Starting in 1986, the Virginia Department of Education has sponsored Governor's Foreign Language Academies, summer residential programs for Virginia's most motivated and talented foreign language students. As of 2006, approximately 6,600 students have completed one of the six programs, housed at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond: immersion programs in French, German, and Spanish, an intensive Latin program, and partial-immersion programs in Russian and Japanese. Virginia Commonwealth University offers concurrent STARTALK summer programs in Chinese and Arabic.
The six governor's academies maintain their individuality and offer activities to expand global awareness, multi-cultural understanding, and international education. The three immersion academies provide an intensive experience and unique challenge for students who have excelled in language study to continue their study of that language in a total immersion environment, which is generally unavailable in the regular school environment. The Latin Academy provides an intensive experience for students who have excelled in the study of Latin to continue their study in a milieu unavailable in the regular school environment and introduces the students to classical Greek. The partial-immersion programs in Japanese and Russian, as well as the STARTALK programs in Chinese and Arabic, provide an opportunity for interested students to be introduced to these cultures and languages, which are not widely taught across the Commonwealth. Beginning with the summer of 2011, the Commonwealth of Virginia ceded sponsorship of the Russian Academy to Virginia Commonwealth University.
The success of the pilot Virginia's Governor's Foreign Language Academies is influencing other states into starting similar programs to encourage excellence in foreign languages.
Activities
Initially, each academy was held at a separate college or university in Virginia; however, from 2004 until 2010, all academies were held at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond Virginia. In 2011, once again, the academies dispersed throughout the commonwealth. In 2012, The Japanese and Latin Academies will be hosted by Randolph-Macon College, in Ashland Virginia. French, Spanish, and German Academies will occur at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. Highlights of the programs include day trips, such as to Washington, D.C. to see various museums, academic, and/or cultural institutions that correspond to the respective foreign languages, outings to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, or the archaeological sites at Jamestown.
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies is a private research university based in Seoul, Republic of Korea. The university was founded in 1954 to promote foreign language education in post-war Korea. The university is located in Seoul and Yongin. The university has 60 departments and offers 53 different language courses. The name of the university is derived from the romanization of the Korean word Hankuk which means Korea. The university is considered one of the best private higher education institutions in South Korea, especially on foreign language and social science. Most recently, HUFS won 3rd place in 2020 QS World University Rankings on the subject of Linguistics, 4th on English Language and Literature, 4th on Modern languages and 6th on Arts and Humanities in Korea. It has a graduate school of interpretation and translation.
Language immersion, or simply immersion, is a technique used in bilingual language education in which two languages are used for instruction in a variety of topics, including math, science, or social studies. The languages used for instruction are referred to as the L1 and the L2 for each student, with L1 being the student's native language and L2 being the second language to be acquired through immersion programs and techniques. There are different types of language immersion that depend on the age of the students, the classtime spent in L2, the subjects that are taught, and the level of participation by the speakers of L1.
English villages are language education institutions which aim to create a language immersion environment for students of English in their own country.
A language school is a school where one studies a foreign language. Classes at a language school are usually geared towards, for example, communicative competence in a foreign language. Language learning in such schools typically supplements formal education or existing knowledge of a foreign language.
French immersion is a form of bilingual education in which students, who do not speak French as first language will receive instruction in French. In most French-immersion schools, students will learn to speak French and learn most subjects such as history, music, geography, math, art, physical education and science in French. Most school boards in Ontario offer French Immersion starting in grade one and others start as early as senior kindergarten. With the TDSB French immersion is offered starting in senior kindergarten. At the primary level, students will receive instructions in French at a hundred percent of their instructional day. English instruction is introduced in grade 4, and the minutes of English instruction will increase throughout their educational career with up to fifty percent of English/French instruction daily.
Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) is a consortium of 14 private liberal arts colleges, primarily in the Midwestern United States. The 14 colleges are located in five states. The ACM was established in 1958 and is headquartered in Chicago. The consortium's current president is Sonya Malunda.
The Governor's Schools are a collection of regional magnet high schools and summer programs in the Commonwealth of Virginia intended for gifted students.
King's Academy is an independent, co-educational boarding and day school for students in grades 7 through 12 in Madaba-Manja, Jordan. It is named in honor of King Abdullah II of Jordan and seeks to fulfill His Majesty's vision of producing "a new generation of enlightened and creative minds." King Abdullah attended high school at Deerfield Academy in the United States as there was no school of comparable standing in Jordan when he was a boy, but his son Crown Prince Hussein enrolled in the new school's second incoming class (2008). The new school's first headmaster, Dr. Eric Widmer, is a past headmaster of Deerfield.
The Joseph H. Lauder Institute of Management & International Studies offers a joint degree program at the University of Pennsylvania, combining an MA in International Studies from the School of Arts & Sciences with an MBA from The Wharton School or JD from the Law School. Students pursue one of six Programs of Concentration focused on five regional areas or the Global Program. Within the regional Programs of Concentration, students must attain superior language proficiency based upon an oral proficiency interview certified by Language Testing International in either Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, or Spanish.
The Croft Institute for International Studies offers a B.A. degree in international studies in conjunction with the University of Mississippi's college of Liberal Arts. The degree combines the study of global economics, history, politics and social relations with the study of languages and cultures in a rigorous multidisciplinary curriculum.
Practices in language education vary significantly by region. Firstly, the languages being learned differ; in the United States, Spanish is the most popular language to be learned, whereas the most popular languages to be learned in Australia are Italian and Mandarin Chinese. Also, teaching methods tend to differ by region. Language immersion is popular in some European countries, but is not used very much in the United States.
The Middlebury-Monterey Language Academy (MMLA) is a summer language immersion program for pre-college students in 8th-12th grades. Founded in 2008 by Middlebury College and its graduate school, the Monterey Institute of International Studies, the Language Academy convenes on two college campuses in the United States and at three abroad locations. Languages taught at MMLA include Arabic, French, German, Chinese and Spanish.
The Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program is a United States Department of State cultural and educational exchange program which offers approximately 600 students from the United States the opportunity to participate in an intensive language study abroad. This nationally competitive program funds students who study one of the 15 critical need foreign languages, and is part of the National Security Language Initiative. The 15 critical languages include Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Chinese, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Swahili, Turkish and Urdu. With an acceptance rate of less than 10%, the Critical Language Scholarship is one of the most competitive scholarships in the U.S. and the most prestigious language program for U.S. citizens.
The BYU College of Humanities was formed in 1965 by the division of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences into the College of Humanities and the College of Social Sciences. The College of Social Sciences was later merged into the College of Family, Home and Social Sciences although some of its programs were made part of the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies.
The Middlebury Language Schools are language schools administered by Middlebury College. The programs comprise undergraduate and graduate instruction in 11 languages during six-, seven-, or eight-week summer sessions. The Schools enroll approximately 1,500 students every summer. The pedagogical approach of the programs relies on immersion-based instruction and acquisition. All students in the Language Schools must sign and abide by Middlebury College's "Language Pledge", a pledge to use their target language exclusively during the duration of their time at the School.
E. E. Waddell Language Academy, formerly known as Smith Academy of International Languages, is a public K-8 magnet school in Charlotte, North Carolina, United States. It is part of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School (CMS) District.
The Institute of Modern Languages, also known as IML-UQ, is a language and translation institute located within the St Lucia campus of the University of Queensland (UQ) in Brisbane, Australia. Today IML-UQ enrolls 3000 plus students annually in all of its language programs.
Polis – The Jerusalem Institute of Languages and Humanities is a non-profit academic institution based in Jerusalem, Israel. It was founded in 2011 by an international group of scholars who aimed at a renewal of the humanities through the study of Western and Eastern cultural sources. Sharing the conviction that languages are the key to our cultural and spiritual heritage, these scholars sensed a need for change in the way ancient languages have been taught since the 19th century. With this in mind, they developed a teaching method intended to allow true language acquisition.
Seongnam Foreign Language School, commonly referred to as SNFL is a national school located in Seongnam, South Korea. SNFL offers regular high school course with four different second language programs. School year starts in March, starts its second semester in September, and ends the school year in February. The Lowest educational expense among foreign language high schools
STARTALK is a language education program at the University of Maryland, created under the National Security Language Initiative, a federal program which seeks to expand the teaching of strategically important languages in the United States. Languages taught under the STARTALK program include Arabic, Chinese, Dari, Hindi, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Swahili, Turkish, and Urdu. STARTALK is a project of the National Foreign Language Center of the University of Maryland, located in Riverdale, Maryland.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
