Spanish - Grades 9-12
The learning environment at Hyla with a low student-teacher ratio creates an ideal language lab where students:
- Have a lot of opportunity to practice speaking, speaking, speaking.
- Learn Spanish in a proficiency-oriented curriculum focused on what students can do with grammar, not merely grammar itself, with project-based units.
- Experience culture as a catalyst for language learning.
As a core class at Hyla, students take Spanish for four years. We believe language learning matters because it:
- Improves cognitive function across all disciplines
- Expands personal and professional horizons
- Brings an essential dimension to diversity education
Program goals:
- To achieve intermediate level language proficiency in alignment with ACTFL standards
- To become cultural ambassadors who reach across cultural differences, listen to other perspectives, and develop an open mind toward new experiences.
Teacher: Tom Neal
Spanish highlights
Guatemala is our cultural snapshot for Unit 3, providing us with a rich and colorful background against which to practice our vocabulary and grammar. Through listening activities designed to practice interpretative skills, we’ve had the chance to touch upon the country’s fascinating Mayan heritage, as well as it’s volcano-laden landscape, the stunning colonial city of Antigua, and Latin America’s deepest lake, Lago de Atitlán. One lesson that especially resonated with students this week was our deeper dive into Spanish accent marks. While high school Spanish students typically learn to memorize where accents go, they aren't always taught why they occur in certain words but not others. Our class showed genuine excitement to be equipped with the tools to understand this sometimes irksome but important linguistic pattern that tends to plague students (and even native speakers) into college and later life. The weeks ahead will see us grow our marketplace, shopping, and garment vocabulary as we work towards our overarching unit goal: to be able to describe and compare clothing and footwear and to communicate in shopping situations. We will need to add more grammatical tools to the toolbox and towards this end, will be studying certain irregular present tense verbs, stem changing verbs, and gustar in the context of shopping situations and transactions.
Course Progression
