Mateo Rovira Valencia

My focus consists on a particular emphasis in the development of of borth reading and writing skills for purposes of conversation and argumentation, such that prospective students will eventually come to be able to not only hold conversations, but both express challenging a complex Ideas and glean them from academic and formal texts.

The main goal is for the student to be able to understand texts in three different levels, each corresponding to a different information structure:

-Syntactic: the grammar proper. How is information coded into structure? how to detect a properly built sentence of spanish? how to compose them?
-Semantic: the logic of the language. What does it mean to understand a sentence? what does a sentence entail? how to detect contradictions in writing?
-Pragmatic: the use of the language. How are certain expressions used? how does the language interact with social and cultural context?

The purpose of the 3 levels above is to: first, introduce the student to the sentences of Spanish and what makes them work. Second, to read from them a coherent meaning. And last, to familiarize them with actual language use and become culturally competent on top of linguistically so.

Another priority in the sessions will be the development of proper pronunciation in the language, and introducing the student to the sound system of Spanish and how it manifests in Colombian Spanish.