 4 hours per week.

General Course Purpose

SPA 101 students will start to develop competence in listening, speaking, reading, and writing (including handwriting) in the standard target language while gaining an awareness of the culture, heritage, and civic values of the cultures studied. Classes may be conducted in target language.

Course Prerequisites/Corequisites

Functional fluency in English

Course Objectives

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

  • Written Communication
    • Use rehearsed material to develop, convey, and exchange comprehensible ideas in the target language.
  • Professional Readiness
    • Collaborate with others and use the target language and cultural behaviors to communicate appropriately in personal and professional settings at a basic level.
  • Interpersonal Skills
    • Ask predictable questions and respond to them.
    • Recognize and produce comprehensible words and phrases in simple conversation.
    • Communicate on topics relating to basic personal information, family, school, and locations.
    • Shows awareness of most obvious cultural differences, as well as awareness of basic information of the countries that use the target language.
  • Interpretive Skills
    • Demonstrate emerging evidence of the ability to make inferences on background and prior knowledge.
    • Comprehend texts with key words, cognates, and predictable words that are highly contextualized.
    • Rely primarily on vocabulary to derive meaning from texts.
    • Use skills, such as skimming, scanning, recognizing cognates, predicting meaning based on context, and/or recognizing linguistic roots to comprehend texts.
    • Demonstrate ability to comprehend spoken Spanish and respond to questions applying critical thinking skills.
  • Presentational Skills
    • Present simple, basic information on very familiar topics orally and in writing using practiced or familiar words, simple sentences, and phrases.
    • Create oral and written messages in contexts relating to basic biographical information.
    • Produce understandable words and phrases both orally and in writing with frequently practiced questions and statements.
  • Intercultural Communication
    • Show awareness of the most obvious cultural differences of the countries that speak the target language.
    • Identify products and practices to help students understand perspectives in native and other cultures.

Major Topics to Be Included

  • Basic greetings, salutations and expressions of leave-taking in appropriate contexts,
  • Family, adjective descriptions
  • Academic day
  • Likes and dislikes
  • Daily and weekend activities
  • Communities
  • E numbers
  • Travel, weather and pastime expressions