This course offers an overview of the principles of modern second language acquisition (SLA) research, specifically applied to the learning of Spanish. The main objective of this course is to provide students with the background knowledge to understand the psycholinguistic principles at work in world language learning, how these principles appear in the acquisition process, and the acquisition of different components of language.

This course offers an overview of the social and linguistic determinants of grammatical structure, applied to Spanish. The main objective of this course is to provide students with the knowledge to be sociolinguistically responsible users and teachers of Spanish. Instead of an uncritical review of grammatical rules of “Standard” Spanish, this course analyzes the range of variation found in commonly taught grammatical structures, considers the social and linguistic reasons that account for this variability, and explores the implications of this variability for language teaching and use.

This practical course aims to help students acquire basic knowledge of interpretation skills with an emphasis on written translation. With Spanish being the second language in the United States, this translation course responds to the increasing need to prepare language graduates and educators to communicate in Spanish in various professional settings. The emphasis of this course is on the translation of a variety of texts from different disciplines and fields. Some texts will be translated from English into Spanish and others from Spanish into English. The students will also learn basic translation concepts and essential translation procedures that are considered vital components in the formal training of a professional translator.
The history of Latinx/Latine in North America can be traced to even before the existence of the US as a republic, and their history until today continues to be one of both growth and struggles. This course aims to create a space for dialogue and examination of the complexities of Latinx/Latine cultural production in the US. By critically analyzing works from diverse groups of artists and writers, we will explore some of the major themes that inform their cultural productions (race, gender, immigration, citizenship, class, etc.). The course also aims to foster awareness of the customs and traditions of the Latinx/Latine community in the US and give students the ability to explain the importance and role of language and culture awareness in an increasingly global society.

This course overviews Latin American Literature through varied texts (short stories, poetry, and novels) from the 20th and the 21st centuries. Grad students will discuss the significant themes and authors in the region. Latin America is a diverse and vast territory, full of contrast, racially diverse, and culturally heterogeneous. We address in this course parts of that complexity by reading writers from distant parts of the region, from different backgrounds and cultures.

This course offers the opportunity to study artifacts taken from literary works, film, painting, theatre, and music, among others, produced in different Spanish-speaking countries through the lens of cultural studies. Students will acquire the necessary skills and critical vocabulary to convey the analyses of multiple types of cultural production from different historical periods and associated with various socio-political contexts. The course’s main objective is to expand students’ knowledge of the cultural expressions from Latin America and Spain via the analysis of visual, oral, and written texts from different sources while acknowledging the diverse platforms in the field of cultural studies they can use to accomplish such study.