Spanish 231 is the largest course in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures with over 1,000 students taking the course each year. Since the majority of students come from high school, Spanish 231 plays an important role in shaping the students’ experience in their first year at U-M. The course is an opportunity to provide incoming with encounters with a rich scope of cultural topics.
Commercial textbooks for Spanish instruction tend to highlight common, almost stereotypical cultural themes, and overlook the diversity of social identities and ways of life that would offer a broader and more accurate picture of the pan-Hispanic world. We will create audio materials to support the development of students’ listening skills, and to expose them to more inclusive topics such as topics such as trial marriages in Central and South America, indigenous sports such as tejo in Colombia or chueca in Chile, urban agriculture in Venezuela, and same-sex marriage in Argentina.
We will design this material introducing these cultural themes so that the students will engage intellectually with the pan-Hispanic cultures, and also reflect on their own culture(s) using this added perspective of the world.
With pre and post-reflective surveys, we will analyze the students’ expectations and interests, as well as the impact these audio materials have in influencing their cultural perceptions. We will use data from Canvas to investigate the correlation of students’ use of extra audio activities with their level of interest in Hispanic cultures, and their development of listening skills.