Foreign Language Education Program:

Vision statement

The FL education program at UGA is a teacher education/professional development program that seeks to prepare effective language teachers to play a key role in individuals’ life-long learning journey. Becoming an effective teacher not only implies the acquisition of knowledge of theory and practice, but also the ability to reflect in order to be able to constantly improve and refine one’s own practice. Being effective also implies being able to question the status-quo in most K-12 school settings, which prevents learners from developing critical thinking skills necessary to thrive in increasingly more linguistically and culturally diverse societies.

It is with this in mind that the FL education program at UGA has been tailored to provide preservice as well as inservice practitioners with opportunities to not only gain essential theoretical and practical knowledge necessary to excel in their professional world, but also to provide them with opportunities to critically explore issues and challenges pertinent to the FL teaching world. It is this particular interest in developing reflective practitioners who constantly ask questions and seek answers about their practice and their students, that best defines the Foreign Language program at UGA.

The academic program we propose is developed within a framework of critical pedagogy emphasizing the importance of exploring and experimenting with varied pedagogical approaches that reflect recent theoretical advances in second language acquisition (SLA) and that are in harmony with socio-cultural theories of language learning. Among the many alternative approaches to curriculum design students will explore while enrolled are:

content-based instruction (CBI);
project based learning (PBL), in the context of FL education;
combination of theme and task-based curricula that focus on integrating content and language instruction in a coherent manner.
standards-based curriculum planning combined with performance based assessments

Some of the questions we hope enrolled students in our program will explore are:

What does it mean to learn a language and to be a language learner? What does it mean to teach a language and to be a language teacher?
What are current theories of second language acquisition and what implications do they have for FL teaching?
What are the ultimate goals of language teaching? What are the roles of foreign language teachers in today’s increasingly diverse communities?
In what ways can the teaching of foreign language stimulate learners’ critical awareness of the diversity that composes human experience?
How do socio-political contexts impact schools’ governance and FL education?
What are the skills foreign language teachers need to develop to become accomplished teacher-researchers?

PHILOSOPHY STATEMENT

GUIDING PRINCIPLES

PROGRAM REQUIREMENTS

QUALITY ASSURANCE CONTRACT