Goals and Objectives

Goals

The department serves a diverse student constituency including those enrolled in core-mandated courses as well as majors and minors. The department seeks to develop a broader understanding of a foreign culture through its primary manifestation: language. In addition to improving the skills of speaking, reading, writing, and listening in a foreign language, departmental courses expose students to literary, historical, and social artifacts of a foreign culture.

Analysis of the formal aspects of a foreign language also serves to heighten awareness of English language structures. A major in French or Spanish helps students to develop significant proficiency and makes them aware of the principal literary and other cultural manifestations of the language. With its emphasis on language, literature and critical thinking, the foreign language major prepares students for graduate work, teaching, government, and other careers with an international focus.

Objectives

Upon completing a course sequence in a foreign language through the 202 /222 level, a student will be able to:

• Demonstrate basic oral proficiency in the foreign language
• Understand basic grammatical structures in the foreign language and show an awareness of syntactic patterns
• Demonstrate critical thinking, especially in relation to analyzing, synthesizing, and producing the foreign language.
• Demonstrate an awareness of the basic literary and cultural manifestations of the foreign language