This course offers an introduction to key terms, concepts and issues in the fields of second-language acquisition and language-teaching pedagogy as it relates to the teaching of Spanish and Portuguese.Students acquire knowledge, as well as develop and practice skills that prepare them to teach foreign languages, select content and create materials, assess student performance, and reflect upon their own teaching practice. The course's theoretical principles are applied to the teaching of the four linguistic skills: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. The teaching of culture and use of new technologies are also addressed.
Graduate Courses
For more detailed information including course description, sample reading list, and instructor, please visit the Registrar's Office.
Note: 400-level undergraduate courses may be taken for graduate credit.
Spanish Graduate Courses
Methodology of Spanish Language Teaching: Seminar and Practicum
Instructors: Mariana Bono, Dunia Catalina Méndez Vallejo
Race, Gender, and Class in the Early Modern Spanish Empire
The cultural productions of the Spanish empire of the early modern period often appear to have a veneer of social neatness and structured compliance. Closer readings, however, reveal a messy social world in which the disenfranchised, or those who identify as such resist and respond to dominant forces and ideologies. In this course, we examine literary and documentary texts with the purpose of reading them against the grain and with a focus on uncovering their hidden scripts of dissent. Our approach emphasizes methods of close analysis and discussions revolve around issues of race, gender, and class.
Instructors: Christina H. Lee
The Cinema of Cruelty
Drawing on Antonin Artaud's ideas around theatre of cruelty and André Bazin's notions of auteur film and its subversive capacity, this course looks at a group of Latin American and Spanish films and directors to explore how cruelty has become a recognizable aesthetic, one with strategic relevance for Hispanic film. This seminar understands film as a text in which cruelty functions as a cinematic trope, and also reflects on spectatorship, film's ability to inflict pain and, even more, the possibility that film constitutes a modern spectacle of cruelty.
Instructors: Javier Enrique Guerrero
Spanish Undergraduate Courses for Graduate Credit
From the Apocalypse to the 'New Normal' (and back)
Does the coronavirus emergency irretrievably change our way to see and act in the society? Is the way we experience this crisis completely new, or does it have any link with our past experiences? In this course we will explore different cultural responses to the COVID-19 pandemic (and its likely traditions), such as the use of apocalyptic imagery to represent the crisis, the recurrence of technocratic considerations around the "govern of the experts," conspiracy discourses that reproduce dystopic readings of the world, and diverse creative paths to contest deterministic interpretation of the post-pandemic future.
Instructors: Natalia Castro Picón
Portuguese Graduate Courses
None offered this semester.
Please see the 400-level Portuguese Undergraduate Courses that may be taken for Graduate Credit.
Portuguese Undergraduate Courses for Graduate Credit
The Canon Re-signified
This course will focus on Brazilian literature through the close reading of different genres, from fiction to poetry and essays. Each class will concentrate on a single text, with a close look at the way it was crafted and a discussion of the author's biography and historical moment. Through the study of 19th-century to contemporary authors, we will discuss how a canon can be re-signified when it takes in women, Black and Indigenous writers.
Instructors: Pedro Meira Monteiro, Lilia Katri Moritz Schwarcz