Foreign Language Education Program:

PHILOSOPHY STATEMENT

Members of the Foreign Language (FL) Team at the University of Georgia (UGA) strongly believe that the goals of FL education go well beyond the teaching of the four language skills: teaching world languages represents a unique opportunity to help learners develop an awareness of the diverse realities people inhabit. In other words, in addition to allowing individuals to communicate with others, teaching a foreign or world language also affords a unique opportunity to broaden individuals’ horizons and help them develop a level of cultural as well as intellectual sensitivity necessary to succeed in increasingly more complex multi-lingual/cultural communities. It is also our belief that, when the teaching of FL holds higher instructional goals such as the development of learners’ cultural awareness, the FL classroom can become a site for cross-cultural explorations and discovery of the self and the Other.