The way I teach Spanish now is so different from how I learned it in school. I learned rules and used flash cards and memorized lists. If you learned that way, you probably walked away an expert at reading but not speaking Spanish. It's hard to become confident enough to speak to other people. It's hard to make sentences fast enough.
So, we want to get the language into our hearts, where we don't have to think about it. When we speak without having to consciously think of "the rules" we're using our "acquired competence". How did we learn our first language? It was by having others speak to us! The way to build this type of competence is through language input. In this class, I'll be providing students with lots of this language input through spoken or written messages.