France: Language, Community, and Social Change

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Advance your French through intensive language learning in Toulouse.

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Through this intensive language program, students can rapidly improve their French language ability. Students experience full language immersion through instruction at L’Institute Catholique de Toulouse, interdisciplinary seminars, and homestays in French communities.

Students interact with French scholars, community members, local organizers, and arts groups. The program’s Community Service Project provides students an opportunity to increase language skills while giving back to the host community.

The program is based in Toulouse, France’s second-largest urban university area. Toulouse is home to a world-class arts and cultural scene and is situated between the Pyrenees Mountains and Mediterranean Sea. Students also undertake several excursions outside Toulouse, including to the Pyrenees Orientales along the French-Spanish border.

A Cultural Mosaic
With borders along eight European countries, colonial ties to West Africa, and territories in North and South America, France is a country influenced by myriad cultures. As one of Western Europe's leading asylum destinations, France is also home to a growing non-Christian immigrant population, with a significant percentage of immigrants coming from Muslim countries.

Within this diverse and evolving environment, students on this program explore the impact of immigration on French politics, economics, and arts, and the ways in which individuals and communities maintain both separate cultural identities and a French nationality. The program considers contemporary France's ethnic, religious, urban, and regional diversity and its complex post-colonial relationships with the Francophone world.

View a video clip of a France24 news story as a BBC reporter accompanies SIT students on their tour of an immigrant neighborhood in Toulouse.