A co-taught Spanish immersion course that is taking students out of the classroom and into the Spanish-speaking world will now be offered during MAYmester.

Students taking the “SPA 200: Selected Topics — Spanish Immersion” course will be conversing with and interviewing Spanish-speaking immigrants and refugees at Syracuse’s Westside Learning Center this May.

“We just believe that having real world experiences are key when students are learning Spanish,” said Catherine Nock, language coordinator in the Department of Languages.

The three-credit course uses instructors who are native Spanish speakers to teach students about different facets of Latino culture. Students learn to salsa dance, play soccer and cook with help from native speakers from Central America, Cuba and other Spanish-speaking countries.

“It’s completely different from our usual classroom applications,” Nock said.

Over the past two summers, the immersion course has been offered to high school students through Syracuse University’s Summer College Program, and to college students as a summer class. The class has had an eclectic mix of participants, said Katie Clinton, Spanish instructor and co-teacher of the course.

“We have had a very big geographical and socioeconomic and ethnic mix both times we have run these courses,” Clinton said. “We learn from each other and learn from that knowledge.”

This year, the immersion course is going to be offered to college students in MAYmester and high school students in July. Clinton said it still is not confirmed whether the program at the Westside Learning Center will be happening this summer for high school students, outside of MAYmester.

Another aspect of the course is the method by which students will fulfill their credits. The two-week MAYmester course only fulfills two of the three credits, and the last one is for an outside project. Nock said students have completed the project by using video and other presentations depending on their interests.

The course also contains some grammatical and writing instruction, but this is not the main part of the student’s experience. Nock said some of the goals of the course are to make students more confident in their Spanish-speaking abilities and to prepare them for their future use of the language.

“Maybe they’re thinking of going to Spain or Chile next semester so they want to brush up on their oral proficiency,” Nock said.

Prior to enrolling, students need to have taken two semesters of Spanish, which would place them at the 200 level. This was done to ensure that every student taking the course gets the most out of the experience, Nock said.

The number of students who participate in the program has varied from year to year. During the summers of 2013 and 2014, the courses had less than 15 students in the classroom.

Alberto Lainez, a senior at the Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice in downtown Brooklyn, said he benefited from the individual attention he got from the class and the close-knit environment it created.

Sophia Jones, a junior at Fayetteville-Manlius High School, completed the immersion course last summer. Her class was mixed with students from different places and age groups. She said the program enabled her to get ahead in her Spanish classes. Now, she is looking to attend SU for college if she is accepted next year.

“Even if we had different backgrounds, it didn’t really matter because we all became friends by the end,” Jones said.

Published on April 1, 2015 at 9:44 pm

Contact Rob: rromano@syr.edu