The Undergraduate Program in Applied Foreign Language (LEA) is one of the founding degrees of the Faculty of Human Sciences and the degree with the one of the highest employment rates for this area of studies (official data from the General Directorate of Statistics for Education and Science).
Groundbreaking in terms of the Higher Education offer of this area, the LEA degree has an international transdisciplinary bent in the three variants offered (Business Relations, Translation, and Portuguese as a Foreign Language).
It is both innovative and up to date in its understanding that a complex job market requires professionals with multidisciplinary and rigorous answers, based on a solid scientific and ethical training.
It is dynamic and challenging in its presentation of innovative methodologies that encourage students' active participation and that include Service-Learning models, inter-class collaboration and projects outside the university. The fact that the Faculty of Human Science obtained the European Language Label in 2022 is a statement of this constant innovation.
While combining knowledge from different Colleges, the degree's multidisciplinary curriculum is based on three fundamental pillars:
- Learning languages and their complex intercultural frameworks;
- Theoretical reflection on cultural, juridical and economic contexts within ever more globalised society;
- Functional knowledge that guides students through the diverse work contexts (geographically and culturally) in which they will develop a specialized professional practice.
Why choose Portuguese as a Foreign Language ?
This specialist option seeks to meet a need within the scope of the first national cycle of university education that otherwise does not provide for training in Portuguese as a foreign language.
This specialisation focuses upon the broad and thorough learning of language as a cultural phenomenon that spans borders and adopting Portuguese, for historical and current reasons, as a language for encountering distinct and different realities and geographies whether at the level of cultural exchanges (linguistic, literary, artistic, behavioural, etcetera) or in terms of business and international relations.
