Many classes require students to deliver an oral presentation to demonstrate what they have learned over the course of a semester or year. In Spanish classes, your oral presentation should demonstrate your fluency and language skills. It should be conducted entirely in Spanish and should touch on either some interesting study of the Spanish language or some aspect of Spanish-speaking culture. Whenever possible, incorporate visual aids, demonstrations and interactive components.
You could give a presentation about the Spanish language itself. Explore some aspect of the Spanish language in your presentation: vocabulary, semantics, grammar, slang or language used for specific situations. One example is to compare slang from different countries or from different regions in the same country — for example, Spanish spoken in Buenos Aires compared to rural Argentina. If grammar is your passion, you could also describe the different uses of the indirect object pronoun "le" and the direct object pronoun "lo."
Spain and Latin America are home to thousands of cultures within cultures. Pick a country or region of the Hispanic world and demonstrate an aspect of its culture that fascinates you: sports, food, dance, traditional costumes, education, religion or music. Use this opportunity to get interactive. Bring samples of food, wear a traditional costume and lead your peers in a Spanish folk song or a traditional dance. Or you could talk about the spices used in Yucatec cooking in Mexico and bring an assortment of spices for your fellow students to taste and smell.
You could choose to focus on current events in the Spanish-speaking world. Spain and Latin America are constantly in the news, so you could discuss what's happening now in indigenous rights, environmental conservation, the global economy, immigration and political elections. You could also talk about the tourism industry in a particular Spanish-speaking country and highlight why tourists may want to visit it. For example, you could compare and contrast the political system and electoral process between the U.S. and Cuba. Successful visual aids include live news broadcasts on television or public radio.
Spain and Latin America have a rich, complex and sometimes shocking history. Choose some aspect of Spanish or Latin American history that is personally interesting to you. You can talk about political movements, military dictatorships, pre-Columbian societies such as the Mayans or Latin American civil wars. For example, teach your classmates about the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s. Use supportive media such as short clips from feature films about a certain historical event.
