The Diploma Programme is a rigorous pre-university course of study designed for students in the 16 to 19 age range. It is a broad-based two-year course that aims to encourage students to be knowledgeable and inquiring, but also caring and compassionate. There is a strong emphasis on encouraging students to develop intercultural understanding, open-mindedness and the attitudes necessary for them to respect and evaluate a range of points of view.
Spanish ab initio is a language acquisition course designed for students with no prior experience of the target language, or for those students with very limited previous exposure. At this level, a student develops receptive, productive and interactive communicative skills. Students learn to communicate in the target language in familiar and unfamiliar contexts.
Spanish B is a language acquisition course developed at two levels—standard level (SL) and higher level (HL)—for students with some background in the target language. While acquiring a language, students will explore the culture(s) connected to it. The focus of these courses is language acquisition and intercultural understanding.
The following assessment objectives are common to both language ab initio and language B. The level of difficulty of the assessments, and the expectations of student performance on the tasks, are what distinguishes the three modern language acquisition courses.
1. Communicate clearly and effectively in a range of contexts and for a variety of purposes.
2. Understand and use language appropriate to a range of interpersonal and/or intercultural contexts and audiences.
3. Understand and use language to express and respond to a range of ideas with fluency and accuracy.
4. Identify, organize and present ideas on a range of topics.
5. Understand, analyse and reflect upon a range of written, audio, visual and audio-visual texts.
In the language ab initio course, students develop the ability to communicate in the target language through the study of language, themes and texts. In doing so, they also develop conceptual understandings of how language works.
The five prescribed themes are:
• identities
• experiences
• human ingenuity
• social organization
• sharing the planet
The themes allow students to compare the target language and culture(s) to other languages and cultures with which they are familiar.
The language ab initio and language B syllabuses organize written, visual, audio and audio-visual texts into three broad categories: personal (blog, diary, email…), professional (formal letter, interview, menu…) and mass media texts (leaflet, flyer, film…).
At all levels of language acquisition, DP students are encouraged to make use of the thinking, communication and research skills they have developed over years of experience in school, and to transfer those skills to the target language at the pace—and within the contexts and for the purposes—that their language skills development will allow. Certain conceptual understandings of language are fundamental to successful communication and should be developed in all DP language acquisition courses.