Home Programs & ServicesCenter for International InitiativesInternationalization Toolkit Good Practice in Internationalization

Innovative Campus Strategies

Advancing Language Learning

ESOL Service Learning Tutoring Project at Oregon's Portland Community College: students from beginning Spanish courses and low-level writing/reading courses provide weekly, one-on-one tutoring to the lowest levels of ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) students in literacy skills, vocabulary, and sentence formation. The tutors also provide insight for ESOL students into American culture through guided activities led by the ESOL instructor. Find out more about the program [PDF, 15 KB].

Located in the Honda International Center, Kapi'olani Community College's International Café is an informal gathering place where local and international students meet for cultural and language exchanges. Language tutoring is one of the most popular features of the International Café. Students enrolled in Japanese 101, for example, can find ample native Japanese speakers with whom to converse in exchange for help on homework or the like.

Missouri Southern State University offers after-school foreign language classes for K–12 students, designed by the International Language Resource Center (ILRC) director and taught by Missouri Southern students. A dozen classes are offered each semester in area public schools, at the Joplin Public Library, and on the Missouri Southern campus. The languages taught include Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. Total enrollment in these classes is now more than 250 students per semester. These efforts have increased interest in language learning and provided a vital service for school districts that could not afford to introduce languages at the elementary school level. The ILRC also sponsors workshops for foreign language teachers in the area; the workshops are available at no cost to faculty and high school teachers who wish to participate.

At Dickinson College, summer immersions in foreign languages for faculty advance language learning. Each summer, up to 10 faculty members from outside the language departments spend a month at one of the campus centers abroad improving their skills. Each participant qualifies by taking an intermediate-level language course before the session. The immersions include intensive language study, homestays, and pairing with a specialist in their field from a foreign partner university. Upon return to Dickinson, participants offer Foreign Language Intensive courses (FLIC), regular offerings in which students may opt to work in the foreign language. The Dickinson International Education Fund funds French-, German-, Italian-, Russian-, and Spanish-language immersions and also cultural immersions in China, Greece, and Italy.

Binghamton University, SUNY established Languages Across the Curriculum (LxC), a prize-winning and innovative foreign language program, in 1991. LxC provides students the opportunity to complete a portion of a course in a language other than English. To do this, special learning groups are organized, with content and discussion led by "language resource specialists," i.e., native speakers, usually BU international graduate students. Since the program's inception, more than 3,000 students have participated. Additionally, language faculty have developed special non-English modules in civilization courses taught in English to provide language students and heritage learners (students who grew up speaking both English and another language) with opportunities to develop their language skills while acquiring substantial content knowledge. Faculty also have created English modules within introductory language courses that allow beginning students to examine interactions between the United States and a foreign culture at a level beyond what their elementary skills in the language would allow.

At Indiana University—Bloomington, Global Village, a living and learning residence community, includes the French-, German-, Japanese-, Russian-, and Spanish-language communities. Participants form closely knit language groups, pledge to speak their languages as much as possible during their daily activities, and work with the academic coordinator to organize language-related events such as foreign films, lectures, and exhibits, which are open to other Global Village residents and the general public. The language groups also sponsor language tables, where students and faculty meet for lunch or dinner for informal conversation.

Michigan State University offers more than 200 on-campus courses in 14 languages through the Department of French, Classics, and Italian; the Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African Languages; and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. The departments are working to enhance opportunities for instruction in less-commonly taught languages (LCTLs), to include offering on-demand instruction in 27 additional (mostly African) languages. To address the needs of heritage learners—second- or third-generation members of immigrant families—MSU offers evening instruction in several LCTLs. MSU's Center for Language Education and Research (CLEAR) also provides leadership in the development of innovative research projects, language teaching materials, and professional development opportunities for language educators.

In 1991, the University of Missouri–St. Louis established the Joint Center for East Asian Studies with Washington University-St. Louis, which combines the resources of an independent private university with a public university. The Joint Center assigns faculty to teach on either campus and encourages students from either campus to enroll in courses available on the other campus. The Joint Center's added resources have enabled the teaching of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean on UMSL's campus.

The University of New Orleans Critical Languages Program is a self-instructional language program that offers less-commonly taught languages. Using small class sizes, native-speaking tutors, materials with strong audio components, and external examiners, UNO students can take (for credit or noncredit) languages not typically offered. Languages that have been offered include Arabic, Creole, Czech, Dutch, Greek, Hebrew, Kiswahili, Korean, Indonesian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

The College of Notre Dame of Maryland has tailored the language requirement of its general education curriculum to recognize the varied language backgrounds of its students. The college encourages all of its students to develop fluency in their mother tongue and in a second language. When that second language is English, students may use English to fulfill their foreign language requirement. In addition to a full range of English writing and literature courses, non-native speakers of English may choose to improve their English skills in a course designed specifically for second-language speakers.

*Please contact the institution directly if you have questions regarding specific programs.

Please direct questions about this page to:
cii@ace.nche.edu | Staff Contacts
Download our information brochure
This page last updated on: 01/07/2009