Gary Schmidt, professor and chair of the Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies, has been awarded a U.S. Department of Education grant for $191,000 over two years to support the development of an Intercultural Language Resource Center. Schmidt offered his insights on the impetus for the project and his vision for the future of language incorporation across disciplines at CCU.
Schmidt reflected on the grant and the center as a tool to allow students to not only learn but apply the languages they acquire in authentic settings.
“My vision for the center has been guided by something I’ve been trying to do since I got here to CCU: create more connections for studying language and culture across the disciplines,” said Schmidt. “We need to foster ways for students to apply language study to other disciplines, to actively use their language knowledge in research questions or some sort of active engagement in another discipline.”
Who needs language?
Two examples Schmidt gives are students in an intelligence and national security studies class who would benefit from reading intelligence and news briefs in the original language, or students in a Russian literature class having the ability to read the original text rather than an English translation.
“The center will be a place that supports these types of activities,” said Schmidt. “It will provide resources such as film and media databases and subscriptions to specialized proficiency analysis sites. These will help students may acquire the advanced proficiencies they need to utilize the language in real-life situations, in contexts that cross disciplinary boundaries. The center and its resources may also bring in students from other disciplines who might otherwise have not seen the connection and the relevance of language study.”
A center with a mission
Schmidt said the center will have two major goals.
“The first goal is to increase the number of students doing area studies [such as Asian studies, European studies, or Middle Eastern studies] with a language component, so they’re doing language culture study across disciplines,” said Schmidt. “Secondly, the center will increase substantially the number of students who have a certain level of proficiency in any language, but especially a critical language: Chinese, Russian, or Arabic.”
At the end of the two-year grant period, Schmidt hopes to have built a new dimension in cross-disciplinary language learning and proficiency at CCU.
“My vision is that after the grant period ends, we will have created new interdisciplinary courses in which foreign language skills are utilized,” said Schmidt. “We will have a center that regularly offers events and programming related to language and cultural learning across the disciplines: a place where we have guest speakers, film screenings and discussions, readings, reading groups, language group meetings, and the like, with involvement from other faculty and students from other disciplines. It will also be a place where students in the college can go and be advised on opportunities related to interdisciplinary language studies including study abroad and scholarships. And we will see, as a result of available resources, demonstrable improvement in number of students leaving CCU with advanced proficiency in a language.”
August 24, 2020
Congratulations Gary and the entire COHFA team on their vision and efforts to bring this valued resource to Coastal Carolina University! As a language and area studies major in my undergraduate degree program, I can easily see how exciting the opportunities will be for our students with this center!