The student sustains performance in speaking, listening, reading and writing at the Advanced level of language proficiency, as outlined by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL): 1.1 Speaking ability: The student is able to satisfy the requirements of everyday situations and routine school and work requirements. Can communicate facts and talk casually about topics of current public and personal interest, using general vocabulary. The student can be understood without difficulty by native speakers. 1.2 Listening ability: The student is able to understand main ideas and most details of connected discourse on a variety of topics beyond the immediacy of the situation. Comprehension may be uneven due to a variety of linguistic factors and topics. 1.3 Reading ability: The student is able to read prose selections of several paragraphs in length, particularly if printed clearly and if prose is in familiar sentence patterns. Reader understands the main ideas and facts but may miss some details. At this level the student can read such texts as descriptions, narratives, short stories, news items and routine personal and business correspondence. 1.4 Writing ability: The student is able to write routine social correspondence and join sentences in simple discourse of at least several paragraphs in length on familiar topics, and is able to express him/herself simply with some circumlocution. Good control of the most frequently used syntactic structures, but makes frequent errors in producing complex sentences. Writing is understandable to natives not used to the writing of non-natives.
While working on compositions, we had to understand the difference between the imperfect and preterit tense when talking about the past, and when to use them in speaking and writing. The grammar course allowed us to practice individual components of Spanish. I learned how to focus on time expressions and proper use of grammar. Areas that I wish to develop further are: understanding comparisons between words and knowing when to use them when speaking or writing. It is also important for me to familiarize myself with the English words that correlate with those words. For example, in English there is only one way to say to be or I am. In Spanish, there are more than one way to express this but it depends on the tense, place and time, person etc. As English speakers, we tend to translate every word in Spanish to sound the same as in English but this is not the case according to the Real Academia Española. I would say that the most challenging lesson I had to learn in this class was understanding the rules of grammar, because I was never taught at home the rules of the Spanish language; I was just taught how to speak it. Knowing the rules will help me to speak better or properly and it will improve my writing abilities if I decide to translate certain documents for companies that I may work for in the future. In Spanish, the use of the subjunctive is used a lot more than in English. Another rule I learned in this class is that it is extremely important to practice writing and speaking Spanish frequently. Constant repetition will allow for better memorization skills.