Spanish Language and Literature

Hello, I am Associate Professor Dr Olcay ÖZTUNALI. I am the head of the Department of Western Languages and Literatures. Our department includes the Department of Spanish Language Literature. Our students are trained to learn Spanish for 5 years, including the preparatory year for the Department of Spanish Language and Literature. There is an exam for the preparatory year. If they pass that exam without studying the preparatory year, they can start the department. In the first years, we have more language-based and general culture and history-based courses such as European cultural history, grammar, written and oral expression. In addition to language, more specific Spanish Literature of the Americas courses will come into play later on. Because as you know, Spanish is spoken in 21 countries and is one of the most spoken languages in the world after Chinese. Therefore, it has a multicultural and multinational structure. In this sense, I can say that we have a wide range of courses. Today, our students are subject to compulsory internship from the 3rd grade. Of course, we leave students very free in this area. Because we want them to work in the field they want to work in because their working areas are very wide. Therefore, they can work in a wide range of fields from tourism to publishing houses, from embassies to courses. Then we have an internship board. We evaluate this accordingly. I think internships are very important for us. We attach great importance to this internship programme by taking advantage of being in a big city like Istanbul. Our young people have the chance to see and test themselves before graduating and going into life. We have international opportunities offered to our department students. This programme is the ERASMUS programme in order to develop the language more. We have an ERASMUS programme with the University of Burgas and they can go there periodically and benefit from the student exchange programme. Likewise, there are programmes for our professors. We aim to further develop these programmes. In our department, we have department seminars that take place every semester, where our esteemed lecturers present examples from different fields of study, and from time to time, guest lecturers from outside the university and the department also attend our seminars. Apart from this, we have a seminar programme on women's literature and Peruvian identity with the Embassy of Peru. We also have a seminar on world literature and comparative literature with Yeditepe University. We also have a seminar programme on Latin American countries with Carlos Telcia University in Madrid. I think it will increase gradually. Our students have a wide range of job opportunities after graduating from our department. They can work in many different fields of translation and interpreting. For example, they can work in embassies, tourism sector, international companies, media, radio and television organisations. They can also work as teachers. They can be interested in education. They can undoubtedly become academics in our Faculty of Literature. They can become literary scholars. They can work in translation in publishing houses. They can be editors. Apart from this, they have the opportunity to work in almost all sectors that require a foreign language. We can observe the difficulties our students have in terms of courses. Because we are a small department, that is, the number of students in the class is not very large, we can control the development process of each of our students. And generally, everyone's difficulties can be different in different subjects. We try to improve them in this regard. But since we are a department that focuses especially on language and expression, I think that we can reach more comfortable results by starting from our own language and literature. In this sense, I can recommend them to read a lot of Turkish books, to learn their own literature, their own history and culture. Only in this way can they more easily make comparisons with a different literature. In this context, I can recommend our students to create a library of their own. I sincerely wish success to our young people who will take the university exam. May your path be clear. We are waiting for you all at Istanbul Medeniyet University, Faculty of Literature, Department of Western Languages and Literatures, Department of Spanish Language and Literature.