The mission of the Department of Foreign Languages at Central Washington University is to teach language and to instill in our students an appreciation of how language serves a variety of practical social, economic and political needs. We provide our students with major and minor programs in Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. Graduates acquire necessary professional skills and foreign language and culture experiences for productive employment in foreign language related areas. We seek to develop individuals who are critical thinkers and possess awareness of, and sensitivity to, cultural diversity in the increasingly global community of the twenty-first century. Our faculty members are dedicated to mentoring students to ensure their success in our programs and in their lives after they leave the university. We strive to be interdisciplinary in scope, maintaining close and productive collaboration with other programs of study that share a similar mission to ours for example, the Asia Pacific Studies, and the Latino and Latin American Studies programs. We promote a variety of study abroad programs that offer students authentic language immersion and cultural experience crucial for their pursuit of a career in a foreign-language related areas. Our faculty members are also advisors for various student language clubs that offer a relaxed atmosphere for language practice and further university-wide interest in that specific foreign language and culture. More importantly, we expose students to the epistemological foundations of human thought, knowledge, and experience. A fundamental understanding of language, the most human of behaviors, is imperative to the preparation of students for the challenges of responsible, enlightened citizenship and stewardship of the earth.
The university and college, through their encouragement of responsible stewardship of the earth and its resources, and responsible citizenship, create a milieux and an atmosphere of support for the basic mission and activities of this department e.g., acquiring knowledge of the respective histories and cultures of the languages we teach, requiring significant periods of immersion in various cultures through study abroad, developing and knowledge of and appreciation for the art and literature of the languages we teach, etc.
1. Regularizing and expanding upon present programmatic offerings in ASL. 2. Conduct a feasability study in order to assess the possibility for an Arabic program. A priority is to replace at least one of the Spanish positions with a full time faculty position.
Our permanent, long-standing goals have always been to provide top quality programming to our undergraduates.
Study abroad programs. Our students have many choices of programs in which they can participate in order to study in the native culture of the language they are studying. Our department faculty have helped establish, administer, and teach programs in La Coruna, Spain, and in Pau, France. Area Studies Programs. Collaboration between the area studies programs — Asia/Pacific Studies and Latin American Studies - and the Foreign Languages department has been quite effective and beneficial to both parties. International Education and World Languages Day.
Personnel. Other than Spanish and American Sign Language, the rest of the languages have only one dedicated FIE faculty instructor. 1. American Sign Language instructor turn-over. 2. Insufficient staffing in ASL, Chinese, German, and Russian with one dedicated faculty member per language. 3. Management of the workload requirements that conflict with the expectations and demands at the college and univesity levels. Faculty are expected to produce research at increasing levels in terms of both quantity and quality without administrative support through reduced teaching loads and increased financial and organizational resources. 4. Increased amounts of administrative work being pushed down into the departments. Examles of this include professor produced reports via the Safari system, recording of grades via professor, the removal of registration holds on student accounts, etc. all of which used to be handled by others. Add to this the implementation of assessment and accreditation reporting which is adding so much new work to our schedules that in order to be adequately implemented release time from other duties is imperative. 5. Chinese. A chronic and ongoing problem has been the lack of continuity in Chinese language instruction due to the expedient of staffing the program with exchange professors from Chinese universities. Enrollment. Another of the more perplexing challenges of the past three years faced by the department has been change in enrollment patterns. 6. Class Size. Large Spanish classes, particularly in upper division sections of composition, conversation, and literature degrade the quality of that program. This has caused significant frustration among not only the faculty, but among some of the students as well.
One of the most important functions provided by the department is the role it plays in providing opportunities to develop understanding of and sensitivity to the polyglot and interrelated world in which all people now live. All of the course offerings in the department carry a strong cultural component which informs not only the way students speak their chosen language but, also, how the students understand the activities of the societies in which the language is used. Also, and perhaps as important as any of the academic objectives associated with language study, the students have their understanding of their native tongue and culture informed by the study of another language.
Course offerings provide: (1) an introduction to the nature of the language as a facet of culture; (2) an acquaintance with the literature and culture of the aforementioned languages; and (3) proficiency in speaking, comprehension, [reading] and writing.
As language instructors, we are keenly aware of the constantly changing and shifting nature of living languages. All department faculty avail themselves of various media — both printed and electronic — and travel to countries where our instructed languages are spoken in order to assure that the material we teach is reflected in the respective native cultures and languages of our programs. The study abroad programs, particularly those coordinated by department faculty, are, perhaps, one of the most direct ways we guarantee currency of our curricular offerings. Our students are exposed to the very living forms of the languages they are studying through these exchange activities. Additionally, all of us confer with the representatives of various publishing companies who develop and distribute texts used in our lower levels of instruction. This occurs on a yearly basis.
Our assessment results are announced in department meetings and via email. Copies of assessment data - survey results, institutional research data summaries, etc. - are distributed as email attachements or hard copy.
Discussions at department meetings and email responses.
In the Breadth Requirements section of the General Education Program, Foreign Languages makes a contribution in the Arts and Humanities area under the Philosophies and Cultures of the World rubric. A student can choose from any Foreign Languages offering at the second year level (251, 252, 253) if they choose a language which they studied while in high school. If they choose a language which they have not studied in high school — if it is different from the one used to meet the two-year admission requirement, then a student may use from any Foreign Languages offering at the first year level (151, 152, 153).
While we have no graduate programs here, our Foreign Language 481 (Methods and Materials for the Teaching of Modem Foreign Languages), 482 (Applied Linguistics: Foreign Language Acquisition), 483 (Sociolinguistics), and 492 (Practicum) all provide academic programming that supports the M.A. Teaching English as a Second/Foreign Language programs in the English Department.
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We have not participated in any distance education programs, nor have we utilized the interactive and web-based course technology other than the online supplement to first year Spanish classes, Quia.
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We pride ourselves on the accessibility our students have to their professors and the quality of the advising we offer. Faculty and office staff are available to students in need of advising on a drop in, or scheduled basis.
Course curricula from other universities and institutions are reviewed by faculty in the respective language areas for validity and currency. Then, recommendations are made to the registrar's office as the appropriateness of couses to transfer into our programs.
International Education and World Languages Day. The International Education and World Languages Day activity will bring students from high schools in the central and eastern areas of Washington State to the Ellensburg campus. Initially, our main motivation was to increase the enrollments in our languages by exposing young people who had not yet made decisions as to what they wanted to study at college. Undoubtedly, holding this event here will have an impact on the enrollments in our language classes. We are finding, however, that the exercise of planning the event and coordinating with the different areas of the university is also having immediate benefits in interdepartmental, intercollege, and interdivisional interaction and cooperation.
As a result of in office consultation or classroom interaction, students are counseled and referred by their instructors into appropriate classes and offices for remediation and other forms of help.
There are language specific clubs available to our students for participation. A French club (Un Coin de France), French Table, Japanese Club, Japanese Animation Club (Namakemono), Russian Club, ASL Club, La Tertulia (Spanish Conversation Club), and German Club. While our students are here we provide ample opportunities to participate in extracurricular activities which not only enhance, but also buttress the central aspects of their college experience, both academic and social. Examples of the kind of activities that are planned and led by our faculty are: Language clubs; culture specific cooking activities; field trips to museums, musical events, and other cultural activities both local and international; the production of plays and international film festivals, and an animated film appreciation club. Many times there are students who are not associated with our department in any other way who receive an introduction to our programs through their participation in these activities.
Over the past five years, hundreds of our students have gone on exchange. The list of countries where students have studied includes: Argentina, Austria, Canada (Quebec), Chile, China, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Spain, and Taiwan. Our students are routine participants in the federally funded McNair Scholars Program and SOURCE (Symposium on Undergraduate Research and Creative Expression) which prepare them for participation in graduate study. After leaving our programs many have gone on to graduate programs. (A partial list includes: University of Florida, Fulbright study in Germany, University of Hawaii Manoa, Indiana State University, Monterrey Institute of International Studies, University of Texas, and University of Washington.) Many have gone to work for the governments of other countries (JET - Japan Exchange Teaching - program, Japanese and Mexican Consulates) and to work for foreign public and private educational and business enterprises.
Our professors routinely counsel their students after graduation while they are searching for employment or placement in graduate programs.
We have no recorded comprehensive staffing plan covering all of our language areas and offerings. We are proud of our ability to provide the array of languages that we currently do and wish to maintain and project the present course offerings into the future. We would like to make as many of our positions tenure-track as we possibly can, but understand that there is a critical mass of student demand - among other things like availability of funding and competition for monies from other departments and colleges - that determine the feasibility of pushing for an increase of tenure track lines in the department. As Spanish is the largest program in the department, it, of course, has the largest number of tenure track (TT) lines. In the event that the enrollment demands exceed our TT faculty's ability to cover course offerings, one and sometimes two adjunct faculty are employed to cover the overage. Russian, German, and Japanese also utilize the services of adjunct professors as the need arises. (We are quite lucky in that we have personnel we can call upon to help us out when things get tight.) In the next five years it is safe to say that we are going to see complete turnover in at least three of our languages, viz. French, German, and Russian. Finding people to fill these positions should not present any particular degree of difficulty, however, justifying three separate TT lines in the face of competition from other languages - American Sign Language and perhaps, Spanish or Japanese - to say nothing of competition from other departments and programs, may be a difficult sell. I hope that the excellence of these programs and continuing demand will carry the day.
As language instructors, we are keenly aware of the constantly changing and shifting nature of living languages. All department faculty avail themselves of various media — both printed and electronic — and travel to countries where our instructed languages are spoken in order to assure that the material we teach is reflected in the respective native cultures and languages of our programs. Also, almost all of our faculty have been able to maintain an active schedule of conference attendance and research presentation.
Traditionally we have attempted to balance the three areas of faculty responsibility into: teaching, 80%; research, 10%; and service, 10%. As our full time TT positions have three faculty who are solely responsible for providing all of the academic programming within their respective languages, it has not always been feasible for all to follow this formula. These faculty have the sole advising responsibility for both majors and minors, but student clubs as well.
Data provided by Instructional Research and other appropriate offices.
In addition to materials on the shelves in both reference and general holdings, the library provides media support in the form of a fairly extensive video and DVD collection in both English and other languages. The Media Circulation section of the library has also supplied much of the equipment (video projectors, VCRs, DVD players, etc.) that is necessary to project the audio-visual media forms. The periodicals section has language specific newspapers, magazines or journals in all of our spoken languages.
We are happy to have the library in such close physical proximity to our offices and to have librarians who are affable and accessible. The library, while not able to provide the resources to faculty that large Carnegie 1 or state flagship institutions can, does a very good job as far as we are concerned in supporting our programs and individual research agendas. In particular, we have found the inter-library loan program to be a very handy and convenient way to access materials from all over the state and region. This service is efficient and fast and covers whatever our library cannot provide from itself.
In upper division courses our students are routinely asked to make use of technological resources in order to collect, analyze, and synthesize information used in the completion of course requirements. These resources include web-based periodicals and journals in the courses’ target languages, computerized reference works (dictionaries, databases, etc.) and computer based language learning programs. While there is no technological proficiency standard incorporated into any of our programs, technological resources are steadily moving towards a more central role in how we teach our languages, how our students learn and reinforce the curriculum of our courses, and how we evaluate the progress of our students.
Library Representative: One member of the faculty is chosen to represent the department to the library in matters of materials acquisition and library service. That member works with library personnel and correlates the departmental needs with the available monies dedicated to acquisitions to bring new works into the library.
The department has a large selection of dictionaries and linguistic resources (CDs DVDs, and VHS tapes) for all of the languages taught in our department. They are readily accessible and available to be borrowed by both students and faculty. There is not a day that goes by that these resources are not utilized by the faculty or staff.
Governance within the department is fairly straightforward and simple. The chair is tasked with the day-to-day administrative management of personnel and budgetary oversight of the department’s fiscal resources. Additionally, there are the following standing committees: Curriculum and Scheduling Committee: Members make recommendations to the department as to how changes in curriculum and scheduling can improve the quality of programmatic offerings and service to the university. Personnel Committee: This is a committee of the whole department. There is an elected chair who oversees the process of recommending department faculty for promotion and tenure. Scholarship Committee: This committee consists of three department members who oversee the process whereby scholarship monies are disbursed. There are three scholarships awarded yearly to students working towards majors within the department. Ad hoc committees: Occasionally, emergent issues have resulted in ad hoc committees being formed. Examples are promotion and tenure policy formulation, and planning for department supported activities, i.e., Foreign Languages Day, International Education and World Languages Day.
Faculty have always been involved in the governance of the university. Trying to govern something like an American university, without the collaboration of its core constituency, the faculty, would be extremely difficult, if not impossible. Before collective bargaining, the faculty senate and its officers, "...represented the faculty in all matters." Since the advent of the union and collective bargaining.
As our department grows, we have an increasing difficulty finding adequate space for all of our faculty as well as space for students to work and study. It is also increasingly difficult to schedule classroom space in our building because of the way in which rooms are scheduled. This hinders preparation time as well as accessibility to the department.
There is a computer lab in our building that has decent hours for students and programs in different languages. This is an asset to our students. We would like to have a language lab with a room containing a video camera and audio recording equipment for student presentations and practice.