AP Spanish Language and Culture

Advanced Placement course
the Advanced Placement Spanish Language course and exam

Advanced Placement (AP) Spanish Language and Culture (also known as AP Spanish Language, AP Spanish V, or AP Spanish) is a course and examination offered by the College Board in the United States education system as part of the Advanced Placement Program.

This course is primarily a comprehensive review of all previous knowledge pertaining to the Spanish language. This class builds upon the skills developed within introductory and intermediate Spanish classes by applying each skill to a specific, contemporary context; common themes include health, education, careers, literature, history, family, relationships, and the environment. Students also strive to refine their skills in writing, reading, speaking, and understanding spoken Spanish. Students concentrate on developing proficiency in such skills, specifically in preparation for the AP Spanish Language examination. In addition, the course emphasizes mastery of linguistic competencies at a very high level of proficiency. Despite the best attempts by the College Board, the AP Spanish Language curriculum is very fluid. Individual teachers can choose to present the material in a variety of ways. Because teachers inherently have different methods of pedagogy, issues arise that pertain to the necessity of a standardized Spanish curriculum for the exam. Since the Spanish language is so eclectic and can be tested in a plethora of manners, a more solidified curriculum covering specific vocabulary, verb forms and usages, expressions, and other facets of the language is hard to develop. While some students may be concerned about their ability to demonstrate proficiency in an assessment that native speakers of Spanish also take, only the scores of students who study Spanish as a second language are factored in when creating the distribution curve of scores 1–5. Native speakers or heritage language speakers of Spanish are then compared to non native distribution and assigned a score accordingly. There are six AP themes in the course, and within each theme there are six contexts.