Mini Project 3

"En tu opinión, ¿cuál es la mejor ciudad para vivir? "

The ultimate goal of this project will be based on perceiving how Spanish learners develop their communicative skills, as well as how they improve their cultural awareness through the practice during a semester. Moreover, technology will play an important role in this lesson activity.

This lesson plan will be geared towards Spanish learners at the intermediate level enrolled in SPN 2200 at the University of Florida. Before their registration, an oral and written Spanish language placement test is given to students, as well as a placement form is filled out and turned in to their instructor. Thus students work at their level of proficiency. SPN 2200 is the first course of the Intermediate Spanish Program and is followed by SPN 2201 and SPN 2240. These 3 courses must be taken in sequence, one after the other, since each is the prerequisite for the next.

The goal of this entire lesson plan is to offer students an opportunity to acquire new communicative skills in Spanish while developing an awareness and appreciation of Hispanic/Latino cultures. Taken its goals from the Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century , also known as the 5 Cs, this lesson focuses on the five general areas: students will communicate in Spanish; students will gain knowledge and understanding of cultures of the Hispanic world; students will connect with other disciplines and acquiring new information; through comparisons, students will develop awareness of similarities and differences among language and culture systems around the world; students will use Spanish to participate in communities at home and around the world.

Likewise, these students will have the opportunity to put the 4 linguistic skills into practice. In other words, each student will be able to demonstrate comprehension of Spanish spoken at normal speed on a selected topic (listening); each student will be able to demonstrate the use of conversational skills in a specific communicative situation (speaking); each student will be able to demonstrate accurate reading comprehension of cultural material (reading); each student will be able to produce written Spanish to meet practical needs as well as creative expression (writing).

The textbook used for this class is Conexiones: Comunicación y Cultura (2005). This class activity will be administered the last day (one class meeting) assigned for chapter 4 "El individuo y la personalidad" and will consolidate the main objectives, such as: (i) talking about oneself and others: personality and routines; (ii) describing people, things, and situations; and (iii) telling what has happened.

With the main points of this chapter in mind, this lesson plan will engage students in a variety of activities, which is summarized as follows:

a) reading a paragraph and then answering some questions; (8 mins.)
b) filling in missing words from a dialogue; (7 mins.)
c) listening (and watching) a video clip and then answering some T(rue) or F(alse) statements; (10 mins.)
d) speaking in pairs and role-playing a situation. (25 mins.)

While the reading and writing tasks are intended for the review of the main content of this chapter, the listening and speaking ones attempt to display a more pragmatic side to second language acquisition. We believe that through interaction, students will practice and communicate using vocabulary and grammar learned in oral and written modules through communicative activities in paired and group work. By making the student an agent in language learning, we direct them towards communication and connecting, which are two of the components mentioned in the 5 Cs. By taking language structures and vocabulary outside of the textbook context, the activity encourages students to make the target language relevant to themselves.

Finally, in terms of SLA theory, this lesson plan is designed from a standpoint of the Sociocultural Theory (SCT). Proposed by Lev Vygotsky in the 1920s, SCT establishes a connection between the outside world and the individual’s inner mental processes in order to explain how the social interaction leads to internalization and learning. This lesson plan is guided taking into consideration that the fact of engaging and participating in socially significant tasks makes some impact in language development. As Hall (1997) claimed, SLA is a process that “originates in our socially constituted communicative practices” (303). Thus, the learner comes to understand it simply using the language. This lesson plan is designed with the belief that there is a strong connection between what learners learn and the opportunities they have to communicate. Since the "context" plays an important role for the language development, these activities focus on the situations in which learning takes place. Following Hall's line of reasoning, we believe that “what becomes important is the discursive routinization of our communicative practices and the means by which we realize them” (1997: 303).