A series of lectures on different aspects of life in Catalonia, complete with the relevant explanatory notes provided by the lecturer. Each time the series is offered, six of the twelve possible lectures are selected according to interest on the part of the public or the organisers:
- The Catalan political system
- Maria del Mar Bonet, forty years of poetry and song
- Catalan Republicans in the Nazi death camps
- The Jews in Catalonia
- The other Catalans
- The Ebro Delta
- Prehistoric monuments in Catalonia
- The Güell Colony
- The Boí Valley
- La Garrotxa, land of volcanoes
- El Gran Teatre del Liceu
- Language services
Aims
- To provide information on places in Catalonia, historical events and aspects of social life and culture that may interest students from outside Catalonia.
- To broaden students' vision of Barcelona and of Catalonia. To motivate them to visit certain places and to widen their knowledge of the place in which they are studying.
- To encourage participants to use all possible means to understand the talk: the lecturer's speech, the written word, illustrations, prior knowledge of the topic or even their own suppositions. To try and attain global comprehension.
- To help students practice their comprehension of a type of explanatory and narrative discourse in Catalan that is similar to those that they will encounter in their classes.
- To improve students' opportunities to hear and speak Catalan thanks to their improved understanding of their surroundings. The more they know about everything that forms part of the shared knowledge of the Catalans, the more they can progress in their studies of the language.
- To demonstrate that, once certain barriers have been removed, there is a certain degree of mutual comprehension between Romance languages.
