Emily Heidrich Uebel - Böcker

This edited volume highlights how institutions, programs, and less commonly taught language (LCTL) instructors can collaborate and think across institutional boundaries, bringing together voices representing different approaches to LCTL sharing to highlight affordances and challenges across institutions in this collection of essays. Sharing Less Commonly Taught Languages in Higher Education showcases how innovation and reform can make LCTL programs and courses more attractive to students whose interests and needs might be overlooked in traditional language programs. The volume focuses on how institutions, programs, and LCTL instructors can work together, collaborating and thinking across institutional boundaries to explore innovative solutions for offering a wider range of languages and levels.With challenges including instructor isolation, difficulty in offering advanced courses or sustaining course sequences, and minimal availability of pedagogical materials compared to commonly taught languages to overcome, this collection is a vital resource for language educators and language program administrators.The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Licence (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This edited volume highlights how institutions, programs, and less commonly taught language (LCTL) instructors can collaborate and think across institutional boundaries, bringing together voices representing different approaches to LCTL sharing to highlight affordances and challenges across institutions in this collection of essays. Sharing Less Commonly Taught Languages in Higher Education showcases how innovation and reform can make LCTL programs and courses more attractive to students whose interests and needs might be overlooked in traditional language programs. The volume focuses on how institutions, programs, and LCTL instructors can work together, collaborating and thinking across institutional boundaries to explore innovative solutions for offering a wider range of languages and levels.With challenges including instructor isolation, difficulty in offering advanced courses or sustaining course sequences, and minimal availability of pedagogical materials compared to commonly taught languages to overcome, this collection is a vital resource for language educators and language program administrators.The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Licence (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

The perception of a permanent enrollment crisis in US postsecondary foreign language education has shaped our profession’s image for an entire generation of educators. Over the past 30 years, this crisis rarely invited self-examination or inspired creativity. Instead, it was routinely attributed to external factors: shrinking budgets, unsympathetic administrators, disengaged students. This volume is refreshingly optimistic: After providing a nuanced picture of the complex enrollment situation and focusing on perceptions of language education among undergraduate students, the volume features an inspiring panorama of successful models that revitalized language programs at a wide range of institutions. The diversity of approaches to post-secondary language education in the United States featured in this volume highlights that there are no simple “one size fits all” solutions. To be transformational, initiatives need to be intimately calibrated to the evolving needs and desires of our institutions’ most important stakeholder: the student. Per Urlaub, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA, USA