ABSTRACT
A second year course in Basic Portuguese has been a requirement for the Hispanic Studies Honours degree at the University of Glasgow for over 16 years. It has to bring second year university students to a level of language ability sufficient to continue into Honours, where they are expected to handle a whole range of literary texts. This is deemed possible by the historical situation that obtains at Glasgow — most of the students are assumed to have already learned Spanish. It is also necessary to combine the communicative teaching methods of native language assistants concentrating on functions and notions (eg asking, warning, promising as well as routines relating to time, place, currency etc) with the need for a rapid acquisition of grammatical structures that are often quite different from Spanish. Pronunciation in turn provokes orthographic changes in the language, which, unlike Spanish, make the written and spoken language elements quite separate hurdles to be negotiated and much more attention must be given to it.
