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per04 i 312-% S ugpsPef]hy FOREIGN SERVICE INSTITUTE SPANISH / | DEPARTMENT OF STATE Ot BEST COPY AVAILABLE COMPLETED SPANISH PROGRAMMATIC COURSE Volume 1 C. CLELAND HARRIS and ASSOCIATES FOREIGN SERVICE INSTITUTE WASHINGTON, D.C. 1967 DEPARTMEN T O F S TAT E a voto u Printing Office Vor sale by the Superintendent ofD nrumenta. Gowerm ment 20 i PREFACE The FSI Spanish Programmatic Course, Volume |, comprising this textbook and accompanying tape recordings together with an Instructor's Manvel, provides introductory learning materials for use by speakers of English who want to acquire a style of Spanish whichi s neivteryh foermarl n or overly casual. The term programmatic has been adopted to denote a course which uses some techniques of programmed instruction and is adaptable to classroom use, to selj-instruction or to combinations of the two. Part of each unit is in programmed form; other parts follow a more conventioanuadilo - lingual format. In all parts, the guiding principles have been simplicity and clarity of presentation, characteristics which are required of materials to be used in seif-instruction, although the materials have been written with the teacher-classroom situation also in mind. The principal difference in approach between this course and the FS! Sponish Besic Course, for example, is the emphasis placed here on advance, pre-class preparation of new material by the student with the help of tapes. The principal difference between this and completely programmed materials is that here the student’s self-study is, if possible, regularly punctuated by sessions in the classroom with an instructor. The linguist in charge has been C. Cleland Harris, Chairman of the Department of Romance Languages. Helpful criticisms and contributions were made by Jaci L. Ulsh, linguist in charge of Spanish and Portuguese, Rosalinda L. Pineda (Mexico) and Blanca C. de Spencer (Colombiaa)n d by the following members of the teaching staff who participated in the pre-publication trials: Hortensia T. de Berry (Cuba), Marta L. de Gowland (Argentina), Susana K. de Framinan (Argentina), Gladys F. de Telford (Paraguay), Isabel B. de Lowery (Bolivia), Vicente N. Arbelaez (Colombia), Jorge Krichmar (Argentina), Jose A, Mejia (Colombia), Juan Jose Molina (Honduras) and Bolivar M. Cobos (Ecuador). Manuscript and final copy were prepared by Sra. Pineda, Irma C. de Ponce and Marie Litvinoff. The recordings were made in the studios of the FSI Language Laboratory with the technical assistance of Charles P. Monat and Jose M. Ramirez under the general supervision of Gary Alley. The bilingual contrasts on the tapes were voiced by Dr. Harris. Mr. Ulsh read the English announcements, and Sra. de Spencer, Sr. Cobos and Sr, Mejia voiced the Spanish script. James R. Frith, Dean School of Language Studies Foreign Service Institute May 31, 1967 Department of State iii SPANISH | BLATS PAGE iv SPANISH This text is accompanied by an Instructor's Manual which contains the script of all the recorded portions. Since many of the recorded exercises do not appear in printed form in this, the student's book, the Instructor's Manual serves as a handy, quick reference and guide for the teacher, Stu- dents who are using this text for self-instruction will find the manual a useful aid in checking the accuracy of their own performance, FSI Spanish is designed primarily for the student who has access to a tape player for study purposes, If one is not available, these materials should be used in the same manner as are more conventional materials, After pre-publication trials with over 200 students, PSI is convinced that the rate of progress is greater and the quality of performance higher if the stvdent has an opportunity to study new material before reporting to class through the use of facilities that allow him to listen to the recorded portions of the lessons, The authors like to believe that greater progress and higher quality performance are inherent in some small way in the materials themselves; however the general improvement in achievement is probably attributable more to technique than to anything else, For example, a student who pre- pares an assignment by himself, with his own tape player, will normally be participating with the language at the enormous rate of 400 to 600 participations per hour, If the same material were being learned in a class chared with only three other students, his participation rate would be reduced accordingly: to 100 to 150 per hour, This participation rate, of course, begins to approach insignificance with a class of twenty or more students. In such large classes, teachers have to resort to choral Vv SPANISH response techniques in order to counteract the low participation rates. Much of the success of these materials is due, then, not necessarily to the material itself but to the arrangement of material, an arrangement that allows learning to take place profitably outside of the classroom and thereby fosters unusually high participation rates for the individual students, A typical unit covers a cycle of work requiring from three to five hours from the average or above-average student. The learning that takes place during a typical cycle has been sequenced as follows: 1. (Gdservation of the language. 2. Practice with what has been observed, 3. Variation of that which has been practiced, 4, Applicationo f what has been learned in the first three stages, The sectioning of a unit relates to these four learning modes as follows: Sections within a unit: Learning Mode: Introducito n Dialog > ion ical Observation and < Practice Practice Variati = Variation Application ~ Application The last section of each typical unit (the Application section) contains no recorded portions, It is always a summary of the present unit plus a recycling of important features of the preceding two units, No new material is presented. It serves, therefore, (1) as a testing device to determine how well the material has been learned, and (2) as a useful *homework’ assignment where students do not have a tape player available outside of class, This Application section can serve as a time-saver for students with a limited but active knowledge of Spanish: they should work the Application section first; if they can work it successfully, then that unit does not have to be studied, and they should proceed to the next unit until areas are encountered where errors are made, indicating the need to vi SPANISH study that unit. Volume I contains twenty-five units of a course planned to have about 100 units, The course as a whole is intended to lead the student to a minimum professionally useful level of proficiency, The objective of this first phase is to emphasize structure: word structure and, particularly, phrase structure. Therefore, this volume -- especially through Unit 20 -- displays equal concern with phrase relators and connectors and with verb morphology and shows considerably less concern with vocabulary. During this introductory phase, the authors are more interested in the student's ability to perfora in gulti-phrasal and multi-clausal sentences using the proper connectors and relators than in his stockpiling of vocabulary items, Subsequent units will develop the remaining verb morphology and expand the vocabulary, The average student requires approximately 100 hours to go through Volume I, Since there are 417 ‘words’ in this volume, he assimilates at the rate of 4,2'words' per hour. (A ‘word’ is defined as a preposition, a verb form, an infinitive, a number, an adjective, etc.) This rate is 1,2 ‘words’ per hour higher than had been anticipated, but it is still comparatively low, The distribution of vocabulary items (‘words’) is as follows: 115 Nouns; 130 Verbs, Verb Forms or Phrases; 172 Other, To encourage the feeling of realism while learning a foreign language, the study of verb morphology commences with a past tense (Preterit’ or ‘Past of Events’), as it is more natural to ask the student ‘What did you bring last night?’ than ‘What do you bring (at night)?" However, the present tense is not ignored; most of the common verb phrases (e.g. tener que --r, querer --r, ir a --r, acabar de ~-r, aprender a ~-r and so forth) are treated also in the Present with the result that the student becomes as capable in the Present as in the Past. The Imperative Mood is also taught, as well as several frequent patterns of the Present Subjunctive, PSI has used these materials in intensive, six-hours-per-day classes as well as in one-hour-per-day classes, in the former, approximately two hours of preparation followed by 30 minutes or more of classroom recitation and application is the normal pattern, although variations have been employed with equal success, (In one-hour-per-day classes, the ciass vii schedule is no different from that of classes using conventional materials but the ‘homework’ is done where possible as pre-class work on a tape player.) The normal practice of our teaching staff during the recitation periods has been to spend ten to fifteen minutes checking briefly the material studied by the student, followed by an equal or longer period relating this material to the student's own experience. Depending on the exigencies of scheduling, the instructor may follow these recitation periods with instruction in new material, or, more usually, dismiss the class for further self-study in the language laboratory, viii Grammatical Observations Stress as Tense Marker Person Marker Vowels SaEE Application UNIT6 Introduction Dialog Intonation: Statement Identification Tests Intonation: Polite Question Grammatical Observations Intonation: Pamiliar Question Negation USsBeS Intonation: Question with a Application Question Word Test C UNIT7 Introduction UNIT 2 Writing Awareness (Includ- Introduction ing qu-) Vowel Reductions Dialog Dialog Grammatical Observations Identification Tests The Verb: Four Forms The Verb: The Affix lo Application UNIT3 Int roduct ion UNIT 8 Dialog Identification Tests Introduction Grammatical Observations Writing Awareness (Cont'd) ‘Counter-words' and ‘Counter- Gender Concept (un/una) phrases’ Dialog *Being' Grammatical Observations Ser/Estar (1) Application UNIT4 & Introduction UNIT 9 Assimilation: vowel * b/d Dialog Introduction Identification Tests Writing Awareness (Cont'd) Grammatical Observations Assimilotion: s.r +d The Verb Orthographic Accent ‘In’, ‘at’ Dialog Grammatical Observations Ser/Eetar (11) UNIT5 Lal e Test Introduction Nationality Dialog Pluralization Identification Tests Gender (concluded)