"Definition" of Native Speaker:

Did you grow up around Spanish? Did your parents or grandparents speak Spanish to each other and/or to you? Did you speak Spanish with them, too, or maybe just understand what was being said and respond in English?  In the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, for all practical purposes, you are considered a native, or quasi-native speaker, initially, only if you have been growing up speaking and hearing Spanish at home.

The Program

This program is designed for students who have had varying degrees of formal (the equivalent of SPAN 2B) as well as informal exposure to Spanish while growing up and are interested in polishing their skills and acquiring new ones in this language. It includes a thorough review of the grammar rules and the orthography of Spanish, and prepares "native" Spanish speakers with the linguistic and learning skills required for successfully completing upper-division courses in Spanish. You are encouraged to discover how much you already know about Spanish and to develop your skills even further. You will read and write extensively, give oral presentations, and participate in debates, all while learning about the fundamental grammatical structures of Spanish and the many ways this language can be used in both formal and informal settings.

To assure proper placement in the Spanish for Native Speakers class, it is strongly recommended that you take the Spanish Placement Test and place into SPAN 2C;  You are then encouraged to enroll in SPAN 2NS. For more details about the course itself, please go back to "course Descriptions" for SPAN 2NS.  SPAN 2NS, in essence, is equivalent to SPAN 2C, and, as such, fulfills the UCI breadth requirement to "demonstrate competency in a language other than English".