Spring 2023 Courses
SPAN 307
Spanish for the Sciences
Description: Most Spanish courses specialize in humanities topics, such as art, literature, or history. By contrast, the objective of this course is to familiarize students with a different aspect of Hispanic culture, namely, the development of science and technology and its influence on society. In this course, students develop their ability to understand, speak, read, and write about science topics, and they compare the United States and Latin American countries in terms of how science develops, is taught and applied to solve problems in daily life. The most important objective of the course is for each student to develop knowledge about the language they need to communicate effectively with monolingual speakers about scientific topics of interest to them.
SPAN 352
Hispanic Linguistics (in Spanish)
Description: Language is one of the central capacities of humans, and it is the basis for most of our other distinctive characteristics, such as social life, culture, knowledge, traditions and beliefs. Linguistics is the science that studies the many facets of language as a human cognitive capacity, and of individual languages as cultural products of that capacity. This course aims to familiarize students with the basic concepts of linguistic science and of exemplifying these notions with Spanish and its varieties. This will allow them to describe languages with formal accuracy in terms of their sounds, words, sentences, and semantic interpretation. Students also learn to explain the main evolutionary tendencies of Spanish and its regional and social variation. Finally, students can explain the cognitive, social, and pedagogical dimensions of language acquisition and bilingualism, exemplifying with their personal experience.