Program Overview

Our BA Spanish, Portuguese and Brazilian Studies (including foundation year) is open to Home and EU students. It will be suitable for you if your academic qualifications do not yet meet our entrance requirements for the three-year version of this course and you want a programme that increases your subject knowledge as well as improves your academic skills.

This five-year course includes a foundation year (Year Zero), followed by a further four years of study. During your Year Zero, you study four academic subjects relevant to your chosen course as well as a compulsory academic skills module.

You are an Essex student from day one, a member of our global community based at the most internationally diverse campus university in the UK.

After successful completion of Year Zero in our Essex Pathways Department, you progress to complete your course with the Department of Language and Linguistics. Taking this course will enable you to communicate with more than 500 million speakers of Spanish and Portuguese, and do business in a great number of countries, most importantly the rapidly rising Brazil. In addition to mastering both Spanish and Portuguese at a high level of proficiency, you gain practical skills in the use of these languages professionally (such as in translating and interpreting), as well as developing a thorough understanding of some of the world’s most vibrant societies. We house the internationally important collection of Latin American art, ESCALA.

Topics may include:

• Translating, Interpreting and Subtitling
• Spanish and Latin American Art, Film and Music
• From the Caves to Modern Graffiti: A Visual History of the Spanish Language
• Brazil in Focus: Business, Culture and Society

We are one of the largest and most prestigious language and linguistics departments in the world, a place where talented students become part of an academic community in which the majority of research is rated ‘world-leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’, placing us firmly within the top 10 departments in the UK and ranked among the top 150 departments on the planet according to the QS World [University] Rankings [2017] for linguistics.