Languages have lost status in the educational system, and oral skills are less effectively and rigorously taught. However, a University of Leeds program providing short, intensive courses in administrative and legal French for British civil servants has been found to be very effective in developing the participants' oral and aural skills. The…

Hearings on reauthorization of Titles II, VI, VIII, X, and XI of the Higher Education Act are presented. For Title II, the college library programs, Congress seeks acceptable criteria for providing library aid based on need and to determine needs for traineeships and fellowships for professional and paraprofessional librarians. Considerations for…

The dramatic rebirth of the foreign language department in a four-year liberal arts college is documented. The process is described as having three stages: assessment of the department's curricular mission in light of the changed student constituency; development of a long-range plan for outreach and public relations activities to prepare the way…

When asked by the business department for a language component for its new area of concentration in international business, the modern language department of a small liberal arts college capitalized on a recently devised competence-based curriculum. The curriculum, established in the college's general education curriculum as an alternate track to…

Drexel University's undergraduate major in International Area Studies is described. The program has an interdisciplinary curriculum including required coursework in the departments of foreign languages, history and politics, sociology and anthropology, and business administration. All languages offered start with beginner level courses and…

In 1980, Oregon State University began a program going beyond the usual procedure for students of English as a second language (ESL), which involved putting them in intensive English programs until they could pass the Test of English as a Foreign Language and then sending them on to a regular academic program. It was found that this traditional…

Causes of language fossilization and ways to overcome it are considered. Fossilization is the relatively permanent incorporation of incorrect linguistic forms into a person's second language competence. The discussion is focused on fossilization of incorrect syntactical rules, based on experiences with learners of English as a second language at…

In a 3-year, federally-funded program, faculty at St. Olaf College (Minnesota) have developed a series of behavioral and natural science courses in which students with at least the fourth semester of foreign language do a portion of the course readings in the second language and meet once a week to discuss them in that language with the regular…

The guide presents the newly-developed curriculum of the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana at Iztapalapa (Mexico) for its program in English as a foreign language. An introductory section provides background information on the initiative to design a new curriculum. The second section presents the principles on which the curriculum and its methods…

Examination of ways college second language teaching must adapt to new student needs looks at changing characteristics of students, their new educational goals and expectations of higher education, effects of these shifts on the classroom, new time considerations, the need to find creative ways to meet diverse student goals, and use of technology…

Describes a university's pilot immersion and multiliteracy program, in which first-year language students used Spanish language newspapers and texts to study Latin American history, geography, and current affairs. Students in the pilot program developed skills similar to those of students in traditional content courses. Sample quizzes are…

As teachers' roles evolve in technology-enhanced language learning (TELL), choices of technological devices and instructional delivery and the degree of foreign language (FL) teacher facilitation within TELL activities are prominent. This investigation compared 53 beginning college French students' comprehension of FL video in a teacher-assisted…

This paper addresses beginning level Spanish heritage language (SHL) learners' attitudes towards their language and culture. Heritage language (HL) programs and research have often overlooked beginning level learners, especially within university settings. The current study involved 20 participants from a beginning level SHL class in the…

This document contains a total of 57 welcoming speeches, theme addresses, seminar and workshop papers, and poster sessions that were presented at a conference on technological education and national development. The papers explore the ways technology and technological advances have both necessitated and enabled changes in the way education is…

A study of second language learning processes had three goals: to establish a grounded theory on the role of tension, both euphoric and dysphoric, in the formal language learning process; to provide a comprehensive ethnography of the 7-week intensive beginners' class in the French School of Middlebury College (Vermont); and to demonstrate how a…