The Modern and Classical Languages Department at Mountain Pointe High School creates authentic, high quality learning opportunities to prepare individuals for success in an increasingly diverse and global community. The Modern & Classical Language Department of Mountain Pointe boasts an enrollment of over 50% of the students enrolled at Mountain Pointe. We are very proud of our retention rate in our upper-division classes. Our department promotes a communicative approach to language learning at all levels. Our objectives are geared toward providing the students with the ability to communicate clearly and grammatically in the target language, and at the same time, enjoying the language-learning experience and gaining an awareness of the diverse cultural aspects of the language. We are especially proud of our partnership with Rio Salado College in providing students with the opportunity to earn college credit for upper division high school language classes which are taught concurrently as college classes. We adhere to the college curriculum and our teachers are state certified college instructors. Currently we have as many as 50 to 60 students graduating with up to 16 credit hours in foreign language.

Modern & Classical Languages Faculty

	Bob Babbitt ext. 58010		Jeff Hiller ext. 58060		Donna Sampanes ext. 58202
	Mary Catherine Boatright Department Chair ext. 57431		Sandi Hinojosa ext. 58067		Erica Shelton ext. 58081
	Elisabeth Boessneck ext. 58204		Colleen Murray ext. 59206		Erin L. Smith ext. 58153
	Robert Etchamendy ext. 58037

Because students have many learning styles, we provide each student with a variety of opportunities to learn their chosen language and to enjoy it. Therefore:

• we intend to promote an enthusiastic involvement with the language for our students;
  
• we foster an appreciation of other cultures;
  
• we value the environment of mutual respect, trust, courtesy and high self-esteem between teachers and the students;
  
• we encourage a warmth in the classroom and a wealth of extra-curricular activities that build a community amongst foreign language students and teachers;
  
• we encourage the active (participation) involvement of parents in our program;
  
• we recognize the value of foreign language study to help students become more articulate in their own language;
  
• we understand that foreign language study is at its best a combination of fun as well as skill development and memory work, and
  
• we will work together as fellow foreign language teachers to build our teaching skills and to build the strengths of the different language programs.