Taught in Spanish at Pontificia Universidad Católica. This course is designed to develop your basic academic communication skills. To this end, we will focus on reading comprehension and writing of increasingly specialized texts, preparing you for success and sharpening your skills during your studies at Chilean universities. Learning outcomes will be assessed through reading comprehension tests and creation of a writing portfolio.
Upon successfully completing this course, you’ll be able to:
- Reflect on the main characteristics of communication in an academic context.
- Appropriately interpret different texts that circulate in the academic sphere.
- Plan and formulate academic texts to effectively communicate.
- Apply normative and stylistic conventions during the writing process.
- Articulate and support the importance of ethical academic practices during the writing process.
Topics covered include:
Introduction to Communication in the Academic Context
- Functions and contexts of language use
- Differences in language use at school vs. university
- Differences between spoken and written language
- Metalanguage: text, paragraph, sentence, word
Reading Texts for Learning
- Social purposes of texts
- Structure and stages of texts
- Ways of expressing specialized concepts and causality
- Author’s stance and integration of other voices in a text
Writing Texts for Learning
- How to structure an answer to an open-ended question
- How to represent knowledge
- How to establish a position and integrate other voices
- How to revise one’s own writing
Note: Students whose placement test indicates proficiency beyond that required for SPA 480.54 must take an additional local university course taught in Spanish to meet the Santiago program’s Spanish study requirement.
(PUC #LET010)
Department: Spanish
Location: Santiago
Semester: Fall
Credits: 3