Intensive language courses offered through Summer Session

May 31, 1984

If you want to concentrate on learning a foreign language this summer, the University of California, San Diego is the place to be.

According to Jil K. Warn, assistant director of UCSD Summer Session, there will be more intensive language courses offered this year than ever before including UCSD's first summer courses in Latin and Greek.

Summer Session courses are taught on the UCSD campus and include undergraduate courses in practically every academic discipline. Formal admission to the University of California is not required to attend Summer Session and attendance does not constitute admission to UCSD for the regular term although work completed in Summer Session can be helpful to someone seeking regular admission to the campus.

Dr. Sanford Schane, professor of linguistics at UCSD, will teach a course in intensive Spanish which will carry up to 12 units of credit and involve a three-week period of instruction on campus followed by five weeks at the University of Madrid in Spain. Beatrice Pita and Gina Valdez will each teach a "solid" six-week course in Spanish. The classes will run from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and, because of the intense nature of the instruction, enrollment in each section will be limited.

Professors John Heath and Elliot Wirshbo will teach UCSD's first summer courses in Latin and Greek. Formal instruction will be from 8:30 a.m. to noon each day and students will be expected to spend at least three hours per day in preparation. The courses should be of interest to students who plan to study for a liberal arts degree, particularly those interested in the study of Western Civilization. Completion of the Latin or Greek course is equivalent to approximately two years of high school language study.

Heath and Wirshbo received their training in the classics at Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania respectively.

In addition to language courses, UCSD Summer Session will offer several unique courses in other disciplines to be taught by noted visiting faculty members. Mark Harris, author of the popular Henry Wiggins books about baseball, will teach Literature/Writing 141, a course in creative writing. Harris says that he hopes that the students will come to the course "with the understanding that we are going to engage in the study of and/or the writing of creative literature and versions of the creative writing process."

Harris, a member of the faculty at , has taught creative writing programs at San Francisco State, , the California Institute of the Arts, the and the University of Southern California. He edited and abridged the first six volumes of the Yale Editions of the private papers of James Boswell published as "The Heart of Boswell" in 1982.

Gerald Platt, a visiting faculty member from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, will teach Sociology 10, "American Society" and Sociology 127, "Comparative Educational Sociology." Platt is an internationally renowned scholar and a leader in the field of psychoanalytic sociology. UCSD Summer Session classes are open to students presently enrolled in any UC campus, students at any other college or university, high school graduates who can satisfy the prerequisites for the courses they wish to take and high school students who have completed their junior year with satisfactory grades. A Summer Session catalog and detailed information on all courses, fees, and registration are available at no charge from the "Director of Summer Session, Mail Code Q-028-S, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093" or by calling (619) 452-4364.

For more information contact: Paul W. West, 452-3120

(May 31, 1984)