Our department believes that all learners benefit from the study of another language and culture.

• As the world becomes a global community, learners need to be able communicate in more than one language in order to expand their world view and to understand others' perspectives.
• Through the study of another language and culture, learners can become more thoughtful world citizens.

Our mission is to enable world language learners to know how, when and why to say what to whom.*

Student learning outcomes

Students completing a course of study in GCC's World Languages Department will be able to:

• Appreciate diverse cultural and individual perspectives
  • Compare students' own and other cultures, thus understanding both better.
  • Demonstrate basic sociolinguistic competence.
  • Use language appropriate to social and cultural context.
• Solve problems collaboratively
  • Negotiate meaning and understanding collaboratively to solve communication problems and address conflict and misunderstandings.
  • Use target language in class, avoiding the use of English.
• Communicate in various modes and media
  • Communicate through interpersonal, presentational and interpretive modes:
    • Interpersonal: listening and speaking; reading and writing (one-way communication)
    • Presentational: writing or speaking (two-way communication)
    • Interpretive: listening, reading or viewing (wo-way communication)
• Locate, evaluate and use various sources of information
  • Locate, evaluate and use various sources of information appropriately, including authentic documents (texts created by and for native speakers).
• Think creatively and critically
  • Make connections in language; create with language to express one's own thoughts and opinions.
  • Use both literal and figurative communication and a range of language from the everyday to the formal appropriate to the context, including gestural language.
  • Discover consequences of language use for social and cultural contexts.
• Apply, integrate, and synthesize learning
  • Build and expand the repertoire of communication strategies - various modes and media.
  • Make appropriate use of imaginative, concrete and/or abstract language for social and cultural contexts.
  • Apply nuance, refinement, sensitivity and awareness at increasing levels of language sophistication.
  • Explore and apply a range of effective language learning strategies.

* Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), 1999