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PROGRAMS 2025

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PROGRAMS 2025

How World Languages Classes at Our Preparatory School Can Enhance Your Child’s Experience

Learning a new language at R-MA is a unique and deeply enriching experience. By taking lessons from teachers who either speak these languages as their mother tongue, or who have become fluent by living abroad, students gain familiarity with a new language. These studies can also intersect with students’ learning in other subjects, whether their interests lie within business, leadership, the sciences, or the arts.

While studying world languages, R-MA students experience a new language in immersive and heavily detailed ways. Here’s why your child might want to take classes in world languages at Randolph-Macon Academy.

There Are Four Options for Languages at Our Preparatory School

Students at R-MA wishing to take a language class can choose from the four languages on offer: Arabic, French, German, and Spanish. French, German, and Spanish are typically taught in the classroom. Meanwhile, students learning Arabic do so by attending a video conference with the instructor during typical class hours. With each of our language courses, students learn how to increasingly gain fluency in their chosen tongue. At the same time, they also develop a greater understanding of its associated culture and geography.

Language teachers at R-MA teach either their native language or one they learned living abroad

R-MA’s Approach to Languages Helps Create an Immersive Environment

Our private upper school’s approach to learning languages is one based on experiences. More specifically, students gain proficiency in a manner that textbooks might not provide, and learn pertinent details that other, more general approaches might overlook. This can come in the form of specific historical details, cultural information, and more. Students learning world languages also learn while being part of the National World Language Honor Societies, and they can also win awards by competing in National Exams annually. On top of this, R-MA’s Advanced College Prep Diploma requires students to complete a minimum of either two foreign languages over two years, or one over three years, since many American post-secondary institutions require this. Students completing four years of one language, or five of two, receive a language seal from Randolph-Macon Academy.

Students learn through exercises that incorporate online news, cultural information, and more

Our Cross-Curricular Instruction Helps Students Apply Languages to Other Subjects

At Randolph-Macon Academy, students can also learn languages during summer school in a condensed format, or via AP, Honors, or College courses. However, one of the most unique aspects of our preparatory school’s approach to teaching languages is in the manner our language instruction intersects with other subjects, also known as cross-curricular instruction. This encompasses the arts, since students can learn through the use of literature and music; math, since children can learn about metric system conversions and exchange rates with foreign countries; social studies, since students learn about different cultural influences and geography; and science, as students can also learn about countries’ locations and the environment and weather of those nations. This approach helps to enrich each student’s experience, while also demonstrating how different subjects intersect and affect each other. By gaining a deeper knowledge of another language, students enrich their perspective in other fields in ways that can benefit them long after graduation.

Do you want your child to learn world languages at our college prep high school?

Contact Randolph-Macon Academy today!

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