Conversations in the Observatorio: The Development of Academic Proficiency in Oral Spanish in the United States: A Functional Approach

Cecilia Colombi

To RSVP, email:info-observatory@fas.harvard.edu

This presentation, sponsored by the seminar Teaching Spanish as Heritage Language: Theory and Practice (Harvard Department of Romance Languages and Literatures) will focus on an ongoing study that seeks to identify the linguistic features of the oral academic proficiency in advanced L2 Spanish students, and the effect of explicit instruction in advancing such Spanish oral academic skills.

Students from the university in northern California were enrolled in a course of Hispanic sociolinguistics in the US that aimed to improve oral proficiency in Spanish through formal presentations along with an explicit and practical teaching of the linguistic features of spoken academic Spanish.