•   Foreign Language Objectives
     
    1.  Competence in a language involves 4 skills of communication: listening, speaking, reading, and writing.  Learning a language means aquiring all 4 of these skills.
     
    2.  The 1st step in learning a foreign language is to become thoroughly familiar with the sounds of the language; to develop the listening and speaking skills.  Mastering a foreign language is something like learning to play a musical instrument; it is a matter of developing a new set of reflexes.  Success will depend upon practice, correction and more practice.
     
    3.  Students will be exposed to the cultures of Spanish speaking countries in order to develop an understanding and appreciation of foreign cultures as well as their own.
     
    4.  Students will be taught the structure or grammar of the language.
     
    5.  Students will also develop the skills of reading and writing in Spanish.  Just as they have to guard against producing English rather than Spanish sounds when speaking, they will have to learn not to assign English values to the familiar letters of the alphabet when reading Spanish words.