Overview of the Spanish Basic Course

The Spanish Basic Course in Latin American dialect prepares students to function effectively in conversations. Pronunciation, inflection, and intonation are heavily stressed. The text material has accompanying phonetic spellings written in Spanish.

Units 1 - 15 introduce gender present tense verbs whose infinitives end in "ar," "er," and "ir," the irregular verbs "estar," "se," and "haber," adjectives, possessives, present perfect and present progressive forms, and object pronouns.

Units 16-30 present supplemental readings, past tenses, irregular verbs, and reflexive pronouns.

Units 31-45 introduce nominalized verbs and adjectives, numbers, past progressive and present subjunctive verb forms, days of the week, months, and colors.

Units 46-55 drop the phonetic spellings, introduce past, past perfect and present perfect subjunctives, conditional tenses, and passive voices, and noun-forming suffixes.

Method of Teaching

The method is known as Guided Imitation. It may appear to be new, but actually it has been used by a considerable number of teachers for many years, though its greatest popularity has come since the second World War. Its goal is to teach one to speak easily, fluently, with very little accent, and to do this without conscious effort, just as one speaks his own language without conscious effort.

There are two very important aspects of this method. First, learning a relatively small body of material so well that it requires very little effort to produce it. This is Overlearning. If a student overlearns every dialog and drill as s/he goes through this book s/he will almost certainly experiences rapid progress in learning the language.

The second aspect is learning to authentically manipulate the sounds, sequences, and patterns of the language. The important implication here is the reality of both the model and the imitation. The model (teacher, recording, etc.) must provide Spanish as people really speak it in actual conversations, and the student must be helped to an accurate imitation. Above all, the normal tempo of pronunciationmust be the classroom standard; slowing down is, in this context, distortion.

The course is a six-hundred-hours course which may be studied intensively over a period of about six months, or may be spread at the rate of a unit a week over a period of sixty weeks (four college semesters).