SPAN 303
Course description: Reviews all phases of communication skills with practice in understanding, speaking, and writing grammatically correct Spanish. Teaches specific components of Spanish grammar: the Spanish verbal system, the subjunctive, ser versus estar, and other problematic aspects of grammar. Taught in Spanish.
Meets MLO 2
Meets MLO 2
Reflective Narrative
In SPAN 303, I was able to explore Spanish linguistics more extensively through activities that related what I learned in class to current behaviors and social issues. In this course, I learned the difference between prescriptive and descriptive grammar. The first one is dedicated to registering the "rules" of grammar, as dictated by the institutions that “guard” the language, defining what is “correct” and what is not, while the second explains in a more comprehensive way the non-privileged uses of the language. Learning about this distinction helped me to identify prejudices that I had about the speech of some people, and for a long time I came to agree with comments that denigrated in some way those who did not use the "standard" or academic form of Spanish for communicating. Thanks to Dr. Rebecca Pozzi's classes, I have learned to question those comments by doing a little research that helps me identify why some linguistic phenomenon happens. My dad is from a rural area of Michoacan, Mexico, so many times I hear him use certain words that I was taught were grammatically "incorrect" and for a long time I was correcting him, hoping he would use the prescriptive form. One of those words was haiga. In this course, I learned where the use of haiga comes from and why it is stigmatized today by language prescriptivists. During the conquest period, where Latin American countries were assimilating the imposition of Spanish by Spain, haiga was part of "standard" Spanish, but at some point it began to battle against haya, the other conjugation of the verb haber, and it lost. Then, the use of haya began to spread to the viceroyalties of Spain. However, the change in use did not reach the corners of the countries, so it continued to be used. Now that I know this, and other examples, I no longer judge people by their way of speaking, but I try to understand the variations of Spanish that are practiced in society. For this class, in teams we completed a research project on the speech of the singer "Pitbull". In this essay, we identify the artist's linguistic practices by classifying the changes he makes when speaking and connecting the phenomena with the definitions we learned in class. Our purpose was to raise awareness about the variations that do not belong to the prescriptive grammar, to include and validate these different forms of communication that exist in the Spanish-speaking world. With this in mind, I am now better able to confront the language police and change attitudes towards linguistic variations by pointing out the racist, classist or sexist undertones that prescriptive comments may have.