Mission Statement

The Department of Language and Literature at the University of New Orleans is the largest department in the College of Liberal Arts. It offers instruction at various levels of proficiency in seven languages: Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Latin, and Spanish. It offers a major in Romance Languages (French and Spanish concentrations), and minors in those two languages as well; instruction to the sixth semester level and occasionally beyond in German, Italian, Japanese, and Latin; basic and intermediate Chinese. We also offer a graduate program, an M.A. in Romance Languages with a French or Spanish option.

Our department has multiple missions:

1)    We provide the basic four-semester sequence of language study as a foundation for our language majors, and to serve Liberal Arts and other major curriculum requirements.

2)    We produce graduates who possess: a) fluency in and a mastery of French and Spanish grammar, linguistics, vocabulary, and usage; b) an understanding and appreciation of French and Spanish literatures; c) and awareness of the culture of the francophone and Spanish speaking worlds.

3)    We prepare our majors for graduate study; for jobs that serve our multicultural community’s needs in education, social work, tourism, public relations, international business, and for the challenge of the new global economy.

4)    We produce graduates who hold our M.A. in Romance Languages and are capable of: a) mature judgments on the French or Spanish language, literature and culture; b) initiating and completing research projects on literary, linguistic and civilization- related topics in French, Spanish, and comparative Romance areas.

5)    We prepare M.A. graduates for doctoral work and for teaching positions at the secondary and college levels and other positions for which mastery of a major language and culture is required (i.e., translation, immigration and naturalization, customs, foreign trade, tourism, diplomacy, and social work).