New! Grammar Component Added to "Spanish for the Professions"

Starting in the spring 2011 semester all section of the survey course Spanish for the Professions (SPAN 265) at UNC-CH will have a grammar component.  There has always been a lot of demand for grammar in the minor program in Spanish for the Professions.

Students in this minor program are prohibited from taking the department's main grammar course (SPAN 300) and this has been a disappointment to many so we're bring grammar to the minor.

What does this mean?  It means that in addition to the primary text Spanish for the Professions (from Carolina Coursepacks), students will also Manual de gramática: Grammar Reference for Students of Spanish by Zulma Iguina and Eleanor Dozier.  After brief explanations in class, students will do self-guided work in the text and have frequent quizzes in class.

This addition gives the course a strong grammar component while allow the primary focus to remain on content-based instruction in Spanish for the Professions.

Spanish for Journalism students publish articles in Latijam

This semester students in the Spanish for Journalism and Mass Communications course (SPAN 322) published articles in a mass media outlet: Latino Journalism and Media at Carolina (or "Latijam").

This was part of a collaboration between the minor in Spanish for the Professions in the Department of Romance Languages and the Latijam program in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications.

The Spanish for Journalism course is a service-learning course so most students were able to write a news article related to the work they were doing in the local Chapel Hill and Carrboro communities.  For example:

• the first article published was written by Elizabeth DuVall about the 10th anniversary celebration of our local Latino Community Credit Union: La Cooperativa Latina de Crédito celebró su décimo aniversario.
• Kelsey Rice wrote about a new bilingual recipe book: Recetas para una vida saludable: El programa Saludamos y "You say tomato; Yo digo tomate".
• Colleen Cook published an article about an adult ESL program entitled Más latinos quieren aprender inglés.
• Allison Meeks' article is about her work at a food bank in a local church: Voluntarias afroamericanas atienden un banco de alimentos que hacen feliz a muchos latinos.
• Ashley Patton and Jessica Roache wrote about La Fiesta del Pueblo in their article entitled Más de 20,000 visitantes acudieron a La Fiesta del Pueblo.

Stay posted to Latijam for more publications!

Congratulations to all the students for their hard work in the course and for their publishing successes!

PowerPoint Presentations

As the semester comes to a close at colleges and universities everywhere, it's presentation time! If you're preparing a final presentation using PowerPoint, remember the golden rule:

Don't write everything you want to say on the slides and then read them out loud to your audience. Everyone in your audience can surely read and would rather just take a handout and go home to read the presentation.

The heart of the presentation should be about what you have to say. The PowerPoint slides should:

• frame your topic with a declarative statement instead of a dry title. Instead of "The industry:", try to really assert something: "The industry model is too old to be sustainable in the 21st century"
•  instead of a bulleted list of text on the rest of the slide, provide compelling visual support for what you are saying (a photograph, a colorful chart, dramatic statistics, a pithy quote).

Remember: it's you giving the presentation and PowerPoint backing you up--not the other way around.