Putting a slice of Mango to use in the TMC...

Check out our guest blog post on Mango’s website by clicking here! If you are a student, alumni, professor or otherwise a member of the W&L community and are interested in using Mango Languages software to learn a language (or even an assortment of languages) contact us by emailing tmcadmin@wlu.edu in order to receive log-in information.

Our friends at 4Imprint were nice enough to use the 2009-2010 TMC T-shirts as the focus of a promotional article on their website. Check out the blurb on the 4Imprint site by clicking here.

Technical Assistants Tracy and Robbie are now models!

left, Jon Zagrodzky (‘85) right, Gerry Hamilton (‘60)

This past weekend, April 30 through May 2, marked another successful alumni weekend at Washington and Lee. Between good weather and great company, the entire campus was a “buzz” with spring term excitement. The TMC participated in the festivities by hosting an alumni open house from 2:30 – 3:30 on Friday. The open house gave former students and members of the W&L community the opportunity to stop by and see old professors and to also learn about language opportunities post graduation. At the open house, alumni were offered usernames and passwords to Mango Languages , an online program that simulates real-life situations and practical dialogues. The TMC offered subscriptions to the program free of charge. We enjoyed the turn-out and look forward to hearing about everyone’s progress with the Mango languages program!

Due to the volcanic ash eruption from Iceland, Barbara White (Director of Advanced Studies in England) and Jonathan Hope (Associate Dean of Academic Affairs) were unable to attend the annual Board Meeting of Advanced Study in England held this year at Washington and Lee University.  Advanced Studies of England has an annual, working board meeting of all the affiliate schools.  Locations of the meeting generally alternate between Bath, England and one of the affiliate universities in the United States.  However, due to travel impediments caused by the ash, the TMC came to the rescue and allowed those in attendance to communicate live via skype with those stranded in the UK. The purposes of the April 2010 meeting held at Washington and Lee were planning for the future of the organization, success and challenges they have had this year, and what is coming up in the future. The affiliate colleges represented were Boston College, Bucknell University, Christopher Newport, Denison University, Franklin and Marshall, Gettysburg College, Hampton University, Hobart and William Smith, University of Mary Washington, University of Rochester, Saint Michael’s College, Skidmore College, Spelman College, Washington and Lee, Wells College and the College of William and Mary.

Faculty and Students on Accepted Students Day at the Modern Foreign Language Open House in the TMC

Potential Washington and Lee students of Spanish, French, Russian, German, Portuguese, and Italian got a chance to meet with Modern Foreign Languages faculty and look around the Tucker Multimedia Center on Wednesday, April 27.

Prof. Prager conducting the workshop

The 2006 Soccer World Cup was the key event that lifted the German postwar taboo on displays of national pride. This presentation described a teaching unit that explores this watershed event and introduces intermediate-level students to the critical role of soccer in German culture, both as a popular pastime and as a vehicle for the expression of national pride and identity.

The segment employs a Blended Learning approach combining textual, audio and visual material, including film footage of the 2006 national team’s climb to 3rd place, and recordings of two hit songs (by Xavier Naidoo) that conflated the hopes for the team and for “Das Volk” as a whole – in a unified Germany. Students improve their language skills as they learn the vocabulary of soccer; read newspaper reports about the 2006 World Cup and the outbreak of national pride; use the internet to monitor and report on the current German team, and analyze song lyrics to identify how the language and symbols of religion, sport, and nation are often interchangeable. Finally, they discuss and write about the intersection between sports and nationalism in Germany and at home.

TMC welcomed International Students and Scholars at Washington and Lee University on Sunday, March 7, 2010 for a Tax Workshop Session sponsored by Student Association for International Learning (SAIL). The session was aimed at assisting students in completing the required tax forms well before the legal deadline. Students were learning to use CINTAX, a web based tax preparation software, and SAIL members helped guide the students through the program.

This is the second year SAIL is hosting the tax workshop session. SAIL will be hosting another similar session in late March.

If you would like to watch the workshop on DVD, feel free to ask the TMC staff for a copy.

A short summary of what was discussed:

The four-year curriculum of most language-literature departments is not a seamless continuum of linguistic, cultural, or intellectual development. One famous counterexample is that of the German Department at Georgetown, which has revised its curriculum to emphasize both the development of language and the development of literary and cultural awareness throughout all four years. Now the MLA Report on ”Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World” has strongly urged that all language-literature departments take the goal of a unified curriculum seriously. However, neither the Georgetown initiative nor the MLA Report recognizes the essential role of technology in doing so.

In this workshop, Dr. Nina Garrett sketched out some of the ways in which she sees technology as the catalyst – not just as contributing to but as fundamental to the reformation of postsecondary language learning. However, she wants to go a great deal further than the MLA Report or Georgetown: she wants to assert the need to broaden the vision of a unified curriculum for foreign language study to include virtually every discipline in the university. Anecdotal evidence suggests that fewer students are now interested in the traditional literature major while many more are now seriously interested in attaining an advanced level of linguistic and cultural competence in the context of a major in another discipline, or in an interdisciplinary major. Today’s language education absolutely has to aim for making today’s students internationally competent leaders in every field: economics majors will be better and more successful economists if they can handle their profession in another language, and the same is true for environmental engineers, historians, and political scientists — and not only in the “major” languages (in both senses) but in a whole range of less commonly taught languages. The study of how another language represents all domains of knowledge, and how it structures their places in another society – surely this is the study of “culture”! The idea of creating curricula to implement this broader vision may sound like – but is not – an impossibly ambitious vision; we already have the technology that makes it possible.