How to Prepare for AP Spanish Language?

ringopuppers
Sun, 20 Jun 2010 15:38:40 +0000

As a nonnative speaker, it’s pretty tough to get a 5. Are you aiming for a 5 for credit purposes, or personal satisfaction?

First, familiarize yourself with the exam structure because there are several different sections. Some will come super easily to you (for most non-native speakers in my class, essay and letter writing were by far the easiest) and you should brush up on them but really focus on the things that you’re not that great at.

Listening/speaking portions were more difficult. For listening, practice listening to FAST speech. At this point in your Spanish career it should be easy to listen to slower speech and you should understand nearly completely. The speech on the AP exam can be a little quick, and sometimes tricky accents are in there. Our teacher would play news video clips from sites like BBC Mundo. If you do that often, I think it’ll help.

Speaking portion… Well, one part is easy if you know how to do it, the other just needs a lot of practice for some people. The easy one is the ‘presentation’ style section. I used to take my planning period and write my ENTIRE speech, then just read it. Some people don’t like doing this but it always worked for me. This method effectively turns it into another writing portion (easy!) except you can read it aloud! The conversation part gets tricky if the prompting voice asks you a question you previously answered and you find yourself repeating what you already said… It’s hit or miss. Practice and I’m sure it can be perfected, I was just lazy in Spanish…

And then there’s the reading portion. The way it was this year, at least, was that half of the passages were article style/nonfiction, and the other half were kind of like passages from novels. The article ones, for most of us in my class at least, were easy to understand. The novel-esque passages… Ugh don’t even get me started. They should be your focus in your reading practice.

Skipping a level shouldn’t matter. To me, Spanish 1 is your foundation, Spanish 2 builds on it, Spanish 3 you learn like one thing, and Spanish 4 is just monotonous rehashing of crap you already know. Then you get to AP and it’s time for real business!

But ABOVE ALL! Be motivated, practice, write, speak, listen. I was lazy and trying harder would have helped me on the exam… The actual class was easy to skate by with minimal effort but the exam asks more of you.