Management of the programA member of the Wesleyan faculty travels to Mexico with students, and provides them with additional orientation activities during the regular UDLA-P orientation program. A second visit by Wesleyan faculty during the semester, and close communication between the program staff in Mexico and the campus director at Wesleyan ensure that the progress of the students is carefully monitored and that any problems that arise are rapidly resolved. The management of academic aspects of the program is in the hands of Prof. Roberto Herrera, and logistical and extra-curricular matters are handled by the Office of International Affairs.Page 2Page 3Page 4 |
Wesleyan Program in MexicoUniversidad de las Américas, PueblaIntroductionWesleyan's program at the Universidad de las Americas in Puebla, Mexico is designed for students who have studied some Spanish in high school or at the college level but who have not yet attained proficiency. The goal of the program is to provide an immersion experience that will stimulate students to reach fluency as rapidly as possible, using innovative methods inside and outside the classroom to help students build their language skills and cultural knowledge.We have high expectations concerning study abroad for Wesleyan students, and have in the past required that students wishing to study in Spain or Latin America have attained a level of proficiency adequate for them to take all their course work through the medium of Spanish. However, in the past decade patterns of language instruction in high school, and expectations surrounding communicative competence, have changed. In response to what we see as a compelling need, we concluded that we should develop a program appropriate for students who studied Spanish in high school and have not continued their studies, or who have only recently begun the study of Spanish, and who wish to achieve fluency rapidly. Reasons for this goal my be personal, or may arise from the understanding that knowledge of Spanish is becoming increasingly important for many professions in the U.S. In any case, we are committed to helping any student learn Spanish, and we have therefore developed a language acquisition program that is challenging in many ways, and that provides an exceptional opportunity for cultural immersion during the language-learning process. We sought the best combination of pedagogical sophistication and institutional and cultural environment for the location of such a program, and believe that the Universidad de las Américas (UDLA-P) offers such a location. The UDLA-P has a long-established program in Spanish for foreigners , and excellent teachers are available to work with our students. In addition, faculty from the social science departments of the UDLA-P teach units within the modules, so that our students, while not in regular university classes, have the benefit of instruction by experts on Mexico, through the medium of Spanish, while they are still developing their language skills We believe that this is instruction in "language through content" at its best. The combination of an intense focus on language acquisition
with a strong curriculum in Mexican studies culminates in an independent research
paper which the students present both orally and in writing at the end of
the semester. Students who when they arrived in Mexico could scarcely construct
a sentence in Spanish prepare papers 20-30 pages in length on topics they
chose early in the semester, and in oral reports summarize their findings
in some detail for faculty and for their peers. Students return from Mexico
ready for further research through the medium of Spanish, or for careers
in which they will use Spanish in a professional capacity. Oral proficiency
interview testing informs us that students who place at the low-intermediate
level when they begin the program reach the advanced level in the course
of the semester.
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