The nationally renowned Center for Language Studies program will begin its summer session on Friday, June 14, at Beloit College. The program welcomes 120 students from across the country and around the world to participate in intensive four and eight week sessions of study in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Russian. This year, the center has its highest enrollment in seven years.
The students will be instructed by 28 faculty members, including Beloit College professors Olga Ogurtsova (Russian) and Scott Lineberger (Japanese). Ranging in age from 17 to 60 and drawing from 36 states and other countries, the student body is diverse. Many are attending from high schools and secondary education programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels. There are 13 non-traditional students, including an engineer from a Kentucky Toyota plant who is studying Japanese.
In addition, 18 students received full tuition scholarships through the STARTALK Program. STARTALK is funded by Congress to aid the study of kindergarten through grade 12 students in critical languages, placing them at an advanced level when they enter college. Earlier this year, the Center for Language Studies was awarded a $100,000 grant from STARTALK to support the study of Arabic and Chinese.
The Center for Language Studies is an intensive immersion language program that gives students a year of language instruction in a single summer. “Our program is designed to bring students to higher levels of proficiency in all five skills—speaking, listening, writing, reading and culture—in a short period of time,” says Patricia Zody, director of the Center for Language Studies. “We want to help them to continue to develop and maintain these skills after the summer program concludes and to teach them to value the study of languages as a way, not only to open up new worlds, but also to learn about themselves.” Students are placed in beginning, intermediate or advanced levels of study within each of the four languages.
For details about the Center for Language Studies, contact Patricia Zody at cls@beloit.edu. Information can also be found on the program’s Web site www.summerlanguages.com.