GUIDE TO THE COURSE

With this course, students begin the formal study of Spanish. The skills of understanding, speaking, reading, and writing are all presented within the context of communicative situations.

Grammar topics include: letter-sound correspondences; the alphabet; basic punctuation, capitalization, and accentuation; the use of cognates to increase comprehension; the vocabulary of greetings, numbers, telling time, days, months, dates, weather, seasons, activities, question words, people, descriptive words, tener expressions, articles, and subject pronouns; the structure of sentences and questions, of regular and several irregular verbs in the present indicative; and of number, gender, and person agreement.

These communicative lessons also provide a context from which the students begin a cultural study of the Spanish-speaking world.