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UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES)

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Riga, Latvia

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Latvian Level 4 Advanced

Course description: Level 4 is for those who have successfully completed the Upper Intermediate Evening Course or a similar course and have developed a sound knowledge of the language through extensive visits to Latvia, personal relationships, or working with the language. The course runs over three ten-week terms and each session is two hours long.

Linguistic and cultural awareness is reinforced through continuous revision and grammar is consolidated as an integral part of texts, films, television programmes and use of the Latvian media and Internet. On completion of the course students should be able to manage confidently in Latvian-speaking environments, converse reasonably fluently with native speakers, and to retrieve information from a wide range of authentic materials. The course includes all four skills: reading, writing, speaking and listening. The course will cover the following:

Topics: Latvian culture, history and society through text, film, and music; festivals and cultural events; political life; trends in Latvian literature

Functions: reading, analysing, and summarising authentic texts; extracting and presenting information from written or visual resources; reports and preparing presentations; ‘reading between the lines’: detecting implied content in texts

Grammar: refining the use of the verb, adjective and noun systems; derivational noun and verb affixes, compounding; complex sentences and types of relative clauses; idiomatic expressions