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The study of foreign languages and literature provides valuable experience and a potential edge for future career development for our students. Scientists and engineers function in a global market: they rely on primary sources published in other languages, attend international consortia, and often find themselves interacting across national, cultural, and linguistic borders. Government and industry often give preference to job applicants who are proficient in a foreign language. MIT students are encouraged to work and study abroad in conjunction with university, private, and public organizations. The faculty of the FL&L Section, the language coordinators, and the Undergraduate Academic Administrator can provide assistance in choosing an appropriate program and granting transfer credit from overseas or domestic programs. MIT provides a unique perspective on foreign languages because of the opportunities available to integrate the study of natural languages with the latest technological advances in multimedia and interactive learning. FL&L-affiliated faculty are exploring and implementing methods in which multimedia technology can be used to make learning a foreign language a more authentic experience.

This site, aimed at Spanish language learners, educators, and researchers, provides an online corpus of videos of second language and heritage language learners of Spanish during oral interviews covering a variety of topics.  These particular videos are derived from the Spanish Proficiency Training & Learner Corpus, a website that comprises over 320 videos of Spanish language learners.  The present website provides supplemental activities to help viewers investigate learners' language and proficiency levels in connection with Lingüística aplicada:  adquisición del español como segunda lengua (Koike & Klee, 2003), a textbook on Spanish applied linguistics.

The Teaching Foreign Languages workshop will help K-12 foreign language teachers improve their practice by making connections between the National Standards for Foreign Language Learning and current research in foreign language education. Workshop components include eight lively half-hour video programs with leading researchers and practicing teachers discussing how the standards play out in day-to-day classroom situations, a workshop guide available online and in print, and interactive activities on the Web.

Steven Pinker - Psychologist, Cognitive Scientist, and Linguist at Harvard University How did humans acquire language? In this lecture, best-selling author Steven Pinker introduces you to linguistics, the evolution of spoken language, and the debate over the existence of an innate universal grammar. He also explores why language is such a fundamental part of social relationships, human biology, and human evolution. Finally, Pinker touches on the wide variety of applications for linguistics, from improving how we teach reading and writing to how we interpret law, politics, and literature.

The art of storytelling is still a crucial component in many school library programs. By tapping intothis expansive tradition and integrating web 2.0 digital story technologies, librarians are able tocollaborate with English as a Second Language Teachers in order to design student-centered digitalstory projects. This transformative use of technology within the framework of social constructionismmotivates language students to focus on the contextual use of language rather than basic vocabularydevelopment. The case for digital storytelling is built on an intersection of secondary languageacquisition theory, language learning pedagogical understandings and instructional strategies

Do you ever feel stuck in a rut while planning your language classes? Perhaps you spend a lot of time lecturing at the white board, use the same activities with different vocabulary for every unit, or rely on teaching students grammar because that's how you were taught. No matter your "go to" activity, we are all much more engaging when we vary our activities and make them relatable

World Language Assessment: Get in the Mode! supports and empowers world language educators to improve student proficiency through a variety of assessment strategies. Focusing on the three modes of communication (interpretive, presentational, and interpersonal), this resource provides a framework of formative, interim, and summative assessments for use at any grade level.

I put some of my most useful lesson plans together in a web site, in case that Italian teachers around the world are looking for ideas for their classes.  Some activities are based on exercises from textbooks, some others are created to enlarge a topic that's been taught in class.  Although most of the activities are for Italian classes, some might be applied to other foreign languages.  Also, I will be posting news and more activities in the section "My posts".  I will be happy to include helpful suggestions coming from foreign language teachers.  If you'd like to share a useful activity, contact me and I will gladly publish it

How to search news in a foreign language using LexisNexis

Learn and practice languages for free!  Classroom appropriate

This Advanced Spanish Language and Culture course is a rigorous course taught exclusively in Spanish that requires students to improve their proficiency across the three modes of communication:  Interpretive, Interpersonal and Presentational.  The course focuses on the integration of authentic resources including online print, audio, and audiovisual resources, as well as traditional print resources that include literature, essays, and magazine and newspaper articles with the goal of providing a rich, diverse learning experience. Students communicate using rich, advanced vocabulary and linguistic structures as they build proficiency in all modes of communication toward the advanced level.  Class is conducted completely in Spanish and includes frequent writing and integration of skills with a rigorous review of grammatical structures. Advanced organizational and analytical strategies are taught. An array of resources is used as necessary to facilitate the learning process.

Views, Articles, Ideas on World Languages

Spanish Proficiency Exercises is a compilation of video clips in which native speakers of Spanish from various locations throughout Latin America and Spain demonstrate various language tasks.

Spanish Proficiency Exercises is a compilation of brief video clips in which native speakers of Spanish from various locations throughout Latin America and Spain demonstrate various language tasks. The objective of the exercises is to provide students of Spanish with the necessary tools to be able to talk about the same topics in Spanish. In order to do, this Spanish Proficiency Exercises contains five major components. First, there is a simplified video clip. This simplified version is scripted, the native speakers talks slower, and he or she uses simpler words and less slang. Second, there are video clips of native speakers who also perform the proficiency tasks. These clips are not scripted. What the native speakers say is what they really said. Some may talk fast, others talk slow, and some have specific regional dialects.

Course Description Spanish for Bilingual Students is an intermediate course designed principally for heritage learners, but which includes other students interested  in specific content areas, such as US Latino immigration, identity, ethnicity, education and representation in the media. Linguistic goals include vocabulary acquisition, improvement in writing, and enhancement of formal communicative skills.

Where learners connect to interact with students from all over the world.   Search by language, location, grade, subject, content.

Website to practice French, German, Spanish, English, Portugese, Italian using popular songs and lyrics!

Web series for beginners of Spanish.   Interactive and culminating activities.

Create published books - could be a great project for the Spanish and Italian students to create books for younger students in the target language.

Spanish Class Project on using the subjunctive tense. Students create a song parody to Thrift Shop and made a music video.  Comments reveal that people from all over watched and even learned from it.   I've been a WL teacher for 10 years and there is so much room for creativity and expression using the target language.   YouTube makes sharing with a global audience possible.    I could watch these videos all day long!

Spanish Class Project on using the subjunctive tense. Students create a song parody to Thrift Shop and made a music video.  Comments reveal that people from all over watched and even learned from it.   I've been a WL teacher for 10 years and there is so much room for creativity and expression using the target language.   YouTube makes sharing with a global audience possible.    I could watch these videos all day long!

Online encyclopedia of writing systems