Goals and Objectives

To prepare students to acquire oral and written proficiency in Spanish in order to function at the highest level possible in intellectual, social and professional affairs.
To promote an understanding of global communities and to encourage involvement as active citizens in these multicultural communities.
To acquire analytic and critical skills that build from textual, cultural and linguistic analysis to the exploration of society.
To develop an inquisitive mind to demonstrate an understanding of other cultures that opens one to the understanding of the self more completely.
To develop the students own intellectual independence, their own critical perspective, their own creative resources, as well as the ability to shape their education according to their own individual temperaments, inclinations and needs.

Goals: To gain understanding of the literatures of Spain and Latin America and their relationship to the formation of national cultures.

To acquire critical and contextual frameworks for approaching the literary work.

To increase opportunities for lifelong learning through an understanding of the role of literature on illuminating the fundamental questions of human experience and appreciating the depth and complexity in their fellow humans across the boundaries of nations, cultures, religions, race and gender.
To develop the acquisition of a range of language skills, including reading, writing and speaking, necessary for comprehension and commentary of the more sophisticated texts of literary production.

Students will be able to apply critical and analytical skill to a wide range of literary texts. Students will become versatile readers, able to understand and appreciate literary texts in a wide variety of styles, structures and representational modes.
Students will be able to research a topic (literary or otherwise) and write papers which are coherent, thoughtful, well organized, persuasive, appropriately documented and well written.
In interpreting literary works Students will be able to establish connections between literary texts and their historical, social, political and cultural contexts.
Students will be able to address questions of diverse human identities and values.
Students will be able to develop their language skill through writing papers, discussions and oral presentations.
Students will be able to understand literary texts as means of reading cultures.
Students will be able to develop interest and participate in the rich cultural, social, political and intellectual life of the diverse Hispanic world.

To approach a cultural phenomenon of the Hispanophone world (be it a text, event, activity, attitude, belief, style of aesthetic representation, etc.) in a manner that is:
- Comparative
- Contextualized and contextualizing
- Analytical
To understand the relevance of the terms "latino," "hispano," "americano," and "español” in local, national and international context.
To examine critically visual as well as other cultural texts.
To apply critical concepts/theories to historical and current cultural texts/phenomena.

Student will be able to recognize and make comparative judgments about cultural phenomena in the Hispanophone world relative to their own cultural environment.)
Student will be able to establish explanatory relationships between cultural materials and the historical, social and political settings in which they are produced and/or experienced. Student will be able to make use of a wide array of Spanish-language reference sources, including internet, news media and discipline-specific sources.
Student will be able to distinguish the component parts of a given cultural text (i.e., a scriptural, musical, performative or visual work) and explain how these parts contribute to a meaningful and/or value-laden whole.
Student will be able to apply analytical strategies to non-literary texts of the Spanish-speaking world, including for example news media, film, advertisements, visual arts, performance, etc.
Student will be able to demonstrate knowledge of the history and diversity of the Spanish-speaking world.
Student will be able to generalize from specific cultural data and experience in bringing to bear relevant theoretical concepts, such as “identity,” “transculturation,” “ideology,” “gender,” etc., in carrying out research and analysis strategies.

To introduce students into the study of core areas in the field of Hispanic linguistics, historical linguistics, and sociolinguistics
To give students an overview of the linguistic phenomena usually studied in the different sub-fields of contemporary Hispanic linguistics: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.
To train students in the analysis of basic linguistic data in Spanish.
To prepare students to observe similarities and differences between a) Spanish and English and b) among Spanish dialects or variations.
To help students improve their Spanish abilities through self-observation, and practice/application of concepts learned in the course.

At the end of the term, the student will be able to…
Identify the various sub-fields of Spanish linguistics
Use the basic jargon in the field of linguistics
Identify and explain the sub-components of grammar
Compare/contrast the structure and sound system of Spanish and English
Explain the origins of the Spanish language and its development through the centuries
Identify the main
features of some dialects of Spanish