Gente, lengua y cultura: curso avanzado de español provides a set of materials for advanced Spanish learners. Using the curated, interactive texts, audios, and visuals, students will be exposed a variety of authentic Spanish, learn more advanced vocabulary, review difficult grammar structures, and achieve a strong cultural background before studying more advanced courses in language, culture, and literature.
Gente, lengua y cultura: curso avanzado de español is designed to help advanced second-language learners improve their overall Spanish skills. It provides a variety of texts (literature, movies, newspaper articles, speeches, and essays) as a basis for reviewing grammatical concepts, developing writing competency, refining analytical skills, and improving overall communication abilities in Spanish. Through work on authentic and original texts, this course continues to focus on refining the four language skills of reading, writing, speaking, and listening, as well as further developing critical analytical capacities. With the materials included, students will also explore contemporary socio-cultural issues in the context of the Hispanic world and analyze the application of different linguistic structures as tools employed to create meaning and convey a message.
Hélène de Fays’ is the Minor in Spanish for the Professions Coordinator and Teaching Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Her main objective as a teacher is to help her students to develop a deeper understanding and appreciation for the Hispanic world, its language and its cultures. As such, in her classes, she strives to awaken her students’ consciousness to the wealth of the Hispanic cultures, to motivate them to go beyond what we do in the classroom and to inspire them to further explore the Spanish-speaking world, by taking more advanced classes, studying abroad or travelling independently.
During her years at UNC, she has had the opportunity to teach a broad range of courses at a variety of levels. She has been in the vanguard of educational innovation and, in order to enhance the language learning experience, she strives to incorporate technology into the classroom through applications of the World Wide Web, the use of Power Point activities, electronic discussion forums such as Voicethread, and the development of materials in electronic form.
Huesa began his language teaching career when he was in high school, teaching Basque language to adults in the Spanish Basque Country, in the midst of a popular movement to reclaim the ancestral language. This humble and exciting beginning provided a solid foundation to a vocation to teach that he has nurtured and improved to make it into a professional career.