LAC at Skidmore: Promoting Proficiencies and Enriching Liberal

							LAC at Skidmore: Promoting Proficiencies
  and Enriching Liberal Arts Education


 Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum: 2008
       University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
                    16 October 2008

              Mao Chen, Cindy Evans,
       Patricia Rubio, Marc-André Wiesmann
                         Panel Overview


"Developing a Two-Tiered LAC Program”
Patricia Rubio, Associate Dean of the Faculty, Professor of Spanish,
   former Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures

"Using Technology to Support an Individualized LAC model”
Cindy Evans, Director of the Foreign Language Resource Center and
   Lecturer in French

"Promises and Challenges of Teaching Chinese Across the
   Curriculum"
Mao Chen, Associate Professor of Chinese

"New Visions for Advanced (C)LAC"
Marc-André Wiesmann, Associate Professor of French
                  Using technology to support
                  an individualized LAC model


•   Learning objectives & assessment
•   Evolving practices in LAC
•   Advantages of moodle / examples
•   MLA report and LAC
              Learning objectives & assessment


•   Improve reading proficiency
•   Enhance vocabulary in target discipline
•   Provide ongoing L2 learning
•   Syllabus
                    Evolving practices in LAC


•   toward promoting a learning community from more individual format

•   increasing use of moodle as communal space

•   more emphasis on process: in-class peer correction, summaries,
    translations w/ feedback

•   create a sense of common purpose through focus on “peer teaching”,
    language learning

•   portfolio assessment - emphasis on building toward a goal, producing
    work with a purpose and for an audience
                          MLA report and LAC


•   Divergent views of language as instrumental vs. constitutive view of
    language as the object of study - is it the means or the end?


•   Calls for evolution of language departments to incorporate advanced
    study of language and cultures, language classes in more content
    areas. “The kind of curricular reform we suggest will situate language
    study in cultural, historical, geographic, and cross-cultural frames within
    the context of humanistic learning.

•   Interdisciplinary approach (team-taught courses) can create learning
    communities.
Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World,
    May 2007, Profession
        Contact Information
•   prubio@skidmore.edu
•   cevans@skidmore.edu
•   maochen@skidmore.edu
•   mwiesman@skidmore.edu