Exploring Approaches to Cultures & Languages Across the Curriculum

Plenary Speaker

From First- and Second-Year
Foreign Language Instruction to CLAC:
A Quantum Leap or a Well-Trodden Path

Abstract

The CLAC Consortium promotes the use of languages “to achieve a better and more multi-faceted understanding of content." What needs to happen in foreign language instruction at the beginning and intermediate levels to best prepare language learners to apply their developing skills beyond the conventional foreign language classroom?  Based on how experiences in the FLAC program at St. Olaf inspired changes in foreign language programs, Barnes-Karol will present an overview of the underlying principles and elements of a curricular approach that facilitates the transition from the study of foreign languages to using foreign languages in disciplinary contexts.  Specific examples will illustrate how work with selected texts and tasks in foreign language classrooms can pave the way for using other texts and tasks in CLAC classrooms down the road. 

Gwendolyn Barnes-Karol (Ph.D., Minnesota, Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures) is Professor of Spanish at St. Olaf College whose teaching and research interests range from the interaction between oral and print cultures and the reception of literature by native- and non-native readers to the use of authentic materials in the foreign language classroom.  Actively involved in St. Olaf's Foreign Languages Across the Curriculum Program since its inception in 1989, she regularly teaches the Spanish discussion component for a survey of Modern Latin American history, incorporated a Spanish-language component into a liberation theology course offered abroad during a January term, and was part of a four-person team of faculty from the humanities and social sciences who taught a "partial immersion semester" of three integrated courses entirely in Spanish.