This article shares an innovative advanced course design that incorporates cultural connections and comparisons, interpersonal communication, and a relaxing classroom environment to facilitate learning and language development. By using authentic texts as the medium for learning, it provides a case example of an upper-division curriculum that focused on cognitive skills, elicited conversational dialogues, exposed and promoted the use of different registers, and tapped students' existing schema around stimulating topics to foster engagement, reflection and enthusiasm. We advance that a curriculum that focuses on the affective domain over discrete academic or grammatical objectives can develop students' sense of linguistic creativity and language ownership, thus improving their confidence and level of competency in the target language.