In an effort to motivate language students and to promote real engagement, a long-running project has taken root at Newcastle University. For over 12 years, the Real Translation Project (RTP), an extracurricular initiative in the School of Modern Languages, has been offering opportunities to language students to use their linguistic skills to…

German, and increasingly French and Spanish, programs are by nature global because they attract graduate students and faculty from around the world. Most have studied the language and "big C" cultural products during their graduate studies, but they have not necessarily learned approaches for fostering intercultural communicative…

This paper explores the professional development literature in the educational setting. The different literature pieces are aligned to a framework that requires effective professional development to focus on three concepts: content, context, and process. The content focuses on the "what" question in the programs while the context aims to…

Various newspaper articles report that British ministers, university representatives, exam chiefs and business bodies agree that foreign languages skills in primary, secondary and tertiary UK education are in crisis. Lower funding and policy changes have caused language skills deficiencies felt gravely in the business sectors. Funding and support…

Telecollaboration for Intercultural Language Acquisition (TILA), is an EU-funded project within the Lifelong Learning Programme that will run between January 2013 and June 2015. TILA's overall objectives are: (1) to innovate, enrich and make foreign language teaching programmes more attractive and effective by encouraging the implementation of…

One of the key recommendations of the Worton Review of Modern Foreign Languages provision in higher education in England (2009) is more effective collaboration between language centres and language departments. This paper presents a fully integrated model of such collaboration and develops recommendations for language centres and language…

The Fluency First in English as a second language (ESL) project at City College (New York) began as a result of the high failure rate among ESL writing students at the college, and the fact that this kept many students from entering the regular college courses. Revision on the ESL reading and writing curricula, beginning in 1987, focused on…

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…

Project LEAP (Learning English-for-Academic-Purposes) is a three-year faculty development and supplemental instruction partnership to improve the academic literacy skills of native-born, immigrant, and international language minority students. Course teams composed of discipline faculty, peer study group leaders, and professional language…

The report details a federally-funded program at the University of Texas, Austin whose activities included: (1) an experimental summer intensive language institute to facilitate Brazilian Portuguese certification for nine certified secondary school teachers of Spanish; (2) writing and publication of a new textbook of Brazilian Portuguese for…