Welcome to the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center's Spanish Basic Course. This course is designed with you, the adult learner, in mind. It contains material that we hope you will find challenging, interesting, and motivating.
You are about to begin an exciting journey into the world of Spanish language and culture. There are 20 Spanish speaking countries, not including the United States which has a Hispanic population of approximately 25 million people. It is our hope, as you travel through the lessons contained in the textbook, that you will not only find the activities to be interesting and helpful to you as you acquire the Spanish language, but that you will gain some insight into the richness and beauty of the Spanish speaking culture.
The course is written for adult military and/or civilian learners who are in an intensive learning environment. It is based on current theoretical and practical thinking regarding second language acquisition. The approach taken in the course is one that combines communicative, thematic, and task-based activities, reflecting also the variety of learning styles and strategies that the learner brings to the language teaming experience.
If you are a resident student of Spanish at the DLIFLC, you will have 25 weeks to reach your goal, to achieve a 2-2-2 on the Defense Language Proficiency Test and to successfully meet the requirements of the FLO (Final Learning Objectives) sub-skills test The materials contained in this course are designed with this goal in mind. Some of the materials included in the program are taken directly from Spanish-speaking newspapers, magazines, news broadcasts, etc. You will listen to as well as read, talk, and write about a variety of articles and stories and be asked to do multiple tasks such as get the main idea or look for specific information and then write or respond orally. Throughout the course, you will also be asked to work with FLO sub-skills tasks such as transcription, summarizing, reading handwritten texts, and translating and interpreting from and into Spanish. You will be exposed to many different authentic texts which deal with a variety of topics, all of which are based on real-life experiences.
Spanish also called Castilian (castellano), is a Romance language that originated in Castile, a region in Spain. There are approximately 407 million people speaking Spanish as a native language, making it the second-most-spoken language by number of native speakers after Mandarin. It also has 60 million speakers as a second language, and 20 million students as a foreign language. Spanish is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, and is used as an official language by the European Union and Mercosur. Spanish is the most popular second language learned by native speakers of American English. From the last decades of the 20th century, the study of Spanish as a foreign language has grown significantly, facilitated in part because of the growing population demographics and economies of many Spanish-speaking countries, growing international tourism and the search for less expensive retirement destinations by North Americans and Europeans.
Spanish is spoken in: Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Cuba, Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Paraguay, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Panama, Uruguay, Equatorial Guinea
Spanish is also called: Castellano, Castilian, Castillan, Español
