AP Spanish

The AP Spanish Language and Culture course is a rigorous, college-level course taught exclusively in Spanish that helps students improve proficiency in the interpretive, interpersonal and presentational modes of communication in order to prepare students to use Spanish throughout their lives in various contexts.

This course builds upon skills and content studied in Spanish 1-8 where the six course themes have previously been studied in order to prepare students for the AP experience.

The textbook, Temas, is full of authentic resources culled from a variety of sources in the Spanish speaking world. Additional authentic resources such as literature, essays, magazine and newspaper articles, current websites, podcasts, video and other current audiovisual resources are used to help students explore different cultural elements from the Spanish speaking world and compare them to their own experiences in order to understand target cultures and thus communicate more richly and effectively. As a result of the learning experiences from this course, students should be able to do the following tasks using

Goals:

  • Understand spoken and written Spanish in authentic dialogues, lectures, oral presentations, newscasts, newspapers, letters, essays, podcasts, Internet articles, instructions, short stories, novels, poetry and other mediums.
  • Speak on a wide variety of formal and informal topics through presenting, convincing, arguing, inquiring and describing with accuracy and fluency.
  • Write formal and informal compositions in a wide variety of styles (e-mail, creative writing, presentation, analysis, synthesis) with appropriate grammatical structure, rich vocabulary use and proper use of register to differentiate between audiences.
  • Discuss interdisciplinary topics, building on knowledge acquired from other courses
  • Understand the cultural similarities and differences (products, practices and perspectives) between students’ native cultures and target cultures of the Spanish-speaking world and use new knowledge to understand unique perspectives and communicate more richly and effectively.
  • Use Spanish to communicate authentically in the local and International communities during the course and throughout the rest of their lives using the three modes of communication: interpretive, interpersonal and presentational.