Welcome to the Modern Languages Department

The Department of Modern Languages offers students of every discipline a wide range of opportunities. Come experience both the intellectual and personal enrichment that comes with learning new languages, and encountering the diverse cultures that they represent. Our department features some of the most skilled teaching faculty on campus, and much of the department's research is aimed at improving language instruction.

Department News:

International Film Festival 2008:
'Culture and Conflict'
FREE to all members of the Pittsburgh Community
Featuring:

Friday, March 21: Nobody Knows 6pm (Japanese)
Wednesday, March 26: The Edukators 7pm (German)
Thursday, March 27: Duck Season 7pm (Spanish)
Thursday, April 3: The Golden Door 7pm (Italian)
Friday, April 4: C.R.A.Z.Y. 6pm (French)
Wednesday, April 9: Saving Face 7pm (Chinese)
Wednesday, April 16: The Italian 7pm (Russian)

Films will be shown in McConomy Auditorium, Carnegie Mellon, University Center

For Details and directions visit: www.andrew.cmu.edu/org/filmfestival.


Professor Keiko Koda and co-authors B. Adair-Hauk, E.W. Glisan, E. Swender, and P. Sandrock have received the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Lanugages (NECTFL) Stephen A. Freeman Award for their article in the Fall 2006 issue of Foreign Language Annals (Vol. 39, No. 3): ³The Integrated Performance Assessment (IPA): Connecting Assessment to Instrtuction and Learning². The award recognizes the best published article on language teaching techniques appearing during the past year.

French Online, the Open Learning Initiative course also supported by the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center, was awarded the 2007 Access to Language Education award. This award is given annually by the Esperantic Society and CALICO (Computer-Assisted Language Instruction Consortium) to the best publicly available website for language instruction. Named in the award are project director and co-author Christopher Jones, co-authors Sophie Queuniet and Bonnie Youngs, and technical lead Marc Siskin. The public version of this highly interactive, video-based course for beginning students of French can be reached through the Open Learning Initiative portal at www.cmu.edu/oli.

Mariana Achugar, Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies and Second Language Acquisition, and Felipe Gomez, Lecturer in Hispanic studies were named 2007 Wimmer Faculty Fellows by the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence. Funded by grant from the Wimmer Family Foundation, they participated in a summer workshop focused on creating, assessing, and responding to students' writing tasks.

Stephen Brockmann, Professor in German, has been awarded the 2007 DAAD Prize. Every year, the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (AICGS) awards the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies in recognition of exceptional work in one of the Institute's three major areas of research: Policy Studies, Economics, and Culture and Politics. The central aim of this prize is to foster a new generation of American scholarship on Germany and encourage innovative contributions to the interdisciplinary scope of German Studies.

Department Alumni News:
Through the extremely generous support of Alumna, Patricia Askwith Kenner, who established the Endowed Fund for International Studies, our department is able to enhance international experiences for both undergraduate and graduate students. The fund enables us to provide things such as, extracurricular activities, study abroad scholarships, publication of the Polyglot, the multilingual newsletter which is written and produced our undergraduate students, among many others.