More Information on Foreign Service Institute Spanish Courses

The Spanish Supplement for Secretaries is designed to aid secretaries employed in the foreign affairs community and assigned to positions in Spanish-speaking countries. The manual covers special expressions for office work and is therefore not intended as the primary language text, but rather as ancillary material.
The Supplement consists of eleven units, two preliminary ones covering cardinal numbers and the alphabet, followed by nine practice units having the following format:
I - a short dialogue
II - a series of questions on the dialogue
III - a narrative exercise on the dialog...
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The materials in this FSI Spanish Basics course volume 1 (of 4) have been developed to present Spanish as a spoken language, and the skills of understanding and speaking are accordingly emphasized. The method of presentation will likely be new to students acquainted with more traditional methods of language teaching. In order to understand the materials, one must first understand the method upon which they are built.
Method of Teaching
The method is known as GUILES IMITATION. It may appear to be new, but actually it has been used by a considerable number of teachers for many years, though...
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The materials in this FSI Spanish Basics course volume 2 (of 4) have been developed to present Spanish as a spoken language, and the skills of understanding and speaking are accordingly emphasized.
The first two units are focused primarily on pronunciation problems. Drills on other aspects of the language are deliberately postponed because of the importance of developing good pronunciation habits from the very beginning of the course. Pronunciation is extremely important. It is the basis of all real fluency. A person is readily able to understand anything he can meaningfully say himself, if the correlation be...
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The materials in this FSI Spanish Basics course volume 3 (of 4) have been developed to present Spanish as a spoken language, and the skills of understanding and speaking are accordingly emphasized.
The basic dialogs are the core of each unit. These dialogs are recreations of the real situations a student is most likely to encounter, and the vocabulary and sentences are those he is most likely to need. The dialogs are set in a mythical country called Surlandia, which is described as a typical Latin American republic, insofar as it is possible to extract common features from so diverse an area. To further provi...
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The present volume, which completes the Basic Spanish course (volume 4 of 4 - Units 45 to 55) of the Foreign Service Institute, differs in several respects from the previous volumes of the series, since experience with the text has shown that certain features which were useful in early units become unnecessary at a more advanced stage. Thus the "Aid to Listening" column consisting of a phonetic respelling has been dropped as no longer necessary for students whose basic pronunciation habits have become established. Similarly, the replacement and variation drills based on the basic sentences have been eliminated in favor of ...
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The FSI Spanish Headstart for Puerto Rico program consists of four modules with accompanying tapes. Each of the four modules is divided into units (two or three units per module). Each unit is a complete lesson. The learning activities for each unit are;
1. Conversation
2. Notes on the Conversation
3. Exercises
4. Self-evaluation Quiz
Unit-by-unit objectives for each module are stated at the beginning of the module; at the end of each module is a Spanish-English Glossary to be used for reference. The Keys to marked exercises and to the Self-evaluation Quizzes are at the end o...
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The FSI Spanish Headstart for Spain program consists of four modules with accompanying tapes. Each of the four modules is divided into units (two or three units per module). Each unit is a complete lesson. The learning activities for each unit are;
1. Conversation
2. Notes on the Conversation
3. Exercises
4. Self-evaluation Quiz
Unit-by-unit objectives for each module are stated at the beginning of the module; at the end of each module is a Spanish-English Glossary to be used for reference. The Keys to marked exercises and to the Self-evaluation Quizzes are at the end of the ...
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The FSI Spanish Headstart for Latin America program consists of four modules with accompanying tapes. Each of the four modules is divided into units (two or three units per module). Each unit is a complete lesson. The learning activities for each unit are;
1. Conversation
2. Notes on the Conversation
3. Exercises
4. Self-evaluation Quiz
Unit-by-unit objectives for each module are stated at the beginning of the module; at the end of each module is a Spanish-English Glossary to be used for reference. The Keys to marked exercises and to the Self-evaluation Quizzes are at the end...
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The FSI Spanish Programmatic Course Volume 1 (of 2), comprising this textbook and accompanying audio recordings together with an instructor's Manual, provides introductory learning materials for use by speakers of English who want to acquire a style of Spanish which is neither very formal nor 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 self-instruction or to combinations of the two. Part of each unit is in programmed form; other parts follow a more conventional audio-lingual format. In all p...
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The FSI Spanish Programmatic Course volume 2 (of 2) is designed primarily for the student who has access to a tape player for study purposes. If one is not avail-able, these materials should be used in the same manner as are more conventional materials. After pre-publication trials with over 200 students, FSI is convinced that the rate of progress is greater and the quality of performance higher if the student 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 greate...
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You're going to a Spanish-speaking country. Maybe you've already had some experience with foreign languages, or maybe you haven't. In either case, it's unlikely that you've studied a language as intensively as you will in this course. If you have any questions about these next few weeks, they probably fall into one of three categories: "What does this course have to offer me?," "What is it going to require of me?," and "How can I get the most out of it?"
What's in it for you?
This FSI Spanish Familiarization & Short-Term training course is more than just a language course. Language, afte...
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