In 1998, the Language Resource Center was asked to devise a non-traditional program that could meet some of the perceived language needs of Columbia's graduate and professional school students. In response, the LRC created the Language Maintenance Tutorial program. Offered exclusively through the LRC, maintenance tutorials are designed primarily to provide students with prior language proficiency the opportunity to maintain and advance their language skills with instruction focused on everyday spoken language. The tutorials are led by trained Columbia graduate students and generally meet once per week for 10 weeks during the course of a given semester. We offer both conversation groups and individual tutorials at very competitive rates.
Please note these non-credit courses cannot be used to meet the language requirement nor can they substitute for regularly offered for-credit courses.
Registration for the tutorials will open on the first day of the Spring semester (Tuesday, Jan. 22nd 2013), and will remain open for the first three weeks of the semester (until Friday, Feb. 15th 2013).
For languages that are highly requested, (i.e. Arabic, English and Spanish) we recommend that you register as soon as possible
We offer tutorials* in many languages, including (but not limited to):
Arabic**, Bengali, Cantonese, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, English, French, Georgian, German, Hausa, Hebrew, Hungarian, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Urdu, Uzbek, Wolof, Zulu
*A minimum of two years of language education at college level is required for all the languages.
**Instruction is in MSA, but we can also try to find tutors for regional variants and spoken vernaculars. However, this is not always possible.
For other languages, more information about the program or advisement with respect to placement, please contact Johanna Urzedowski.