World Languages

Chinese 1 introduces students to foundational Mandarin Chinese through high-frequency language used in everyday contexts. At this level, students learn how to greet others, introduce themselves, exchange personal information, talk about family, describe daily activities, express likes and preferences, and discuss basic school life. Instruction emphasizes accurate pronunciation, pinyin mastery, essential sentence structures, and the recognition and writing of basic Chinese characters. By the end of Chinese 1, students can participate in simple, predictable conversations. (1 credit)

Chinese 2 builds on foundational Mandarin skills and guides students toward more sustained communication in familiar contexts. In these lessons, students learn to talk about school life, daily schedules, dates and time, food and dining, transportation, weather, and leisure activities, while beginning to describe experiences and make simple plans. Instruction expands students’ control of sentence patterns, question formation, and functional vocabulary, while increasing expectations for listening comprehension, reading, and character use. By the end of Chinese 2, students are able to create original sentences, sustain short conversations, and handle everyday situations with growing confidence. (1 credit)

Chinese 3 builds students’ ability to communicate beyond basic daily exchanges and into more detailed, connected discourse. Across these lessons, students learn to describe personal experiences, relationships, health, housing, school life, and routines while beginning to express opinions and reasons. Instruction introduces more complex grammatical structures and discourse connectors, enabling students to narrate events and handle conversations on familiar topics with greater independence. (1 credit)

UAS Chinese 4A focuses on familiar and practical life themes, particularly sports and leisure activities, travel experiences, and communication scenarios at airports. Students will learn to describe their exercise habits and interests, share travel plans and experiences, and communicate effectively in real-life situations such as airports, asking questions, explaining situations, and handling unexpected events. The course further strengthens narrative and explanatory skills, guiding students to use more complete sentence structures and conjunctions for cross-temporal expression and paragraph-based oral and written production. Through situational dialogues, role-playing, and reading exercises, students will improve their language fluency and practicality, with overall performance corresponding to intermediate mid/high level abilities. (1/2 credit)

UAS Chinese 4B: Communication and Culture: Campus Life and Social Situations focuses on three main themes closely related to student life: new student registration and campus administration, dormitory life and interpersonal interactions, and dining in restaurants and social etiquette. Students will learn to use Chinese to explain, ask questions, express needs, and share experiences in real-life and campus settings. The course emphasizes developing students' language organization skills in longer conversations and paragraphs, guiding them to use more natural, appropriate, and culturally conscious expressions. Through role-playing, situational tasks, reading comprehension, and oral discussions, students will improve their integrated listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills and deepen their understanding of campus life and social interactions within Chinese-speaking culture. (1/2 credit

UAS Chinese 5/6A: Consumption, Academics, and Interpersonal Relationships focuses on three themes relevant to students' daily lives and campus settings: shopping and transactions, course selection and planning, and campus romance and interpersonal interactions. Through reading, discussion, oral practice, and written expression, students will learn how to communicate in Chinese in daily life, share personal experiences and perspectives, and discuss values ​​and decisions. The course emphasizes practical language expression, opinion articulation, and interactive skills, while expanding students' advanced vocabulary and grammar. Upon completion, students will be able to engage in sustained conversations, describe events, and express opinions in familiar and semi-familiar situations. (1/2 credit)

UAS Chinese 5/6B: Modern Life: Technology, Work, and Education focuses on three themes closely related to high school students: computers and the internet, work experience, and the education system and learning concepts. Through reading, discussion, and oral expression, students will learn how to describe the impact of technology on life in Chinese, share work experiences and responsibilities, and explore the relationship between education and future development. The course emphasizes expressing opinions, explaining reasons, and comparing viewpoints, cultivating students' ability to use more formal language for extended narratives and paragraph-based expression as well as expanding students' advanced vocabulary and academic writing. Through thematic learning and task-oriented activities, students will improve their integrated listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills, and develop critical thinking and intercultural understanding. (1/2 credit)

French 1 is an intensive introduction to spoken and written French and francophone culture through contextual, real-life communicative activities. The focus is on sentence formation and vocabulary development with students achieving the ability to speak and write effectively using the present and past tenses. An important goal is for students to begin thinking in French rather than translating from English. (1 credit)

French 2 reviews the basics covered in French 1 and deepens students’ understanding of the material. In addition, students acquire and use the simple and compound past tenses and are introduced to the subjunctive mood and to the conditional and future tenses. Short and extended readings such as Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry supplement the basic textbook and are discussed in French. Students improve their creative writing skills and work on oral skills through presentations, communicative activities, games, cultural activities and reading-centered discussions. (1 credit)

French 3 gives students the opportunity to review past and present tenses and to complete their acquisition of all simple and compound tenses. By this time, they find conversation and writing in French easier and more satisfying and can express themselves in all tenses. Discussions of current events and of short stories, debates and oral presentations are typical conversation activities. (1 credit)

UAS French 4A: Post-Colonial Africa / Indochina and Neocolonialism examines political, socioeconomic and cultural challenges in a post colonial and globalized world. The class exposes students to the relationship between France and its former colonies from the first encounters to the current discourses about the “France Afrique,” as well as to post-colonial theory and immigration literature. Students will be introduced to the diversity of Francophone Cultures through the diverse media, including documentaries, films and texts. We explore the Poets of the Negritude literary movement with essays and texts by Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire. Students review advanced grammar, write analytical essays, and work on multiple research projects.  (1/2 credit)

UAS French 4B:  Literature “Fantastique”- Creative Writing is an introduction to fantasy French literature. The stories, Oriental Tales, written by Marguerite Yourcenar, comprise folktales, fantasies and allegories, in which themes are as varied as the countries represented. From China to Japan, to the Balkans and India, the tales address questions about human nature and how one comprehends our world through various themes such as love, conquest, betrayal, religion, gender perception and passion. The stories share a mythological form based on pre-existing myths and legends. The aim of the course is to help students become more confident creative writers, to fully engage with the reading process, including ways to critically analyze texts. Students will converse and write on a variety of topics. Writing includes essays, personal reflections and literary analysis. Advanced grammar is reviewed and integrated into all skill areas. (1/2 credit)

UAS French 5/6A: Theater of Ideas questions and examines the themes of freedom, tolerance and justice through the study of the philosophical period of the enlightenment, the existentialist movement and its philosophers, the Absurd, the New Wave and the impact of feminism.  Students reflect on the contributions that the writers have made to our contemporary understanding of society and human existence. Texts include stories, plays and essays by Molière, Voltaire, J.J Rousseau, J.P Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir and Ionesco. Students are expected to read carefully and engage deeply with the assigned texts, analyzing them critically for themes, form and content. They will demonstrate original ideas in essays, journals and short reaction pieces. In connection with their literary pursuits, students will be exposed to audio and video clips that offer them practice with daily communicative functions. (1/2 credit)

UAS French 5/6B: The Heroine in Literature and Films examines the problematic themes of identity, gender roles, equality, societal norms and social constructionism from the mid 20th century to today in literature and movies through the lens of female protagonists. We engage with novels by Marguerite Duras, Dai Sijie and Shan Sa, and films by Yamina Benguigui and Agnès Jaoui. Students explore how gender and ideas of masculinity and femininity structure space and shape mobility. We also discuss the changing social and historical contexts in which these heroines evolve. Both in terms of form and content, we investigate the following two genres: autofiction and autobiography, striving to understand how the narrative forms blur the line between memoir, autobiography and fiction. (1/2 credit)
 

Spanish 1 is an intensive introduction to spoken and written Spanish and Hispanic culture through contextual, real-life communicative activities. The focus is on sentence formation and vocabulary development, with students achieving the ability to speak, write, read and listen effectively using the present and present progressive tense. An important goal is for students to begin thinking in Spanish rather than translating from English. (1 credit)

Spanish 2 reviews the basics covered in Spanish 1 and deepens students’ understanding of the material. In addition, students acquire more vocabulary and learn to use the different past tenses. Additionally, they learn the imperative and are introduced to the subjunctive mood. Short readings supplement the basic textbook and are discussed in Spanish. Students improve their creative writing skills and work on oral skills through presentations, communicative activities, games, cultural activities and reading-centered discussions. (1 credit)

Spanish 3 gives students the opportunity to review different verb tenses, complete their study of the subjunctive mood, and learn the conditional and future tenses. They will be able to hold longer conversations and debates, produce more sophisticated and detailed oral presentations about Hispanic culture and politics, and write essays, short stories and opinion pieces. The use of all the indicative and basic subjunctive tenses becomes more spontaneous and natural. (1 credit)

UAS Spanish 4A: Immigration in the US: New Identities in a Globalized World examines the complex and sometimes contradictory experiences of new identities, whose thought and literature are not bound by national, racial or linguistic borders, but instead transit through them. We’ll investigate how these new subjectivities exemplify the positive and negative effects of living in a globalized world. We’ll explore fiction by Yuri Herrera, Tomas Rivera, essays by Gloria Anzaldúa, poems by Reinaldo Arenas, films such as La Ciudad or ¿Cuál es el camino a mi casa?, works that explore the border-defying experiences of immigrant, refugee and exiled subjects. Students will discuss texts, review advanced grammar, write analytical essays, and conduct a final composition and podcast project. (1/2 credit)

UAS Spanish 4B: 20th Century Latin America: What is modernity? asks what is modernity and what does it mean for Latin America and for Latin American writers of the mid 20th century? We will investigate the power and sway of historical reputation on the individual, the national, and even the continental scale. We will study the genealogy of the dichotomy “Civilization and Barbarism” as it pertains to Latin America, and interrogate its subsequent reappearances and reinscriptions. We’ll see the extent to which it appears in art, fiction and film as a kind of haunting or phantasmagoric subtext, even as Latin American countries hurl themselves onto modernizing projects and visions of an abundant future. We’ll look at Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Fernando Botero, read short stories by Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Juan Rulfo, Isabel Allende, and watch the film También la lluvia. (1/2 credit)

UAS Spanish 5A/6A: España: historia, sociedad, identidad, arte y cultura(s) will provide an examination of literary and artistic movements in Spain in the 20th century, beginning with the country’s critical response to the loss of its world empire in 1898, the burgeoning of modernism and the avant-garde in the 20s and 30s, the total reversal of these movements in the aftermath of the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship through 1975, and their dynamic regeneration and reinterpretation in the 1980s and 90s up to the present day.  We’ll engage with poetry by Federico García Lorca, films by Pedro Almodóvar, fiction by Ana María Matute, art by Picasso and Miró, architecture by Gaudí and Calatrava, journalism and essays as we experience the dynamic shifts of a society grappling with its history, its present, and future direction. (1/2 credit)

UAS Spanish 5B/6B: Historia, sociedad, identidad, arte y culturas en América Latina will offer students the opportunity to read and view 20th and 21st century Latin American short stories and full-length films, respectively, within their historical and cultural contexts. For short stories, we will begin with the texts of the classic “Boom” authors of the 20th century such as Augusto Monterroso, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and Isabel Allende. We will then move on to contemporary authors such as Samanta Schweblin and Claudia Hernández. Films include “Amores Perros” (Alejandro González Iñárritu, México, 2000) and “Machuca” (Andrés Wood, Chile, 2004). We will also regularly track and interrogate current political developments and trends as they affect the future and dynamics of the region. (1/2 credit)