Are you looking for a way to enhance your Spanish skills over the summer? Middlebury College offer its Spanish Language School  – or Escuela Española – students the benefits of an immersion experience without leaving the U.S.

At the Escuela Española, which began in 1917, students live on the Middlebury campus in Vermont and pledge to speak exclusively Spanish in the dorms, at meals and during classes and co-curricular activities. Leading professors and guest speakers from around the Spanish-speaking world convene at the Escuela to instruct and guide students in their language journey. Students are placed in one of five levels of Spanish courses, ranging from beginning to advanced, based on their placement exam scores.

The dates of the seven-week undergraduate program are June 29 – August 17, 2018. The  cost for tuition, room and board is $9,610. Need-based financial aid is available.

For details, please visit http://www.middlebury.edu/ls

You may also contact Prof. Martha Davis, Middlebury Escuela Española alumna, at mdavis@nvcc.edu with general questions about the program.

Destini McCallister, a Spanish 201 student and photography major at NOVA, recently traveled to Mexico City equipped with her keen eye, camera and intermediate Spanish skills.

As she wrote in an email to her professor, Dr. Martha Davis, during her trip:

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC houses a world-renowned collection of art, including paintings by Spanish artists such as Salvador Dalí, Francisco de Goya, Juan Gris, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Diego Velázquez, Francisco de Zurbarán and more. The museum is accessible by Metro (Archives-Navy Memorial-Penn Quarter on the green and yellow lines) and admission is free of charge.

Be sure to pick up a gallery map in English and/or Spanish to help you navigate the collection. Audio tours are available for you on your mobile devices. If you prefer, docent-led guided tours in English are offered daily. All of these resources and more are free.

Free guided tours in Spanish are available the following dates and times:

West Building Tours
February 3, 8 at 12:00
West Building Rotunda

East Building Tours
February 3, 8 at 2:00
East Building Atrium

Spanish tour of American Art
January 26 at 12:00
February 23 at 12:00
West Building Rotunda

For more information visit https://www.nga.gov

Ace of Clubs and Four of Diamonds (1912)
by Juan Gris (1887-1927)

NOVA’s Alexandria Campus Library continues to build their collection of books in Spanish and other languages. To help you spot these titles on the shelves when you are browsing, the librarians have implemented a helpful new system. They have placed clear lime green labels over the call number of any book in a language other than English (at least 50%, so the labels are on bilingual books, too). It’s not limited to Spanish-language books, but once you are in the Spain and Latin American literature section, those books are much more noticeable.

Look for this system soon in the feature films section!

Is there a book or film that the library doesn’t have but should? Please see your recommendations to Prof. Martha Davis at mdavis@nvcc.edu.

Looking for ways to keep up with your Spanish over the winter break? Here are some sites  that will help you maintain your listening and reading skills until January:

News in Slow Spanish is a slowly read weekly newscast with transcript. Choose to hear peninsular or Latin American Spanish. Mouse over difficult words to see an English translation.

Radio Ambulante is a weekly podcast from npr.org that features stories from around Latin America and the U.S.

Notes in Spanish features audio and video conversations between husband and wife duo Marina and Ben, who discuss a range of issues suitable for all language levels. She is from Spain and he is from England.

Mi Vida Loca, the binge-watchable drama from BBC.com, is suitable for beginning level students. Watch the learning segments to review the grammar and vocabulary featured in each episode.

As final exams approach, we thought it would be a good time to share our favorite online resources for Spanish students. Remember to break up studying in small chunks of time. Cramming for a language exam does not work.

Barbara Nelson’s Spanish Language & Culture site is a must for students and professors alike. It not only has lots of grammar exercises, but songs and poems that will expose you to Spanish and Latin American culture. Need more? Visit http://www.bowdoin.edu/hispanic-studies/tools/newgr/ats/. For explanations about grammar, be sure to visit http://grammar.spanishintexas.org

For listening practice, you can’t go wrong with University of Texas at Austin’s Spanish proficiency exercises or SpinTX Video Archive, which maintain excellent collections of short video interviews for language learners of all levels.

Google Translate may work in a hurry, but why not use a Spanish-English dictionary to ensure you are using the correct word for what you are trying to express? WordReference will provide you with a list of definitions for the word you look up as well as its pronunciation. They even have an app! Choose to hear the audio in a Mexican, Argentinean or peninsular Spanish accent. Be sure to check out the language forum for explanations about word usage and other help from native speakers from around the Spanish-speaking world.

Are you looking for conversation practice? Consider getting a language partner through  Mixxer

A low-tech option that never fails is good old-fashioned, homemade flashcards. Just making the flashcards helps to remember vocabulary and verb conjugations as you write them out. Then, rather than checking your phone during a short wait on the bus, before class starts or at an appointment, you can reach for your flashcards instead.

It is always a treat to have former NOVA students return to campus for a visit. Today Daniel Ruff, who studied Spanish at NOVA Alexandria and has a passion for language learning, stopped by to talk about his work as an ESL instructor. Over the summer he earned a Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from Cambridge English Language Assessment.

The world is your oyster, Daniel. ¡Te deseamos lo mejor!

Looking for Spanish-language resources at NOVA? The Alexandria Library has a wide assortment of books and films to choose from. Here are some ways to access them:

1. Browse the bookshelves for books. PQ6001-PQ8897, PC 4117 and PC4127 are where you will find literary works. PC4000-PC4961 is where you will find books about grammar and language.
2. Browse the library catalog for books. Visit www.nvcc.edu/library and type “fiction” or “poetry” or “literature” or “short stories” or “drama” or “anthology” in the search box. Limit your results to books, by campus, by language (Spanish).
3. Browse the library catalog for films. Visit www.nvcc.edu/library. Type “feature films” in the search box. Limit your results to multimedia, by campus and by language (Spanish).
4. Watch streaming videos. Visit www.nvcc.edu/library and type “kanopy” in the catalog search box. Limit your results by language.

For more information about NOVA’s libraries, visit http://www.nvcc.edu/library/campus.html 

For many professors, the next best thing to working with students is interacting with colleagues at professional conferences. This weekend at the Foreign Language Association of Virginia (FLAVA) annual conference in Williamsburg, professors from NOVA, Central Virginia, Thomas Nelson Community College and others are presenting and attending workshops and presentations. We are learning how to guide students in a mural art project, support (bi)literacy, learn about the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca and much more. There’s even karaoke…

Prof. Martha Davis, NOVA Spanish students and friends enjoyed a night at the historic Tivoli Theatre in Columbia Heights, home to GALA Hispanic Theatre on Saturday, September 30th. They attended GALA’s production of Don Juan, The Infamous Seducer of All Times, adapted from the 19th-century work by Spanish playwright José Zorrilla. The play featured an abundance of verbs in the “vosotros” form as well as timeless themes about love, betrayal, loss and redemption.

To access the text of the original play, Don Juan Tenorio, visit http://ciudadseva.com/texto/don-juan-tenorio/ 

For more information about GALA Theatre and their 42nd season, visit http://en.galatheatre.org/2016/05/galas-mainstage.html 

Discounted tickets are available for students, military, seniors and patrons under 30 years of age. All performances include English surtitles projected above the stage.