MTEL Spanish (28) cheat sheet

Spanish is a null-subject language: person and number are carried by verbal morphology, so overt subject pronouns (yo, tú, él) appear only for emphasis, contrast, or disambiguation of third-person forms.

The verb system distinguishes indicative and subjunctive moods; the subjunctive is triggered by volition, emotion, doubt/negation, impersonal expressions of value, and non-assertive antecedents (busco un libro que…).

Ser encodes inherent or defining characteristics, origin, time, and event location; estar encodes state, condition, and location of entities. Adjective meaning can shift with the copula (es listo 'clever' vs. está listo 'ready').

Preterite vs. imperfect: preterite presents bounded events and narrative foreground; imperfect presents background, habitual action, ongoing states, and descriptions. Lexical meaning shifts (supe 'found out' vs. sabía 'knew').

The Spanish phoneme inventory includes the alveolar tap /ɾ/ and trill /r/ as distinct phonemes (pero vs. perro); /b, d, g/ have approximant allophones [β, ð, ɣ] between vowels.

Spanish orthography is largely phonemic: b/v are homophones, c before e/i and z represent /s/ or /θ/ by dialect, and written accents mark stress or distinguish homographs (el/él, mas/más, si/sí).

Syllable structure is predominantly CV; stress falls on the penultimate syllable for words ending in a vowel, -n, or -s, and on the final syllable for words ending in other consonants, unless an accent marks otherwise.

Object pronouns follow a fixed order (se + second person + first person + third person) and leísmo/loísmo/laísmo describe dialectal deviations in third-person clitic selection.

Major Peninsular literary periods: medieval mester de juglaría (Cantar de mio Cid) and mester de clerecía (Berceo, Libro de buen amor), Renaissance and Golden Age (Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón, Góngora, Quevedo), and 19th-century realism (Galdós, Clarín).

Latin American narrative landmarks include modernismo (Rubén Darío, Azul), the nueva narrativa of the 1960s (García Márquez, Cortázar, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa), and the Boom's magical realism, which treats the fantastic as ordinary.

Spanish American poetry includes Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Baroque, colonial Mexico), José Martí (modernismo precursor), Gabriela Mistral, César Vallejo, and Pablo Neruda, whose Veinte poemas de amor and Canto general mark distinct phases.

Spanish-language theatre includes Lope de Vega's Arte nuevo de hacer comedias, which codified the comedia; Calderón's La vida es sueño; and 20th-century work by Lorca (Bodas de sangre, La casa de Bernarda Alba).

Cultural products of the Spanish-speaking world include the quinceañera, Día de los Muertos (Mexican observance, November 1–2), Semana Santa processions, and regional cuisines such as paella (Valencia), mole (Puebla), and ceviche (Peru).

Geography and demography: Spanish is official in 21 countries; Mexico has the largest number of Spanish speakers; Equatorial Guinea is the only African country with Spanish as an official language.

Literary terms in Spanish include verso libre, estribillo, soneto, romance (octosyllabic ballad meter), hipérbaton, hipérbole, metáfora, and personificación; recognizing their function supports analysis of tone and theme.

Historical events frequently referenced in Peninsular literature include the Reconquista (ending 1492), the expulsion of the Jews (1492), the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), and the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975).

Written accent rules: words ending in a vowel, -n, or -s stress the next-to-last syllable; words ending in other consonants stress the last syllable; any exception carries a written accent.

Accents also distinguish homographs (tú/tu, él/el, sí/si, más/mas, aún/aun) and mark interrogative/exclamatory words (qué, cómo, cuándo, dónde, quién) when used in questions or exclamations.

Diacritic accents on demonstratives are no longer required by the RAE; forms like este/éste are written without an accent under current norms, though older texts retain it.

Spanish punctuation uses inverted opening marks (¿…?, ¡…?) and the raya (-) for dialogue; the English-style dash and quotation marks are not equivalent to the raya in Spanish narrative.

Capitalization rules are narrower than English: days, months, languages, nationalities used as adjectives, and titles of works capitalize only the first word and proper nouns.

The RAE's Ortografía (2010) and Nueva gramática (2009) are the reference norms; the Diccionario de la lengua española (DLE) is the standard lexicon, now consulted online.

Cohesion in Spanish academic prose relies on connectors such as sin embargo, por consiguiente, en consecuencia, no obstante, and por lo tanto; each carries a specific logical relationship (contrast, consequence, concession).

Register is signaled by pronoun choice and lexical selection: tú/vosotros (informal), usted/ustedes (formal), vos (voseo, parts of Latin America); ustedes is the plural of both tú and usted in Latin America.

Spanish phonology for listening includes seseo (casa = [kasa]) and distinción (casa = [kaθa]) as dialectal variants; neither is an error in the classroom.

Yeísmo, the merger of /ʎ/ and /ʝ/ (pollo/pozo distinction lost), is widespread in most Spanish-speaking regions; the lateral palatal /ʎ/ survives in parts of the Andes and Spain.

Regional pronunciation features include aspiration or loss of /s/ in syllable-final position (Caribbean, southern Spain), velarization of /n/ (pan = [paŋ]), and weakening of intervocalic /d/ (cansado = [kansao]).

Second-language acquisition theory relevant to Spanish teaching includes Krashen's input hypothesis, comprehensible input, the affective filter, and the distinction between acquisition and learning.

The ACTFL proficiency scale orders Novice, Intermediate, Advanced, Superior, and Distinguished; the Intermediate level is characterized by sentence-level production and the ability to handle simple transactions.

Communicative language teaching prioritizes meaningful interaction and authentic tasks; the three modes of communication are interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational.

Assessment principles: formative assessment informs instruction; summative assessment measures achievement; performance tasks should be aligned to the target proficiency level and scored with a rubric.

Spanish-speaking classroom discourse includes circumlocution as a learner strategy; teachers model paraphrasing (es una cosa que sirve para…) rather than translation when a word is unknown.

Gender and number agreement extends to articles, adjectives, and pronouns; nouns ending in -a are usually feminine, but Greek-origin -ma nouns (problema, tema, sistema) are masculine.

The verb gustar and similar psych verbs (encantar, doler, faltar, interesar) take an indirect object; the subject is the thing liked, so plural agreement follows the thing (me gustan los libros).

Reflexive and pronominal verbs (levantarse, quedarse, ponerse) can change meaning; ponerse + adjective = 'to become' (a state), while hacerse and volverse describe other kinds of change.

The passive voice has two forms: ser + past participle + por (true passive) and se + third-person verb (pasiva refleja, e.g., se venden casas), which is more common in everyday Spanish.

Relative pronouns: que is the general form; quien/quienes follow prepositions or refer to persons; el cual agrees in gender and number; cuyo is a possessive relative adjective.

Por vs. para: por marks cause, exchange, duration, and movement through; para marks purpose, destination, deadline, and recipient.

Ser and estar with adjectives can encode different meanings (es aburrido 'boring' vs. está aburrido 'bored'); the choice is a common error source for English-speaking learners.

Common learner errors include false cognates (embarazada 'pregnant', not 'embarrassed'; actual 'current'), literal translation of 'to be' with both ser and estar, and omission of the personal a before human direct objects.