How To Prepare Pre-AP Students for AP Spanish

Are you teaching Spanish 4 or Pre-AP Spanish? Are you wondering what students need to be ready for a college level class? How do we prepare pre-AP students for AP Spanish? After teaching AP Spanish since 2014, here are the needs I see students come in with.

Non-Heritage Learners

Non-heritage learners have different needs than students who come to us hearing and/or speaking Spanish at home. Non-heritage speakers often need help with:

-advanced grammar

-increasing fluency with speaking

-increasing vocabulary

-building confidence in their Spanish

-strategies for taking the AP Test

-instruction on how to present to an audience

Heritage Learner Pre-AP Needs

For the students who come to us hearing and speaking Spanish at home, we see different needs. These students often have a great vocabulary, and their grammar is also quite good. They need help with things like:

-spelling and accents

-study skills and how to prepare for big assessments

-organization of thoughts while writing or speaking

-writing skills (This depends greatly on the individual student and their life experience, but sometimes basic things like punctuation and capitalization are areas of need. Other times, students need help with forming paragraphs and having topic sentences, etc.)

-knowing what things are called in grammatical terms (*This is only important if a student would like to use their Spanish in the future to teach, write, etc. But if you give a grammar quiz that asks for the present subjunctive, heritage learners might struggle to know what that means, despite being able to form a sentence of that sort with ease and accuracy.)

-these students also need practice taking the test

-instruction on how to present to an audience

So How Do We Prepare Pre-AP Students for AP Spanish?

Identifying the needs of our students before they reach AP Spanish is important. When we know what they need most, we can tailor the activities in the classes that lead up to AP Spanish to reduce the gap between where they are and where they need to be.

The above list of common needs can get us starting to think about what we can do in Spanish 4 or Pre-AP Spanish! What comes to mind for you? What activities can you think of that would help address these needs? Leave a comment or email me!

In next week’s blog post, we will talk about some specific ideas and activities that can help guide your instruction to prepare Pre-AP students for AP Spanish!