Learning Goals

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  3. Learning Goals

All students taking courses in the World Languages Department will be able to:

  1. Think critically and multiculturally about race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, etc. A particular focus will be devoted to the concept of intersectionality from a multicultural, historical, and multilingual perspective.
  2. Foster inclusivity and cultural awareness by exposing students to foreign cultures. Texts, films, and other media in the target language will give students insight into a variety of world cultures, social structures, and histories while expanding and challenging ethnocentric (i.e., North American and/or Eurocentric) notions about diversity.
  3. Engage diversity in terms of lived experience, linguistic and cultural identity by recognizing differences in cultural identity in and outside the classroom.
  4. Develop the following linguistic and cultural competencies:

Courses 101-102:

  • Gain awareness of language systems and cultural specificities. 
  • Develop new learning strategies through second-language acquisition.
  • Read and write simple sentences and manipulate basic grammar.
  • Speak and understand at a survival level.

Courses 103-104:

  • Further analyze and understand language as a system, while exploring diversity within a specific culture. 
  • Gain a sense of the different registers of language.
  • Construct coherent short essays on a variety of personal and social topics.
  • Learn close reading and comprehension skills through texts of basic to moderate levels of difficulty.

Courses 200 & above :

  • Acquire the vocabulary and analytic tools for discussing complex cultural issues.
  • Write effectively in the target language, while acknowledging differences in register and style dependent on sociopolitical, economic, and identitarian groups, with an opportunity to build arguments reflective of their identity as writers. 
  • Speak effectively in the target language, while acknowledging differences in register, style and language variations dependent on sociopolitical, economic and identitarian groups, while recognizing the value of students’ linguistic heritage, customs, and dialects.
  • Write critical essays on cultural and literary topics.
  • Raise awareness of how linguistic usages and cultural representations might be used to model subjectivity and perpetuate dynamics of cultural and linguistic subjugation.