Modern Languages and Literatures
The Department of Literatures and Cultural Studies offers two Minors in French. These programs are committed to providing an environment of academic freedom in which faculty engage in teaching, research, and service. Students learn from faculty scholars who engage in research and creative activity to promote excellence in teaching, to develop and maintain scholarship, and to extend human knowledge.
We believe that an essential part of a college education is the study of a foreign language, which enhances the student's overall capacity to communicate by providing the essential means of access to other cultures. To learn another language is to acquire a different system of communication. This process increases the understanding of one's own language; facilitates comprehension of how language structures human consciousness; and increases awareness of language in interaction with other social institutions.
The undergraduate minors offered within the department help meet the university-wide goal of encouraging students to appreciate their own culture and others, affording students opportunities to understand how ways of knowing are produced and conditioned by a variety of cultures. As UTRGV teachers, part of our mission is to furnish our students with the intellectual and communicative tools necessary to live and work effectively in a multilingual world, and to prepare them to become scholars, teachers or other kinds of professionals who will contribute to the prosperity of the area and the nation.
French
The minor in French Language, Literature and Culture expects students to develop proficiency in French by focusing on the four skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking. Content area courses serve to improve language, while broadening cultural knowledge of French and Francophone history, art, and literature.
The minor in French Language, Literature and Culture also prepares students for careers in teaching, translation, international relations and business, as well as graduate programs. Congruent with UTRGV’s mission statement, it also encourages students to become more effective participants in the global community of the twenty-first century by fostering not only fluency in French, but also critical and creative thinking skills and a flexibility of the mind.