|
March 2008 Issue |
|
From
the Back of an Envelope to National Leader
by Dara McCoy
 s it nears the three-decade mark,
the language house program at Austin College may be on the verge of
hitting its prime. It has had a fair share of growing pains, including
a string of relocations from houses the College acquired to residence
halls and even a stint at the local Best Western, that kept language
house students and faculty in French, Spanish, and German moving more
than a tourist on a trip across Europe.
The program has matured along the
way, gaining a new language (Japanese) and building a dedicated
language house facility in 1998, integrating the use of new
technologies, and becoming a nationally recognized leader by hosting
the first national language house conference in fall 2007. Throughout
this growth and development, the purpose has remained the same. Austin
College’s language house program provides a focused, immersive
environment in students’ target languages that allows them to improve
their skills and knowledge every day without the pressure of a
classroom or living in a foreign country.
|
|
|
Decoding Languages
In fall 1980, Austin College’s
first language house term commenced with German. At the time, the
language house was held in Thompson House, a Victorian-style home on
the corner of Grand Avenue and Brockett Street. Each term the language
house rotated between German, French, and Spanish.
Art, books, and other items from
the target language and culture were moved in and out of the house.
“The language house allows students to make the target language come
alive in their daily experiences, in their cooking, cleaning,
game-playing, watching cheesy movies or strangely comic game shows,
dancing to another culture’s music, and listening to other cultures’
news, while still residing on the Austin College campus,” said
Patrick Duffey, professor of Spanish and chair of the Department
of Modern and Classical Languages.
To complete the environment, a
native speaker of each language lives in the house, and the target
language must be spoken in all common areas. Ed Stemple ’83
remembers how his experience in the French House in spring 1981 helped
prepare him for a junior year abroad at Université Paul Valéry in
Montpellier, France.
“The stay there helped me cross
the most important threshold in foreign language development, which is
thinking in the new language,” Stemple said. “From that point on,
French no longer seemed to be code for English, but became a
distinctly different way of thinking and communicating. That’s a very
exciting and eye-opening moment, which is hard to achieve without the
kind of immersion that a language house or study abroad program
offers.”
Stemple’s experience is the
perfect example of what Austin College’s language house program
attempts to do for its student occupants, who often are preparing for
a study abroad term or international Jan Term trip. According to
departmental surveys of Austin College study abroad students, more
than 80 percent indicate that living in the language house was the
most important preparation for their study abroad experience, Duffey
said.
|
|
 |
Finding a Home
A turning point in facilities for
the language house came with some bad news in 1994. The language house
program, then housed in Coffin Hall, was notified the aging residence
hall would be demolished to make room for the new Robert J. and Mary
Wright Campus Center, said Truett Cates, professor of German.
The following year, Cates spent part of his sabbatical visiting
language house facilities at Pomona College and Stanford University.
Using Cates’ research and ideas
from departmental planning meetings, the language faculty proposed
building a language house. “I had a drawing I’d made on the back of an
envelope on the plane back from California,” Cates said. “I scratched
it up on the board in the department meeting, and we went from there.”
When President Oscar Page visited
the family of George Jordan, Sr., a 1915 Austin College graduate,
hoping to raise funds for the new campus center, he succeeded in
raising money, but not for the center. “The president actually had a
list of projects he carried with him when raising money,” Cates said.
“He showed the Jordans a list of possible projects, and they said tell
us more about the language house.” The language house went from
proposal to an active project with gifts from Edwin B. and Louis
Jordan of Dallas and Julia and George R. Jordan of Houston.
At the Jordan Family Language
House dedication in October 1998, George Jordan, Jr., summarized the
significant contributions by relating that his father’s Austin College
education helped him through a lifetime that witnessed the Great
Depression, World War II, and the beginnings of radio and television.
“As the world gets smaller, the need to understand foreign people and
foreign cultures grows more important, not less,” he said. “Those who
have the benefit of a classic education, those who understand where
they came from, have a much better chance of knowing where they’re
going.”
The new facility provided housing
for 48 students, room to add Japanese to the program, and the ability
to separate German, French, Spanish, and Japanese into four
independent “houses” within the building. In 2007, Chinese was added
to the Austin College curriculum and will be included in the language
house in fall 2008. “Austin College as an institution has given such
strong support for many years to the language house program,” Duffey
said. “We’re one of only two colleges in the country with a facility
designed specifically to be a language house.”
|
| |
Leading the Pack
Having the foresight to build a
dedicated language house almost a decade ago put Austin College’s
language house program squarely at the head of the pack. That’s why
Duffey became a little perturbed when he read a 2005 Chronicle of
Higher Education article about the rising popularity of language
houses and Austin College was not listed among the article’s examples,
he said. At the next National Institute for Technology in Liberal
Education (NITLE) conference he attended, Duffey approached NITLE with
the idea of holding a language house-specific conference for the 34 to
35 liberal arts colleges with language house programs, he said.
 NITLE was interested, and Austin
College joined representatives from Furman, St. Olaf, Colorado
College, Pomona, and Oberlin to form a planning committee for the
conference. In September 2007, Austin College was the host site for
the first national language house conference, “Technology and the
Language House Curriculum.” Faculty from 19 liberal arts colleges
attended the NITLE-funded conference that featured sessions on
language house configuration, perspectives of students and language
house residents, language house and study abroad, and many topics
under the umbrella of technology and its use in the language house and
language teaching.
|
|
Thomas Rhodes
|
Speaking the Language
There’s no denying that Austin College’s language
house program is more immersive than a typical textbook and classroom
course. With a native speaker living in their midst, the relaxed
atmosphere of home, and numerous technological tools providing a
unique learning experience, language house alumni generally sing its
praises.
Thomas Rhodes ’08 spent
two and a half terms in the German house before studying abroad in
Vienna, Austria. “You are surrounded by people who are struggling with
the same issues as yourself, which makes you less fearful to actually
speak and say something incorrectly,” Rhodes said. “This prepares you
before a baptism by fire when you decide to study abroad.”
Brenna Shay ’06 lived
in the language house in 2004-2005 and now lives in the Kumamoto
Prefecture in Japan. “Hearing Chika, our native speaker, speak
Japanese was a constant reminder of how much I didn’t know,” Shay
said. “Studying a language is all well and good, but it’s the drive to
communicate that generates a passion for learning. For me, Jordan and
its residents provided that motivation.”
Motivation also is provided by the fact that the
language house is actually an academic course at Austin College.
Students are required to do certain assignments, attend meetings, and
participate in their weekly “language table” at lunch in the campus
dining hall. “There’s a syllabus, and there’s a grade,” Duffey said.
“That’s vital because the students take the language house seriously.”
All these components have placed Austin College in a
leadership role among peer institutions that want to improve the
quality of language house programs. After the NITLE conference,
several institutions expressed interest in developing a language house
association, Duffey said. “Austin College is right at the cutting edge
of doing this and is a real leader in language house programs.”
|
|
Experiment
with emerging technologies
Explore
new ways of teaching
Expand
your professional expertise |
|
Boot Camp for Techies
Because of the NITLE
conference’s focus on technology, Austin College language faculty
decided to beef up their technology skills by participating in
Pomona College’s 2007 Language Technology Boot Camp. The boot camp
was designed to train language house residents, who are
native-speaking students living in the language house and
assisting students in learning the language.
Austin College sent Lena
Krian, German language resident from Mainz, Germany, to
Pomona. The Spanish, French, and Japanese residents, as well as
several faculty members, participated through teleconference. Most
of Austin College’s language residents are placed through the
Foreign Language Teaching Assistant Program of the Institute of
International Education, a type of student exchange program.
The technology boot camp
helped Austin College language residents and faculty improve
technology skills that could assist in language learning. Sessions
on Web 2.0 features like Chinswing and Gabcast; content production
through Photo Story, Flickr, and Audacity; and well-known Internet
sources like blogs and YouTube were discussed in context of
teaching a foreign language.
For instance, Lena Krian
helped three students create a comic strip in German. Spanish
language resident Lucía Gascue said Spanish students are
assigned to post on the Spanish blog at least once a term (www.lamargarita07.blogspot.com).
“It makes students more active learners because students are more
adept at using technology and actually producing projects,” Duffey
said. “The language technology centers or their own computers can
be more like studios where they produce things rather than
passively absorbing. They’re using the target language in whatever
they’re producing.” |
|
|
March 2008
Feedback?
|
High School Teachers Enjoy Benefits of Jordan
Family Language House
 Austin
College students are not the only ones benefiting from the immersion
experience offered by the Jordan Family Language House. Nearly 40
Texas high school foreign language teachers of French, German, Latin,
and Spanish take part in Austin College’s annual weeklong Summer
Foreign Language Institute. The Jordan Family Language House provides
housing and workshop space for the program.
The institute, led by Austin
College faculty members with the assistance of language residents from
Europe and Latin America, allows the high school educators to refresh
language skills and to develop new cultural and technology resources
for their students. The Austin College faculty provides workshops on
culture, literature, and technology uses in the curriculum. Films,
musical and dance performances, and other activities supplement the
workshops. Participants speak their target language at all times
during the institute.
A grant from the Sid W. Richardson
Foundation provided all fees for participants. For information on
future institutes, contact
Bernice Melvin,
dean of Humanities, or watch for updates on the
Classical and Modern Languages
Department Web site. 
 Printer friendly version
|
 pdf version |
Email to a friend |
|
|
