Washington Times Heading
Saturday, August 18, 2001
By Sean Green; SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Intense study easier in beautiful setting Home stays enhance experience
Centro Linguistico Conversa, where the surroundings are spectacular and the classes are intense, approaches its teaching much as the Peace Corps undertakes its training of volunteers.

There's a good reason for that. Dave Kaufman, the American who runs Conversa, spent six years as the language coordinator for Peace Corps training programs in Puerto Rico and Costa Rica. The native of New York state earned his bachelor's degree in Spanish from Ithaca College and began his Spanish-teaching career as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic. He earned a master's degree in linguistics from Georgetown University before returning to the Peace Corp as language coordinator. He has lived in Costa Rica for more than 20 years.

The school was founded in San Jose in 1974 and also teaches English as a foreign language to native Spanish speakers. It opened its larger Santa Ana campus overlooking the Valle del Sol, where my students and I studied, in 1980.

That campus, nestled in the hills outside San Jose, is on the site of a former dairy farm but now holds 20 classrooms, both indoor and outdoor; a dining hall; a swimming pool and bathhouse with solar-heated showers; two ping-pong tables; a half-court basketball blacktop; and plenty of hammocks. The remote setting is ideal for both relaxation and intense study - a seemingly unnatural blend - and I strongly recommend choosing to study at this campus.

For those who prefer campus life to a home stay, the Santa Ana campus also has two lush lodges, one with two family suites and a shared kitchen and lounge, the other with six bedrooms with private baths, a dining hall and two lounges. Though the lodges are inviting, Mr. Kaufman says - and as a student I concur - that to make the most of their time at Conversa, students should take advantage of the home stays the school arranges in Santa Ana.

The home stay is included in the price of the program and provides a private room, breakfast, dinner and laundry service. In the past two years, I have stayed with three families and have found all three stays pleasurable and enlightening.

Given the plusher accommodations of the Santa Ana campus, prices there are steeper than at its San Jose counterpart. A four-week intensive program (four hours of classes a day) costs $2,200. The price includes a home stay, meals, books, classes and airport pickup and drop-off. Equivalent study at San Jose costs $1,500. Discounts are available for groups and married couples, and child care and special children's programs are offered. College students also have the option of earning college credit through the College Consortium for International Studies. Students who request it can obtain a letter certifying their dates of attendance, progress and language level based on the scale of oral proficiency used by the Foreign Service.

The maximum class size at Conversa is four students, and instruction lasts four or 51/2 hours a day, depending on the program, plus a Saturday morning tutorial. Students are tested on the first day to determine group placement and may be moved from one group to another as they progress. They are expected to do about an hour of homework a day. The school calls its methodology "constant contact," meaning that students have a wide range of personal contacts with native Spanish speakers, not just instructors, all day every day.

Discounts are available to students for selected weekend tours, including the ones my group took.

To learn more about Conversa, visit the Web site (www.conversa.com) or call 888-669-1664 for reservations and last-minute arrangements.