Describes the establishment of the very visible and successful Five College Foreign Language Resource Center, focusing on the grantsmanship, equipment, benefits and pitfalls of a consortial approach, involvement with high schools, and a planned summer colloquium. (Author/CB)

Discuses the foreign language department chair's fractured time, department's space in the university, and the complicated action of putting a united front on the diversity of opinion and levels of involvement characteristic of faculty members in any foreign language department. (Author/VWL)

Offers inventive strategies to help foreign language department chairs encourage scholarly development in their colleagues and maintain a place of their own in the research community. (Author/VWL)

Discusses the foreign language department chair's role as middleman encircled by demands from students, faculty, and administration. Provides ideas about dealing with deans, especially in the use of part-time faculty; support for and lack of recognition of faculty research; and technology and the role of a good teacher. Decries the demand for…

Discusses the need to address the ambiguities regarding literature in the standards-based foreign language curriculum. Suggests that by allowing students to explore personal responses to language and literature, it will easier to forge crucial connections across the undergraduate curriculum and to reassert the usefulness of a coherent program in…

Curricular changes at all levels of foreign language education provide alternate ways to provide valid learning experiences. There is new freedom for students to explore varying time arrangements, different learning styles, diverse content, and various locations for instruction. A discussion of student learning styles concerns individualization,…

Emerging social writing platforms offer possibilities for language learners to collaborate around joint assignments. One such environment is the wiki, generally hosting two prominent modes of usage, web pages and discussion forums. This study investigates software engineering students' use of a wiki as an integrated tool within the frames of a…

The present study expands the design of Warschauer (1996) surveying freshman foreign language students at a Turkish university. Motivating aspects of computer assisted instruction in terms of writing and e-mailing are explored through an exploratory factor analysis conducted on the survey developed by Warschauer (1996). Findings suggest that…

Teachers play a vital role in the classroom environment. Interaction between teacher and students is an essential part of the teaching/learning process. An educator, Flanders originally developed an instrument called Flanders Interaction Analysis (FIA). The FIA system was designed to categorize the types, quantity of verbal interaction and direct…

Some of the teaching practices of 10 foreign language teachers in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area are reviewed in this study of second language (L2) instruction. Focus is on how idioms are taught in university German foreign language courses, which textbooks and reference materials available in the German and English fields highlight…

A project surveyed the instructional materials development needs of the less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) language teaching community. The national survey in 1992 covered 82 languages and surveyed approximately 1,000 language course instructors and program directors at national resource centers and universities in the United States receiving…

Questions have been raised about the status of English as a second language (ESL) in colleges and universities, especially with regard to ESL credit, admission of ESL students, and tenure for ESL instructors. These questions prompted Portland State University (Oregon) to send a questionnaire dealing with the topic to the directors of 174 programs…

Three major concerns affect higher education in the United States: the decline in student population with some curtailment of programs, high inflation rates with constantly rising tuition, and political pressures on public colleges and universities. These factors affect study abroad programs in several ways. Public institutions may experience less…

A study examined dimensions of oral proficiency curriculum and testing (OP) in American colleges and universities for the purpose of appraising the implementability of educational policy derived from them. The framework used for this policy analysis looks at the system environment, demands and resources, the process that converts demands into…

The English programs in two schools at the University of Nancy, France, are described and compared. At the School of Science, foreign languages are compulsory in the first two years; at the School of Pharmacy, short courses in English have been introduced for students in their fourth and fifth years. Recently the objective of the Science School…