UC Center, Mexico City

This five-week intensive summer course is intended for advanced heritage language learners -- students who have native or near-native language skills in Spanish -- who have had some formal instruction in the language. It concentrates on improving students' ability to write academic Spanish. It requires heavy assignments of written work and the review and correction of assignments based on extensive, detailed comments by the instructor.

This is a student-oriented course which focuses on participants' cultural reflections of their experiences in Mexico, D.F. to demonstrate intercultural development. Weekly seminars examine topics such as preconceptions of Mexico City, cultural shock, language and cultural barriers, and relationships, among others. Assessment is based on active participate, weekly journal entries, and an in-class presentation.

This five-week advanced summer course is intended for students who have completed the intermediate series of Spanish language at the university level and stresses productive and receptive conversation and improvement of linguistic and communicative skills. The class aims to improve the development of comprehension and discourse production at a level near that of an educated native speaker. The course includes the practice of listening comprehension strategies in order to facilitate access to different types of discourse at varying levels of difficulty.

This course provides an intensive overview of contemporary Mexican history and politics, covering the period between the Mexican Revolution and the transition to electoral democracy, Themes covered include: current economic situation, social movements, minorities, migration and transnationalization, and US-Mexico relations. The course reader includes both historical and sociological articles and is supplemented with readings from daily and weekly periodicals.