Professional Spanish Language Competency Digital Badge

Contact Information

The Professional Spanish Language Competency badge is a competency-based microcredential offered through the Department of Modern Languages. Students, particularly heritage-speakers, will be equipped with the necessary Spanish language skills to serve as a bilingual professional in public sector positions such as healthcare, education, and government services. Competencies set for this micro-credential are aligned with the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Language (ACTFL) standards for proficiency in areas of interpersonal, presentational, and interpretive communication.

Earning Criteria

Participants earning this badge are required to take part in specified academic Spanish coursework and successfully complete final oral presentations, confirm auditory understanding of dialogue in professional situations, and read and write a variety of professional communications.

Competencies Demonstrated

1. Successfully manage a variety of communication tasks in straightforward social and transactional situations using speech that may contain pauses, reformulations, and self-corrections. Ask questions to obtain information to meet important needs, such as instructions, prices, and services.
2. Speak about topics related to employment, current events, and matters of public and community interest by combining and linking sentences into connected discourse of paragraph length. Communicate with sufficient accuracy, clarity, and precision to convey their intended message without misrepresentation or confusion, and appropriately handle the essential linguistic challenges presented by a complication or an unexpected turn of events.
3. Understand speech in a variety of basic personal and social contexts. Derive meaning from oral messages typically understood by listeners at their level.
4. Understand the main facts, most supporting details, conventional narrative and descriptive discourse in familiar patterns, including narrations about past, present, and future events.   
5. Understand texts that convey information and deal with basic personal and social topics to which the reader brings personal interest or knowledge, although some misunderstandings may occur.
6. Understand conventional narrative and descriptive texts, and comprehend the main ideas and many supporting details of factual material. Understand conventional descriptions as well as narrations about past, present, and future events.   
7. Write short, simple communications, compositions, and requests for information in loosely connected texts about personal preferences, daily routines, common events, and other personal topics.  
8. Meet a range of work and/or academic writing needs. They are able to narrate and describe in major time frames in texts up to several paragraphs in length while exhibiting good control of frequently used syntactic structures and a range of general vocabulary. Thoughts are usually expressed clearly and supported by some elaboration.