This subject provides students with the necessary language and intercultural skills to communicate in everyday personal situations in Spanish. Students are introduced to the grammatical structures and vocabulary that will allow them to converse about the self in a number of informal situations, and which will empower them to explore their relationship with the societies and cultures of the global Spanish-speaking community. Students will develop writing strategies that enable them to be able to produce, by the end of the semester, a number of descriptive, personal texts, such as emails, letters, and family profiles. They will refine reading and listening skills through engagement with authentic cultural materials. Students will collaborate on an inquiry-led group project that brings them into contact with authentic cultural materials, such as artworks, advertisements, music and poetry, all aimed at facilitating their appreciation of important cultural notions of interpersonal relations, the family and the home. Students are afforded a taste of the richness of the Hispanic World in this subject; they are invited to develop a personal awareness and understanding of diverse cultural identities through project-based and object-based assessment tasks and sustained in-class activities.

This subject equips students with more sophisticated language and intercultural skills to be able to express and situate themselves within a wider socio-cultural context, in Spanish. Writing strategies, such as editing, summarizing ideas and making writing persuasive will prepare students to produce, by the end of the semester, a number of texts, such as summaries and essays, in the past tense and focused on describing personal experience. Students will also learn to converse about the self in a variety of situations that progressively, throughout the semester, become increasingly less personal and more related to the world around them. Important cultural information about consumer culture, intimate relationships and working life in the Hispanic World will support students in communicating appropriately in this context. Students engage with authentic materials such as songs, film, social media and short written texts as part of group project work designed both to develop an appreciation of the wide range of identities that make up the Hispanic World and to further develop their reading, listening, writing and speaking skills. Students continue to be exposed to the diversity of the Hispanic World in this course and to critically reflect on their own awareness and understanding of the cultural identities of the Hispanic World.

Learning a language involves not only linguistic and cultural proficiency but also the development of skills in areas valued by industry: intercultural competence, communication and digital literacy. This subject offers students the opportunity to develop these skills by engaging with an industry collaborator in target-language communities in Australia. Students will work in teams to progress an existing project, in consultation with the industry partner. The subject brings together students from a mix of language majors and is taught in English, but will result in some assessable outcomes in a target language.

The subject comprises three phases: 1) three initial weeks of seminars (delivered in English to students in all language streams) which introduce students to team- and project-work strategies, workplace culture, career pathways, as well as the industry partner’s project; 2) eight weeks of collaborative work in response to a project brief, under close supervision and to a schedule of reporting deadlines, documenting progress through an online platform; and 3) the presentation of project outcomes to an audience of industry specialists, community members and peers.

The subject allows students to sharpen their skills in listening, speaking, reading, writing and research through an integrative learning experience that involves using the Spanish language to critically examine key cultural texts from the Hispanic world.

Cultural texts studied may include films, literature, art works, propaganda and/or archived ephemera, which act as catalysts for discussion, critical thinking and insight in relation to the Hispanic world. Texts examined chronicle issues and events of historical and political significance, while touching on shared cultural themes.

Through a close reading of Spanish-speaking cultural products of various kinds, students will develop an appreciation for the particular powers of each mode of representation. This subject also introduces students to basic research methods in Hispanic Cultural Studies, such as archival work, translation, interviewing, and the study of primary and secondary sources.