Among Middlebury's most popular summer programs, the Spanish School recruits outstanding faculty from a wide variety of settings and countries, including Spain, Latin America, and the U.S., to engage a diverse and energetic student body in a lively mix of academic, cultural, and social events that create the School's engaging ambiente. Activities include lectures, panels, film series, a sizable student chorus, tertulias, a zarzuela and other theatrical productions, and a zealously supported soccer team. Students have many opportunities to interact in formal and informal settings with specially invited major figures of the Hispanic world in literature, politics, and the arts. Not to be missed is the series of social gatherings that fill the campus with the vitality of Hispanic music and dance. In such an environment, one cannot help but learn and grow, develop and refine language abilities, and entertain a most active life of the mind.
Students dance the tango, they talk, and they learn.
They are learning to interact as Hispanics do. The seven-week intensive language program offers beginning, intermediate, and advanced instruction. Three to four hours of classroom work, combined with the rich mix of supplemental resources and integrated co-curricular activities, produce significant and often stunning results in overall communicative competence that substantially exceed the impact of ordinary course work. Students are exposed to the full cultural breadth of the Spanish-speaking world. Also offered is a series of professional preparation courses for teachers of Spanish.