Mester Spanish Courses

Join us in this adventure into multiculturalism. Let us take you to beautiful Spain for eight weeks and show you the magic that inspired Ernest Hemingway and Washington Irving. The beauty, history, and tradition of this country will capture your heart as we travel to Catalonia, Castile, and Andalusia.

Live with a family and study at one of Salamanca’s best language institutes -Academia Mester- while earning twelve credit hours. These hours may be applied to the fulfillment of the foreign language requirements, some core requirements, and some Spanish major and minor requirements. Courses for all levels are offered. Six full weeks of classroom instruction, and two weeks of instructional touring.

Make your summer study abroad an unforgettable experience that will change your life forever!!!

The main objective of the Study Abroad Program in Salamanca is to have each participant totally immersed in and also interacting with the Spanish society. This will provide the students with a truly intercultural perspective, one which focuses on all cultural processes and interactions as these occur in particular historical, environmental, social, political, and communication contexts.

Our program not only provides such an experience for our students, but is also tailor-made for the mission of Truman State University: to promote an interdisciplinary studies perspective. This style, of more diverse educational opportunities, allows growth in life skills and language proficiency which will help our students to survive in the global community.

The foreign language faculty at Truman State has always focused on providing a sound program for majors and minors as well as helping all students to achieve intermediate proficiency as they leave our two year language programs. Unfortunately, very few students (of any language) reach that goal without the help of some study abroad, which allows them to spend time in a country where they are continually exposed to the target language.

The introduction of summer study abroad programs led by Truman faculty has been a tremendous benefit for our students, offering them the chance to travel with an instructor and several fellow students to a foreign country and become completely immersed in that culture, a proven method for accelerating the process of learning a second language.

Therefore, the students that cannot leave the United States for a semester or a year because of time constraints or financial reasons, can still complete an intensive accelerated summer program overseas and receive twelve credit hours, the equivalent to a semester of work here on campus. This method is also cost efficient, since the cost of going to Spain for eight weeks of study and travel is very much the same as staying on campus for a semester, including tuition, books, room and board, and miscellaneous.

As a professor of Spanish and someone conscious of the continuous increase in today's world of the need for bilingualism and the increasing use of the Spanish language in the world, I feel that intensive, short summer study abroad programs which totally immerse our students in the Spanish culture would be tremendously beneficial in helping them achieve some of their educational goals. Spanish is now spoken by over four hundred million people all over the world and needed by hundreds of thousands non-native speakers, for academic or often practical reasons of employment.

For more information about the Study Abroad Program in Salamanca, Spain, write, call, fax or Email:

Silvia Pites, Ph.D.
Division of Language & Literature
Truman State University
Kirksville, MO 63501
Tel: (660) 785-4060
Fax: (660) 785-7486
pites@truman.edu