Spanish 280, Conversation through Spanish/Latin American Film, was created in 2011 to respond to the students demand for more oral practice at the advanced level. Since then the course has grown from 4-6 sections per academic year to 10-12. This growth has come hand in hand with a variety of topics and a diversity in teaching approaches that make it very rich in terms of content. However, it has come at the expense of consistency across sections particularly when it comes to the primary reason why the class was created: to improve the level of oral competency of our students.

Having already identified the level of oral competency that, on average, students enrolling in Spanish 280 have as Intermediate High according to the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages, this project aims to address the need to create materials that will push our students to the next level of competency, Advanced Low. I am requesting funds to hire 1-2 GSIs who have recently taught the course to help establish linguist goals and develop material that can be used in all sections to standardize language instruction in Spanish 280. This material would then become the skeleton around which each one of the 280 sections is built and filled with content. We would create a sort of textbook for the course that would emphasize the linguistic objectives of the class and define ways in which each instructor can work with their group to achieve those goals