Top of Form

Syllabus

Spanish 210.212 Summer II 2014

Instructor:Dr. Barry Weingarten

Email:

Office Hours: TBA

Course Description

Intermediate Spanish II is designed to continue building upon the four skills essential for communication presented in Intermediate Spanish I. Strong attention will be paid to grammar, along with reading, writing, and conversational skills. Different kinds of readings, compositions, text conferences, voice chats and voice recordings will play an important role in this online second year course. Students are responsible for all material presented in Conexiones, although not everything is likely to be covered by the chapter web pages. They are expected to review the grammar, continue learning vocabulary, and practice the exercises. Oral and written assignments will be completed entirely online.

Most of the work will be done independently. Students will meet with Dr. Weingarten online once a week for conversational practice/quizzing. Students will interact with each other via the Blackboard conferencing system. All assignments will be completed digitally, but the midterm and final exams must be taken in real time with a proctor. Students have two possibilities for completing these exams. They can take them with Dr. Weingarten at Johns Hopkins during the announced dates, or, they can arrange to have a proctor administer the exams remotely. The proctor must contact and be approved by Dr. Weingarten at the beginning of the term. We will meet as a class on the first day of the session in real time on the JHU campus at a place and time announced via email so that Dr. Weingarten can walk you through the online class. For those students who are unable to be on campus at that time, we can do an orientation to the class by telephone or via Google Hangouts

Prerequisites

Intermediate Spanish I (210.211) or appropriate Spanish Placement Exam score.

Required Text

Zayas-Bazán/Bacon/García.Conexiones.5th ed. Prentice Hall, 2012. ISBN: 978-0-205-88697-5

As an alternative to buying the text and the pincode for MySpanishLab, students may simply buy the multi-semester pincode . The online link to purchase the pincode is:

Audiovisual Material

Movie on Reserve in Library (also available in the Language Lab):

  • Nueve reinas

Additional resources

Blackboard

URL:

Participation in the online classroom is mandatory, since this is the way you will complete all work for the course.

Only JHU email accounts will be accepted by the servers. All other accounts will be rejected.

The assignments that must be turned in are noted on the schedule of classes.

  • You must submit all assignments in Blackboard and MySpanishLab.
  • All work must be completed by the dates indicated on the schedule of classes. Due dates must be adhered to. Late assignments will be penalized (10% reduction per day late as of the first day late), and no assignment will be accepted more than two days late. Each unit (there are 5) will have a corresponding web-page of activities that you’ll need to complete, in addition to the assignments on BlackBoard and MySpanishLab.
  • You will also watch a Spanish-language movie, Nueve reinas on your own and you will need to complete three activities about the movie, posted in Blackboard. Please keep in mind that all films shown in Spanish classes were made for commercial release and may contain scenes of a violent or sexual nature.

Instructions for using Blackboard

1. Go to

2. Click on the JHU Enterprise Authentication link

3. Enter your JHED ID and Password

Once you have connected to the course on Blackboard, you will see several links in the left margin that correspond to different assignments, course documents, this syllabus, your grades, etc. The links to the assignments pertaining to Nueve reinas are in Blackboard.

Many assignments pertaining to the chapters in Conexiones will be done in MySpanishLab. Conferences will be completed in BlackBoard and real-time voice chats will be completed with Dr. Weingarten. The Voice Threads will have direct links in Blackboard.

MySpanishLab

Instructions for enrolling in MySpanishLab can be found in our Blackboard classroom. The code which you will need to enroll in the virtual classroom where you will be completing these assignments will be announced in Blackboard. There are approximately 15-18 graded activities for each Chapter. You can complete each one of these exercises 3 times, and MySpanishLab will calculate the average grade of your attempts and post that grade.

Course Objectives

There will be a continued focus on perfecting the four language skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing with further exploration of the culture of the Spanish-speaking world and greater exposure to Spanish-language literary texts. Some morpho-grammatical and syntactic structures will be revisited in greater detail and some new ones will be introduced. Topics that will be covered include, but are not limited to, the following: por vs. para,the imperfect subjunctive,the conditional and conditional perfect,the pluperfect subjunctive, si-clauses,indefinite and negative expressions,relative pronouns, andthe passive voice. Vocabulary-building will be related to the thematic topics of the textbook (such as ecology, human rights, etc.) as well as to the literary readings.

Course Requirements

Students are responsible for all the material presented in the required textbooks. They are expected to review the grammar, and continue learning vocabulary. The unit web pages will be, to a great extent, devoted to the discussion of selected readings. While content is important, attention should also be paid to expression: correct grammatical structure and vocabulary, and pronunciation. All oral interaction with the course instructor will be in SPANISH.

Exams and Grades

Your grades will be available for you to see in Blackboard and will be based on the following components:

Exams / 2@ 25% / 50%
My Spanish Lab Assignments (Excluding the mini-compositions and the sound files) / 5 sets @3% / 15%
Voice Threads / 3 @2% / 6%
Discussion Board Posts / 5@ 2% / 10%
Real-time Chats / 5@2% / 10%
Nueve reinasAssignments / 3 @2% / 9%
TOTAL / 100%

Every exam is divided into 5 sections, each of which accounts for 20% of the total exam grade. These will also include a take-home composition to be completed and turned in the day before the exam (topics will be announced a few days before the due date). All exams are intrinsically cumulative and therefore will include previously presented material.

The exam will consist of the following parts:

1. Gramática y Vocabulario

2. Comprensión Escrita

3. Comprensión Auditiva

4. Expresión Oral: Topics for the Expresión oral section will be distributed the day before the exam. After the first three parts of the exam students will be assigned topics and divided into pairs. They will be given ten minutes at the beginning of the class to prepare their presentations and then they will present them in front of the class. Those students who will be taking the exam remotely will have to complete the oral expression section of the exam with Dr. Weingarten via Google Hangouts at a mutually convenient time that same day.

5. The fifth section of the exam, Expresión Escrita, will be a take-home composition. The length of these compositions will be 400 words. Topics for the compositions will be distributed two days before they are due.

Grading is based on the following scale:

90-92=A-; 93-98=A; 99-100=A+ (Excellent) 80-82=B-; 83-87=B; 88-89=B+ (Good; Very Good) 70-72=C-; 73-77=C; 78-79=C+ (Satisfactory) 60-62=D-; 63-67=D; 68-69=D+ (Passing)

There is no extra credit in this course.

Academic Dishonesty

The strength of the university depends on academic and personal integrity. In this course, you must be honest and truthful. Ethical violations include cheating on exams, plagiarism, reuse of assignments, improper use of the Internet and electronic devices, unauthorized collaboration, alteration of graded assignments, forgery and falsification, lying, facilitating academic dishonesty, and unfair competition. All students are expected to do their own work both in and out of class. It is considered cheating if you receive assistance from anybody else when you complete your homework. We consider it to be a breach of academic honesty even if you have another individual check the grammar, syntax, spelling, etc. of the essays you compose in Spanish. Report any violations you witness to the instructor. You may consult the associate dean of students and/or the chairman of the Ethics Board beforehand. See the guide on "Academic Ethics for Undergraduates" and the Ethics Board web site () for more information.

Note from the disability services office

Any student with a disability who may need accommodations in this class must obtain an accommodation letter from Student Disability Services, 385 Garland, (410) 516-4720,

Course Schedule (To be published one week before the session begins)