Am​haric Classes
By Agazit Abate

Published: Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Los Angeles – The Center for World Languages at the University of California, Los Angeles is offering Heritage and Foreign Language classes for High School students this summer 2011 – including for students who speak and/or understand Amharic at home and want to learn to read and write in Amharic or to develop their speaking and literacy skills.

The classes will be held from June 28- July 28, 2011 on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays from 9:00am- 12:30pm along with after lunch tutorials at the UCLA campus.

The languages currently being offered are Amharic, Armenian, Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Italian, Persian and Russian. The language classes are specifically designed for heritage language students. This typically means that the student heard the language at home throughout their childhood, but was educated primarily in English. In addition to our heritage language classes, the center is now offering beginning Italian and Russian for any interested high school students.

The need to produce multilingual citizens in our society is evident. The need for our heritage classes in particular arose out of the realization that there were a group of students entering university who wouldn’t fit in either a beginning or an advanced foreign language class. Our heritage languages are also less-commonly taught languages and therefore high school students often don’t have access to formal schooling in their home languages. For this reason, our classes look specifically at their needs as heritage learners and seek to help them develop literacy in their home language while they are in high school so that by the time they continue their language studies at the University level, they can place into advanced language and literature courses.
—

Enrollment is now open at www.hslanguages.ucla.edu. The fee is $150 and students may earn up to one year of High School foreign language credit.

For general information, contact Agazit at (310) 825‐2510 or cwl@international.ucla.edu.

Cover Image:
Students attend Amharic language lessons run by Washington D.C.’s Ethiopian Community Center. (Photo: Tadias File)