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Planning continues for the 2000 ADFL Summer Seminars West and East, to be hosted by David Foster and the Department of Languages and Literatures at Arizona State University, Tempe, from 1 to 4 June and by Richard Zipser and the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Delaware from 29 June to 2 July. Under the rubric Looking to the Future, this year's seminars will focus on the role languages might play in the next century in an educational framework that is undergoing extensive transformation. The seminars will address how language departments can capitalize on their present and future opportunities and responsibilities in the light of the ongoing reorganization of communication; institutional, national, and disciplinary borders; and knowledge.
Plenary sessions will explore questions such as
The ADFL Executive Committee suggests that chairs need to engage these questions in a national context. ADFL seminars have for thirty years been the department leaders' antidote to isolation, in the face of old issues that won't go away and new issues emerging on the horizon.
The 2000 seminars will again feature preseminar workshops for new and recently appointed chairs. Workshops are led by experienced administrators who direct discussions and activities focusing on such areas as advocacy, budgeting, staffing, faculty development, time management, and curriculum issues. The $250 seminar registration fee includes the preseminar workshop, most seminar meals, coffee breaks, and traditional nightcaps, but not housing. Details about speakers, registration cutoff dates and procedures, housing, meals, and excursions will be announced on the ADFL Web site (www.adfl.org) and in a brochure mailed to all language department chairs in early spring. For further information, please write or call Elizabeth Welles, Director, or David Goldberg, Associate Director, ADFL, 10 Astor Place, New York, NY 10003-6981 (212 614-6323; adfl@mla.org).
The fifth ADFL Award for Distinguished Service in the Profession will be presented to Claire Kramsch, Professor of German and Foreign Language Acquisition at the University of California, Berkeley. The award honors eminent scholar-teachers for exceptional contributions to the field of foreign languages and literatures at the postsecondary level.
Claire Kramsch, an internationally acclaimed leader in the field of foreign language teaching and learning, has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1989 and has served as director of the Berkeley Foreign Language Center since 1994. She is the North American editor for Applied Linguistics and on the editorial boards of TESOL Quarterly, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Modern Language Journal, AAUSC Yearbook, and Die Unterrichtspraxis. Her professional engagement demonstrates the breadth of her vision of language teaching: she has held leadership positions with the American Association of Applied Linguistics, the American Association of University Supervisors and Coordinators, the American Council on Education, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, the International Association of Applied Linguistics, the Modern Language Association, the National Foreign Language Center, the Northeast Conference, and Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages. She has been much in demand as an external reviewer for numerous colleges and universities, and she appears tireless in speaking to foreign language teachers around the world about their work. Since 1994 she has delivered invited lectures in South Korea, Japan, the Netherlands, Austria, France, Germany, Canada, Turkey, Bulgaria, Hong Kong, Great Britain, Denmark, Finland, Singapore, Italy, Australia, Israel, and Ireland.
Through her research, lectures, and publications on second language acquisition and applied linguistics, discourse analysis, and social and cultural theory in their applications to language teaching and learning, Kramsch demonstrates that foreign language teaching and learning belong at the heart of undergraduate general education. In the words of one her nominators for the ADFL award:
From a teleconference with EFL teachers in Istanbul, a Goethe Institute seminar for high school teachers on intercultural teaching in Alsace, a lecture to foreign language teachers in Singapore, a meeting of the MLA Executive Council, to a TA's intermediate German class, everything seems to coalesce into a vision of enhancing foreign language education. And--since it is her greatest service to the field--what is that vision? It is not a method that grandiosely trumpets her name. It is not a numbered, detailed list of things for teachers and students to do. It is not a postmodern theory. Her vision is the challenge to every foreign language teacher to see how he or she, in his or her own appropriately personal manner, can raise the discourse of teaching and learning in the foreign language classroom: to integrate language acquisition, cross-cultural thinking, and critical reflection so that ultimately fruitless dichotomies like skill and content, acquisition and learning, language and literature, and so forth, are meaningless.
The profession has often honored Kramsch. She is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from the Middlebury School of Languages (1998), the Goethe Medal from the Goethe Institute (1998), the MLA Kenneth Mildenberger Prize for her work Context and Culture in Language Teaching (1994), honorary lifetime membership in the AATG (1994), the Nelson Brooks Award for best research on the teaching of culture (1988), the Educational Press Association's Distinguished Achievement Award for the best learned article (1988), the AATG's award for best article in Die Unterrichtspraxis (1981), and the Northeast Conference Stephen A. Freeman Award for the best published article on teaching techniques (1981).
Colleagues from her institutional base speak of Kramsch as having "breathed new life into language teaching" in California, through opening meetings of the Berkeley Foreign Language Center to the University of California extension, local colleges, and secondary schools and initiating a conversation involving faculty members and administrators from the eight University of California campuses that provide language instruction to discuss a university-wide consortium. A colleague in the field of German studies writes that Kramsch "radically altered our notion that the teaching of languages was prior to the teaching of literature and culture." Another nominator writes, "Context and Culture in Language Teaching [is] a work that has played an enormous role in bringing the teaching of culture to the forefront of our profession's collective consciousness. Claire is a true visionary."
Beyond Kramsch's intellectual vision and professional tirelessness, it is the quality of personal support and service to individual colleagues and students that stands out among the traits enumerated in letters nominating her for the ADFL award. Colleagues write warmly of Kramsch's "infectious spirit and great good will," of her "profound impact" on their thinking and teaching, of "Claire, always ready to talk shop," of "generous critiques," and "extraordinarily constructive suggestions," of graduate students "who idolize her" and junior colleagues who rely on her honesty, of a "daunting standard" and an "overwhelming consensus that we are in the presence of someone extraordinary." Writes one nominator, "Claire's influence is not only professional but profoundly personal. One might summarize her extraordinary devotion to her colleagues with the motto 'Claire cares.'"
ADFL welcomes nominations for this award. Criteria specify that the award is given for outstanding service to the profession in the larger community, not fame from publication. Anyone wishing to nominate a candidate should write a letter of no more than two typed pages, gather three supporting letters, and forward these materials, together with the nominee's vita, to Elizabeth Welles, Director, ADFL, 10 Astor Place, New York, NY 10003-6981 (adfl@mla.org). The ADFL Executive Committee acts on nominations at its spring meetings and confers the award only in years when a particularly outstanding candidate is nominated.
The MLA is still accepting completed surveys from foreign language and literature departments for the Mellon Foundation-supported study "Models of Good Practice: A Study of Innovative Programs in United States Colleges and Universities, 1994-1999." The project's first phase will comprise a study of surveys solicited from all 2,707 language departments in the United States, seeking information about programmatic, administrative, and curricular developments in an attempt to identify innovations that have improved outcomes for language learners. The results of this study will provide the field an overview of practices that build linguistic and cultural competence in students, attract enrollments, and maintain a strong place for language programs on campus. We urge department chairs to send in their completed surveys: the usefulness of the study will depend on the broadest possible participation. For more information, or additional copies of the survey, please write adfl@mla.org, or call Elizabeth Welles or David Goldberg at 212 614-6323.
© 2000 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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