Rather than try and shield themselves from organizational change, language departments should turn current administrative attempts to streamline the campus to their advantage, particularly in the trend toward internationalization of the curriculum. Areas for expansion include languages across the curriculum, area studies, study abroad, comparative…

A program designed to teach university science lecturers in Indonesia how to design and teach one-semester courses in English for special purposes (ESP) is described. The program provided lecturers with training in language teaching methodology and course design. The piloting of the teacher training course, focusing on physics instruction, is…

The restructuring of the Romance language program at Howard University to improve oral proficiency involved modification of goals, syllabi, classroom activities, and testing. Goals were adapted to American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL)/Educational Testing Service (ETS) guidelines for oral proficiency. Assessment of French…

The two-term technical writing course at the University of Aizu (Japan) was developed to help computer science majors develop writing skills needed for academic and future career activities. The course was first organized and presented in 1994 and has undergone continuous evaluation and revision. During the first two years, it was presented in two…

Development and implementation of an interdisciplinary elementary and early childhood teacher education program at Baruch College (New York) was characterized by many internal and external tensions and pressures. One of the important factors which had to be considered was the ethnic diversity of both the college's and the city's student…

The time to make positive changes in foreign language education programs and instruction has come. The first step in effecting change is to find out about the students' language backgrounds, interests, and intentions for their language skills. Language instruction can take many different emphases: foreign language and international studies,…

Business school faculty and language educators agree that the business school curriculum must be internationalized and that means must be provided for students to acquire facility in a foreign language. The use of traditional foreign language offerings to provide language skills to business majors has proven unsatisfactory. The traditional…

In response both to interests within the foreign language teaching profession and to a new Texas law mandating oral proficiency standards for foreign language teachers, Tarrant County Junior College developed a number of curriculum changes in French, German, Spanish, and English for Speakers of Other Languages. The primary first-year emphasis and…

This new method for teaching college English in India is based on prior assumptions but is given a justification and a methodological framework previously lacking. The method, which lies somewhere between the manipulative control and regimentation employed at the school level and the total freedom of the existing college method, is described in…

Five brief essays are presented in response to an earlier article on leadership in college foreign-language departments. They address issues of curriculum redesign, pedagogical change, the nature of language teaching, the professional identity of language teachers, the role of professional organizations, and the traditional departmental model. A…

For many years, the modern language enrollment at Butler University included many students with a second major in education, and the language curriculum served this population. As the number of teacher trainees diminished, foreign language majors increasingly indicated second majors in business. To serve this population, the foreign language…

A study investigated: (1) the average language proficiency level as determined by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) attained by 271 college seniors majoring in 6 languages (Spanish, French, Russian, German, Japanese, Italian); (2) current and projected uses of the ACTFL OPI by…

This brief report summarizes a longer document with the same title. The report discusses the response of colleges and universities in the United States to the needs of graduate students to become equipped to make personal and and public policy decisions as citizens of an international society. It notes that curriculum changes in higher education…

This report discusses the response of colleges and universities in the United States to the need of graduate students to become equipped to make personal and public policy decisions as citizens of an international society. Curriculum changes are showing a tightening of foreign language standards in schools of higher education and, throughout the…

A state grant to the Department of Romance Languages of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville has allowed development of a proficiency-based curriculum for first- and second-year French and Spanish. Most of the effort to date has been preparation of the syllabus based on specified goals and objectives, or student outcomes, focusing on allowing…