As far as the Spanish language is concerned, no basic requirements have to be met.
On the other hand, administratively, students need to add the credits to their faculty programme.
Non-programme students are not accepted, except outgoing Erasmus students who have been allowed to follow the course by their faculty.
Maximum 20 students per group. Possibility to register in Q1 or Q2 subject to availability.
The prerequisite(s) for this Teaching Unit (Unité d’enseignement – UE) for the programmes/courses that offer this Teaching Unit are specified at the end of this sheet.
This course is aimed at beginners who need an intensive module, for instance those who need to leave for Latin America or Spain, or those who want a very first immersion into the Spanish language and the cultures of hispanic countries.
For this reason, this learning module aims at covering the basic grammatical structures and vocabulary corresponding to starting to learn the language from scratch and a Council of Europe Framework of Reference level A1.
The various themes addressed are: myself and the others (introducing oneself, preferences, family, basic descriptions); daily needs (personal belongings, the classroom, feelings); everyday life (habits, food, clothes, hobbies and sports); life in general (the environment, the weather, the city, shopping, asking for directions); telling the time (the calendar, times, expressions of frequency, timetables); expressions relating to concrete situations (greetings, forms of politeness, useful business-like expressions, such as purchasing things and going to the restaurant).
At the end of this learning module, the student should be able to:
- ask and provide information about oneself and others, daily needs, everyday life, one's living environment and the weather, using basic expressions.
- describe themselves and their living environment, using basic words and expressions in isolation.
- express themselves about concrete situations using basic control of simple syntactic structures and grammatical forms belonging to a standard memorized repertoire as well as basic forms of politeness.
- answer and ask simple questions, react to simple statements and make statements about basic needs or familiar topics.
- understand instructions that are given to them in a clear way as well as follow short and simple instructions.
- understand short and simple texts, sentence by sentence, indicating nouns, familiar words and basic expressions, re-reading when necessary, as well as get the hang of the contents of a simple informative text, especially if it is accompanied by some visual aid.
- spell out personal information and recognize the most frequent nouns, familiar concepts and elementary expressions used in ordinary situations of everyday life; pronounce a very limited repertoire of expressions and memorized words, such that a native speaker used to listening to non-native speakers can easily understand them.
- fill out simple forms (a hotel booking or a brochure) by oneself; provide basic information about onself, numbers, dates, hours, placenames, quantities, prices, etc.
- write short and simple texts about oneself and imaginary characters, using familiar words and regularly used expressions, as well as postcards using elementary compounds and connectors, such as "and" or "then".
The contribution of this Teaching Unit to the development and command of the skills and learning outcomes of the programme(s) can be accessed at the end of this sheet, in the section entitled “Programmes/courses offering this Teaching Unit”.
Assessment is based on a final written exam - including reading, listening, writing, grammar and vocabulary. The weighting of the written exam is 60 % of the final score. There is also an oral exam, worth 30 %.
On top of that, any topic may be tested - unannounced - throughout term, in the form of short tests worth the remaining 10 %, along with asignments and classroom participation.
This learning module is taught in the form of contact hours using the communicative, lexical and grammatical approach.
An A1-level book is used.
This learning module consists in developing the basic communicative and linguistic skills needed to be able to survive in everyday situations in a Spanish-speaking country.
The methodology used is varied (productive as well as receptive skills, emphasizing speaking skills) and linked to the topics addressed.
The assignments (if any) have to be submitted during class or on the UCL Moodle platform.
- Corpas, J., García, E. & Garmendia, A. (2013). Aula 1, Nueva edición - Libro del alumno. Difusión.
