Description:

The World Language Department at Golden West College offers mostly courses that are transferable to a four-year college or university.  These courses have been articulated with these colleges and universities, and the course descriptions are reviewed frequently to meet the articulation requirements.  The college courses offer beginning, intermediate, and advanced courses in the seven aforementioned foreign languages.  The beginning courses emphasize listening and speaking, while the intermediate and advanced courses teach cultural and literary topics and emphasize reading and writing.  The communicative approach is used throughout these courses to enable the student to function in the target language after the first semester.  Our World Language Department also offers conversation classes in French, Spanish, and Vietnamese to meet the needs of the community at large.  GWC is one of the few community colleges that offers Sign Language.  This is a program that meets the unique demands of the hearing impaired, and thus goes beyond being just an academic program, but a community service for a portion of the community that is under represented.  We also have a newly updated lab to facilitate language learning for all of our students.  Students have an option of going to the lab and using it in library mode or as part of a class with their instructors.  Students registered in beginning language courses must attend the language lab once a week to develop their listening and speaking skills.  GWC will be offering Farsi this coming Spring semester.

Instructors are encouraged to attend workshops to keep them on the cutting edge.  Some of the workshops attended by our instructors have been on technology in the classroom and the use of computers and the Internet in teaching the language and culture.  In the fall of 2001, GWC offered a workshop in the integration of cultural web sites into the classroom.

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