This robust course gives students a wide range of experiences to learn the vocabulary and mechanics of Spanish, and then to put them into practice. The class meetings are focused on instruction, questions, explanations, and lots of practice! The meetings are highly interactive and engaging, with a creative variety of activities designed to help students grow in confidence and skill with listening and speaking. Homework includes grammar instruction and practice, listening comprehension, reading, cultural instruction and verbal practice. With 32 thematic vocabulary units, a thorough grammatical study, a survey of Spanish and Hispanic history, a comic mystery novel, and a study of the life of Jesus, TPS Spanish 2 is both challenging and rewarding.
Note: TPS offers Spanish 1 and 2 in two levels: standard and honors, where this “standard” course is one day of live class per week and “honors” is two days of live class per week. How do you choose between them? The workload and level of difficulty are similar, but the honors class has more dedicated opportunity for instruction and speaking, so your proficiency will be higher after the honors course. If you are seriously considering going to Spanish 3 or higher — or if you just love the idea of learning Spanish from a world-class expert teacher — then you will want to take the “honors” course with two days of live class per week. If you are pretty sure you just want two basic years of Spanish to meet your foreign language requirement, then you may prefer this excellent “standard” course with one live class per week. You can change your mind in either direction after each year, and you can still go to Spanish 3 from either track (though you will be better prepared from the “honors” track).