Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Students successfully completing Spanish 151:

1. Manage common interactions, in both oral and written forms, in a selected variety of settings using the present, past and future tenses.
2. Apply circumlocution and inference skills when navigating a variety of real world situations in Spanish.
3. Reflect on linguistic and cultural diversity within the Spanish-speaking world and how it differs and/or relates to one’s own culture.
4. Apply a broader understanding of important historical and cultural movements in the target culture through exposure to literature, art and performing arts in the target language.
5. Expand and strengthen strategies for analyzing authentic materials in the target language.

Students are expected to attend all classes, participate actively in classroom activities, and prepare oral and written homework assignments. Students may work with bundled media or related web media, and they may meet with the teacher or tutors. After the introduction to the course, Spanish will be used in the classroom at all times. Students should plan to spend about one hour in preparation and practice outside of class for each class hour.

Beginning with the first day of class, students are assessed by their active participation, homework, in-class activities such as presentations and oral interviews. Regular attendance is also required to achieve a passing grade.

Spanish 151 emphasizes the acquisition and correct use of pronunciation, grammatical structures and cultural concepts for the purpose of communication in Spanish. The themes and skills listed below are not necessarily presented in order; presentation of these items depends on the teacher, textbook and the make-up of the student population.  

Possible structures presented 

1. Direct object and Indirect object pronouns

2. Prepositions

3. Expansion of the preterit tense

4. Question/answer patterns with the preterit

5. Negations

6. Impersonal expressions

7. Prepositional pronouns

8. Imperfect tense

9. Present perfect tense

10. Compare and contrast the imperfect and preterit

11. Begin basic forms of the present subjunctive

12. Introduction to the command forms

Topics for active communication 

1. Food and beverages, ordering in a restaurant

2. House vocabulary

3. Writing and sharing recipes

4. Walking about habitual (“used to”) actions in the past

5. Talking about completed actions in the past

6. Unplanned occurrences/accidents

7. Geography

8. Travel

9. Maps, asking and giving directions

10. Professions and professional activities

11. Travel vocabulary