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World Languages

In keeping with our mission, the World Languages Department seeks to educate the whole person, and inspire students to honor the diversity that enriches both our school community and the world beyond St. John's. A large part of this holistic education is teaching students to communicate effectively, an important skill in our interdependent, multicultural world.

Students learn to express themselves confidently in the language they choose to study (German, Chinese, Latin, Spanish), and develop an appreciation for its culture and people. We follow the national Standards for Foreign Language Learning, referred to as the 5 Cs: Communication, Culture, Connection, Comparison, and Community.

Students are challenged according to their ability in differing levels of instruction, and they learn to apply the four basic linguistic skills: speaking, reading, listening, and writing.

World Languages Courses

Its aim is to provide students with ongoing and varied opportunities to further develop their proficiency across the full range of language skills within a cultural frame of reference reflective of the richness of Chinese language and culture.

The course requires students to prepare and translate the readings and place these texts in a meaningful context, which helps develop critical, historical, and literary sensitivities.

This course is designed to provide students with a learning experience equivalent to that of a third-year college survey course in Peninsular and Latin American Literature.

In this Mandarin Chinese class, students will develop the four language skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing.

The course emphasizes developing students’ language skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

Many of the grammatical constructions introduced in first-year Chinese will be repeated in this course with increasing sophistication in terms of style and usage.

This course is for the above-average Chinese speaker who has excelled in first-year Chinese both in the oral and written component.