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# Introduction

Each section of this free course, Intermediate Spanish: Understanding spoken Spanish, will help you develop an understanding of spoken Spanish through watching video portraits of six people talking at a natural pace about themselves and their lives. Using videos for language improvement is powerfully motivating because as well as hearing people talk, you pick up cultural clues and body language, all in authentic scenarios which make language learning meaningful.

The more you watch and listen to Spanish in this way, the more you will understand. As you start, just relax and enjoy the sound of the language with its range of accents. Simply being able to recognise from the intonation, for example, that a question has been asked is an important step towards understanding natural language.

The video clips you will watch in this course are all authentic, that is, they are unscripted and spontaneous. They show people from Spain or Spanish-speaking countries talking about themselves at normal speed.

## Strategies for understanding video resources

You may not be aware of this, but when you watch a video or movie in your mother tongue, you are constantly using various strategies to help you make sense of what you are seeing. This course will enable you to recognise the strategies you already use in interpreting spoken language, and will help you adapt them so you can understand everyday speech in Spanish through the medium of videos. The language level used in this course corresponds to B1 in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (COE).

These are some key strategies you will explore through the course:

- Predicting content

- Using knowledge of your own language

- Using cultural knowledge

- Using subtitles

- Coping with unfamiliar language

- Deducing meaning

This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course L116 Spanish Studies 1: language and culture of the Spanish-speaking world.

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OpenLearn - Intermediate Spanish: Understanding spoken Spanish
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