Intermediate Spanish II: Human Rights, M

Course Description:

Prerequisites: SPAN UN2101 (Intermediate Spanish I) or a score of 450-625 on the Department’s

placement examination. This is an intensive course in Spanish language communicative competence with an emphasis on oral interaction, reading, writing, and culture at an Intermediate II level focused on Human Rights, Memory, and Film. This course fulfills the last semester of the foreign language requirement. After SPAN UN2106, students can continue learning Spanish and its cultures in SPAN UN3300.

This course uses film as a foundation for exploring contemporary social issues in the Hispanic world and the cultural, legal, and artistic responses that have arisen in their wake. Through filmic texts and authentic multimodal materials, students will analyze how language functions as a tool of identity, citizenship, and social transformation while they develop linguistic competencies for different professional contexts. The themes—immigration, neocolonization, law, and historical memory—allow for building specialized vocabulary, practicing situations linked to public service, and critical reflection on the realities of the Hispanic world in their own context.

Learning Outcomes:

At the end of this course, students will be able to: 

·   Critically analyze filmic and multimodal texts in Spanish, identifying and explaining their narrative, visual, and symbolic features and their relationships with historical and political contexts from the Hispanic world.

·   Interpret historical processes and social transformation—like war, dictatorship, migration, and transition to democracy—using textual and cinematic evidence in discussion and academic essays.

·   Apply relevant specialized vocabulary to cinematic analysis, topics of historical memory, citizenship, Human Rights, and representations of gender in oral and written interventions.

·   Construct coherent academic arguments in Spanish, integrating critical analysis, citations, and indirect discourse in presentations and written work.

·   Compare cultural and historical perspectives from the Hispanic world with contemporary debates in international studies, Human Rights, history, and political science. 

·   Demonstrate functional command of linguistic structures (the subjunctive, conditional, indirect discourse, and nominalization)