Aimed at Ph.D. programs in German, this article offers a broad framework to discuss the urgent issues facing our programs to stem the tide of (possible or even likely) disinvestment in German in times of fiscal hardship. Many conversations on suitable reforms tend to be held separately by different stakeholders -- teaching-focused faculty or…

Ensuring that students spend time preparing for class has always been one of the challenges of teaching. Indeed, when students are given an assignment that they are required to do before coming to the next lecture--whether it be written exercises or just studying--one wonders how often they are actually doing it. There are many ways in which…

This report by the American Association of Community Colleges summarizes the results of a nationwide year-long study on foreign language education. Programs, called Improving Foreign Language Education projects at Community Colleges, were implemented at a total of 36 American colleges to enact proposed changes in curriculum and foreign language…

A computer-assisted instructional program to teach the Arabic writing system and elementary vocabulary and comprehension, which was developed at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at The University of Texas at Austin in cooperation with the university's College of Liberal Arts, is described. Among the benefits of the computer-assisted approach…

New video technologies available for French second-language instruction are reviewed, and their incorporation into a Pennsylvania State University third-semester French course is described. Issues discussed include considerations of media availability, authentic vs. contrived video, second-language acquisition theory, and curricular goals and…

A discussion of multimedia teaching techniques for second language instruction looks at the current state of educational technology for college-level Chinese language teaching, then focuses on practices for teaching Chinese at Smith College (Massachusetts). Truly multimedia materials, which use computer software, compact discs, video, slides, and…

Johnson County Community College, in Kansas, recently implemented a unique laboratory combining interactive video, computers, and peer tutors to support its speech communication, foreign language, and interpreter training departments. The facility is equipped with 15 interactive, video-based work stations, costing $3,930 each; four computer…

This article provides a report on NetMeeting as an appropriate fourth-generation tool for interactive language learning in distance mode. It follows on earlier research by Wang and Sun (2000, 2001) on the most urgent problem facing distance language education--lack of provision of oral-visual interaction and the emergence of a fourth-generation…

In the context of the modern global society and economy, foreign language instruction is placing more emphasis on students' cross-cultural understanding and on using language to develop students' communication skills. These goals are evidenced by the current interest in Foreign Languages Across the Curriculum (FLAC) courses, which teach languages…

Sixty-six descriptions of notable programs and promising practices related to specific problems, practices, and goals in American postsecondary education are presented in this study, a continuation of Volume I. The programs are the result of searches made by the staff of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, although neither the…

This paper describes a method in oral fluency evaluation for Tourism English according to a corpus-based lexical approach. Our main research focus is placed on measuring oral skill competence among Tourism English (TE) learners by contrasting their word use and linguistic fluency, achieved in two types of oral tasks, with corpus data frequencies.…

Technical aspects of the PLATO system, the language work done on PLATO thus far (specifically in foreign languages), and areas for further research in computer-based language instruction are reviewed. PLATO-IV, designed and implemented by the Computer-Based Educational Research Laboratory of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is…