SPAN 211 – Intermediate Integrated Language and Culture I

SPAN 211 is the course that I took to satisfy the World Languages Perspectives aspect of the Civitae Core Curriculum. This course was taught by Dr. Sergio Diaz-Luna. SPAN 211 was a direct continuation of SPAN 111.  I chose to take this course with Dr. Diaz-Luna because I was already familiar with his teaching style and I knew that he would stop at nothing to ensure that all of his students would succeed. The first couple of weeks were spent reviewing some of the more advanced topics from SPAN 111, such as the preterite and imperfect past tenses. During this review period, the textbook introduced new vocabulary. I think that the hardest part of learning a new language is learning the vocabulary. I did pretty well with the grammatical structures in class, but I found myself struggling with the vocabulary. I feel that this is because there are so many false cognates in the Spanish language. After finishing up the review period, we moved on to new content, with most of it being in the subjunctive. I feel like once you have mastered both the indicative and the subjunctive, you have taken your knowledge and fluency of a language to the next level. Being able to express doubt, will, and emotion is such a powerful tool for communication in any language. I was very excited that this course put such a heavy emphasis on the subjunctive because it added that extra tool that we can use to communicate more powerfully. After moving to the online format, we still held our classes at the normal time on Zoom. However, we had a couple major changes to our assignments. The remainder of our quizzes and tests were now open note and Dr. Diaz-Luna completely omitted the final IPA (Integrated Performance Assessment). I greatly appreciated these changes because I do not have a stable internet connection at home, so not having to worry about the IPAs was a huge relief. I also appreciate how helpful and personable Dr. Diaz-Luna remained even after we left campus. Every lecture he made it extremely clear that he was always available to answer questions regarding concepts or assignments over email. It is professors like Dr. Diaz-Luna who made my first year at Longwood so successful and enjoyable. Having faculty members that are genuinely there to help you is so much more important than I realized, and I am glad that I had such helpful and supportive professors this year.

Because of this class, I have a new perspective on the power of communication. After taking SPAN 111 I felt very confident that I could carry a strong, meaningful conversation in Spanish. However, I still lacked the tools to express emotion and desire as strongly as I would have liked. After learning the subjunctive, I finally possessed this tool. This got me thinking about how powerful communication is in any language. I feel that when we are just studying in English, we don’t take the time to think about how powerful our words are. However, when you are learning a new language, you can see how your competency evolves over time, and you can see how much more you can express as you progress. I used the concepts that I learned in SPAN 211 and paralleled them to similar structures in English. By doing this, I gained a new appreciation for how powerful our words can be.

Linked above is the second IPA paper that I wrote for SPAN 211. For the IPAs in SPAN 211, there were three components, a class discussion to generate ideas, a written composition, and a video element where we would record ourselves speaking in Spanish. For the written papers, we would have a video to watch that we would analyze, respond to questions about the video, and add some of our own opinions. For this IPA, the topic was cinema and television. Writing this paper was relatively easy since the overall topic was something I am very familiar with. If we were just to write about a very specific aspect of Spanish culture, I would have struggled much more to write this paper. However, since we were able to write about our own preferences, I felt a deeper connection to this work. For example, I got to write about my favorite television shows and actors, which I could honestly talk about for hours! Having prompts like this was a big reason why I enjoyed writing papers for SPAN 211, despite them being in a different language than I am used to.