This intermediate sequence presumes elementary knowledge of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. The course teaches language with constant reference to authentic materials – literature, music, television and film, journalism, and short videos – in order to reinforce the link between language and culture and to engage intermediate speakers in their continued study of BCS. Through individual and group activities that solidify and develop the major communicative skills, students will build on their existing vocabulary, improve their grammatical accuracy, gain the confidence to speak freely and to lead discussions, take increased responsibility for the trajectory and pace of their learning, and navigate real-world situations courageously.
Students completing the 117A/B sequence will achieve Intermediate Mid or higher proficiency in BCS across all modalities: speaking, listening, reading (in both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets), and writing (in both alphabets). They will be able to converse in BCS with sympathetic native speakers and to describe familiar events in the past, present, and future. Students will be able to comprehend and respond to more detailed directions and will successfully understand and paraphrase short audio and video clips. They will be able to read authentic fictional and non-fictional texts in both alphabets with a glossary, and will have sufficient grasp of word roots to make educated guesses about unfamiliar words. Students will be able to take simple notes in BCS. In their compositions, they will demonstrate the ability to combine pieces of learned material to express personal meaning in full paragraphs using complex sentence structures. Students completing the 117A/117B sequence will be prepared to benefit from spending time in a BCS-speaking country.
This course is taught as a single class covering the Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian standards. You may choose the standard you write and speak in, and you should use it consistently within a given assignment; you are expected to comprehend all of them. Differences across the standards are treated in this course as an object of study rather than as noise, which is what the sociolinguistics strand on the schedule is for.