Global vision:
New language center supports internationalization efforts
In 2010–11, the University of Denver’s new Center for World Languages and Cultures emerged as a key resource in the institution’s internationalization efforts.
“We have a broad and vital mandate,” Director Kathy Mahnke said, noting that the center aims to further linguistic and cultural understanding and to prepare students for global citizenship and active involvement with local, national and world communities. “No matter what their major, no matter what their career, today’s graduates are citizens of the world who will most certainly interact with institutions and individuals from other cultures in the course of their life’s work. It is important for us to prepare our graduates to understand both the languages they will come into contact with and the different cultures reflected in those languages.” The center supports DU’s internationalization goals in a number of essential ways. It helps students participating in international education programs, such as Cherrington Global Scholars, hone their language skills for advanced study in their host country. Just as important, it provides a resource for DU’s research community, including students and faculty embarking on projects abroad. It also complements programming at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, where scholars engaging in comparative work may have to conduct research in several languages. Since opening in 2010, the center has launched free, drop-in tutoring for eight languages—French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Chinese and Hebrew. It has plans to add a ninth, Arabic, in the near future. The center also sponsored an evening event during which students studying Hebrew, Israeli culture and Israel/Arab dynamics from the Israeli perspective mingled with students studying Arabic and the Israeli-Arab relationship from the Arab point of view. In June 2011, the center opened a Summer Language Institute to provide intensive language study for students, faculty, staff and the wider Denver community. In addition to numerous extracurricular activities, the institute offers a Living Lab, a unique opportunity that pairs language students with native speakers of the target language. Courses in the institute provide one quarter’s worth of language study in just three weeks. “The teaching methods used by the faculty in the Summer Language Institute reflect current research on how languages are learned,” Mahnke said. “They require a significant commitment from students and faculty, and a significant commitment from the center as well. Though we’re basing our institute on successful programs elsewhere, we’re adding our own DU touches; we’re confident that our program will become a model for future language teaching initiatives here at DU as well as elsewhere.”