SHERMAN, TEXAS — Modern language faculty members from across the country will visit Austin College Sept. 27-30 for a National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE) conference, “Technology and the Language House Curriculum,” hosted by faculty of the Austin College Department of Classical and Modern Languages.
Registrations include faculty from Colorado College, Oberlin College, Wellesley College, Furman University, DePauw University, Sewanee: The University of the South, University of Puget Sound, Pomona College, Bryn Mawr College, Occidental College, Whitman College, College of Wooster, Juniata College, St. Olaf College, Rollins College, Macalester College, Hope College, Lafayette College, and Valparaiso University.
Language house programs — in which students of a particular language live together, often along with a native speaker, in order to become more fluent in the target language and often speaking only that language in certain areas of the residence — can be found at many liberal arts colleges. There is, however, no national association of such programs and limited opportunity for sharing ideas about language house instruction.
The language house program at Austin College is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year and hosting the conference is “an excellent way to showcase Austin College as a national leader in educating undergraduates in foreign languages and cultures,” said Patrick Duffey, professor of Spanish and one of the principal organizers for the event.
Austin College’s language house program began with students living in the college’s Thompson House, then a Victorian residence at the edge of campus, and the target language rotated each year between German, Spanish, and French. Throughout the past 25 years, the program has evolved in many ways, with no change more important than the construction of the Jordan Family Language House in 1998.
The Jordan Family Language House provides Austin College students one of the only language residences specifically designed for that purpose. The facility includes four wings and offers residential immersion programs for students of French, German, Japanese, and Spanish. Native speakers of each language also live in the residence. Each wing includes student residential rooms clustered around a common room. The configuration provides each language with an identity and an area in which the residents can meet and interact in the target language.
An interior courtyard is open to all residents and computer and multimedia language instruction laboratories are available for classroom, group, and individual use. The house also includes a kitchen and dining area to further enhance cultural as well as language exploration. The living community is designed to take language and cultural exploration beyond the classroom into everyday, casual conversation and activity.
The facility aids in specific goals of Austin College’s Classical and Modern Languages faculty: promoting development of fluency and proficiency, making language study beyond the competency requirement levels attractive to students, and generating greater interest in study abroad.
Austin College faculty members have observed that by incorporating living and learning arrangements in a residential setting, students make significant gains in fluency with a foreign language. Those students are then better prepared for undertaking international experiences and the language immersions that faculty members consider critical in the study of language.
Participants at the NITLE conference will share a variety of ideas about language house programs and their activities and curricular components. In this age of YouTube®, blogs, wikis, moodles, and podcasts, there are countless new ways to immerse students in the target language while they live in the language house. Faculty at the conference will acquire hands-on experience with a variety of interactive Web applications, social software, and graphic applications. Sessions also will include ways to integrate language house programs with students involved in international study.
NITLE is a non-profit initiative dedicated to promoting liberal education. We provide opportunities for teachers in liberal arts contexts to create transformative learning experiences for and with their students by deploying emerging technologies in innovative, effective, and sustainable ways.
Austin College is a leading national independent liberal arts college located 60 miles north of Dallas in Sherman, Texas. Founded in 1849, making it the oldest institution of higher education in Texas operating under original charter and name, the college is related by covenant to the Presbyterian Church (USA). Recognized nationally for academic excellence in the areas of international education, pre-professional training, and leadership studies, Austin College is one of 40 schools profiled in Loren Pope’s influential book “Colleges that Change Lives.”