Thank you for your interest in the Center for Global Languages (CGL) at Valencia Enterprises a division of Valencia Community College. Valencia Community College has become an innovative leader in higher education with a national reputation for teaching excellence. With four campuses and two centers in the Orlando area, Valencia is now the fourth largest of Florida's 28 community colleges, teaching more than 50,000 students a year.
The Orlando area is internationally known, making Valencia a popular place of study for students from around the world. We receive both professionals and university students from many different countries and career backgrounds.
CGL offers Conversational English and Spanish courses, Cultural Diversity workshops, American Sign Language, and corporate training programs. Our faculty and staff put their energies into a "learning-centered" philosophy that emphasizes individual student success. All students in the language program are orally evaluated prior to course commencement and placed according to their oral proficiency in the target language. The goal of this program is for students to master the language functions at each proficiency level rather than to simply gain exposure to the rules and vocabulary.
In our language programs, participants will:
* Enjoy small class sizes with a maximum of 15 participants per group.
* Gain a greater ability to understand native speakers of the target language through a "language immersion" approach.
* Improve their fluency, pronunciation, grammatical accuracy, and sentence structure.
* Learn to communicate effectively in situations that they would encounter in the real world.
* Gain a greater understanding and appreciation of native speakers through the teaching of culture.
Program benefits include:
* Instructors who speak with a native-like fluency in the language of instruction.
* Using the Communicative Approach to second-language instruction, classes are given exclusively in the target language with a de-emphasis on translation.
* Language is taught through the use of modeling, pictures, gestures, paraphrasing, repetition, and the negotiation of meaning, whereby activities are structured to account for different learning styles and preferences.
* Practice in all four skills is given, with an emphasis on speaking and understanding.
* The curriculum is organized around central themes and functions specific to authentic, real-life tasks, which makes learning meaningful to students, as grammar and vocabulary have a communicative objective, and are taught as tools to support the functions rather than isolated rules and lists.