Courses for the major or minor in French, Italian, or Spanish:
- Learning Goal: Students should develop linguistic skills in oral and written expression.
Objectives:
Students should be able to:
- demonstrate the ability to understand speech in the target language in most social and professional situations;
- demonstrate the ability to communicate orally in the target language in most social and professional situations;
- demonstrate the ability to understand written texts (journalism, non-fiction, literature, etc.);
- demonstrate adequate mastery of the grammar of the target language;
- demonstrate the ability to write grammatically and analytically at a variety of language levels.
- Learning Goal: Students should develop a sense of the cultural aspects of the peoples who speak the target language.
Objectives:
Students should be able to:
- recognize political, social, economic, and linguistic factors that influence components of the language and the culture;
- develop understanding of people of other cultures in general and in the particular local setting(s).
- Learning Goal: Students should be able to demonstrate an ability to read and analyze literature written in the target language.
Objectives:
Students should be able to:
- develop a sensitivity for literary language;
- become familiar with various literary terms and concepts and be able to use them in explicating and interpreting literary texts;
- become acquainted with a diverse range of literary genres, trends, schools, and groups;
- analyze and interpret literary texts;
- understand the historical, social, and political context of literary works and apply that knowledge to a literary analysis of those works.
Courses fulfilling the language requirement:
I. Language Requirement Courses
These goals and objectives extend over the first 4 levels of language learning, known as the elementary [FREN, ITAL, and SPAN 1 & 2] and intermediate [FREN, ITAL, and SPAN 3 & 4] levels. The objectives listed here pertain to each course, increasing in degree with each successive level. Each of the objectives is addressed incrementally in each of the 4 courses in the language requirement sequence.
- Learning Goal: Students will develop linguistic skills in the target language.
Objectives:
By the end of the sequence of language courses, students should be able to:
- understand sentence-length utterances and longer stretches of connected discourse on a number of topics pertaining to different times and places;
- initiate, sustain, and bring to a close basic oral communicative tasks;
- create with the target language by combining and recombining learned elements;
- read simple, connected texts in a consistent way with reasonable and graduated understanding;
- take notes, write simple letters, synopses and paraphrases, summaries of biographical data, work, school, and personal experience;
- have an emerging ability to write description and narration in paragraphs.
- Learning Goal: Students will develop a sense of the cultural aspects of peoples who speak the target language.
Objectives:
By the end of the sequence of language courses, students should be able to:
- negotiate the culture of the target language region(s);
- develop an understanding for and appreciation of the complexities of the human experience across cultures.
Courses fulfilling the distribution requirement:
Learning Goal: For distribution courses in translation, students will develop an understanding of other cultures through translations of literature as well as non-fiction documentation that originate from the region where the target language is used as an official mode of expression.
Objectives: Students should be able to accomplish the following:
- develop an understanding of people of other cultures in general and in the particular local setting with individuals of those cultures;
- develop an appreciation of the political, social, economic and linguistic factors, including prejudices, that characterize the human experience across cultures in the particular local setting(s) with individuals of those cultures;
- understand the historical, social, and political context of literary works and apply that knowledge to a literary analysis of those works.