Intensive Course Provides Foreign Students at the UIC with Catalan Language Immersion

About 20 Erasmus students attended
the welcome session for the intensive Catalan course. This session was presided
over by Maciej-Piotr Kwiatkowski Boruch, the Director of International Relations,
and Clara Clemente, the International Relations Coordinator, and began with a presentation
on the 2010-2011 academic year so that the students could learn more about the
university.
Marta Juanhuix, the Director of the UIC Service to Promote the Use of the Catalan
Language, introduced the programme, and Carla
González, the course teacher,
gave a brief presentation on the history of Catalan as a Romance language.
After the various presentations, some
dynamic group exercises were conducted in order to introduce the students to Catalan
language and culture. The exercises involved trying to remember as many Catalan
words as possible.
The session concluded with a
guided visit of the university and the first lesson of the course, which dealt
with some basic notions, including introductions and greetings.
The course consists of a total of
60 class hours and includes cultural outings in addition to language
instruction. This will allow students to develop basic Catalan skills,
including understanding spoken language, writing, reading, conversing and giving
simple oral presentations. The students on the course have come from many
different European countries, including Finland, Germany, Poland, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands and
Estonia.
Through activities such as this, the university aims
to achieve one of its core values, i.e. internationalization, which involves increasing
its prominence among other European universities and promoting linguistic and
cultural immersion for foreign newcomers to the UIC.