The Rassias Center for World Languages and Cultures promotes cultural understanding and strengthens communication, within the Dartmouth College community and among people around the world. The Rassias Method integrates a five-point teaching philosophy with dramatic techniques, rhythmic drills, and energetic reinforcement strategies designed to reduce learners’ inhibitions and accelerate spoken proficiency. The goal is to make students sound natural and feel comfortable with language and culture by creating an error-tolerant classroom atmosphere. 

The Rassias Center sees language instruction as a humanistic pursuit that sensitizes individuals to other cultures and the relativity of values; that shares resources for the betterment of national and international understanding; that appreciates similarities and respects differences among peoples. The Center aims for language learning to connect people heart to heart through language and cultural instruction and training future teachers to carry on the Method. In practice, this means students learn with and from one another in immersive settings and carry that learning into their daily lives.

This language refresher will include two, two-hour sessions (each session is one-hour of lead class and one-hour of drill) over Zoom. Depending on students’ levels classes will focus on culture, food, and general language skills.