Chers amis du Cercle Français,
Please join us this Wednesday, May 2, at 11:30 AM until 1:30 PM in STV 113 for our final French Club gathering of the year.
We decided to combine our end of the year party with our department’s party, since the winners of our two French study-abroad scholarships will be announced at noon that day: The Petrossian-Tarrant Scholarship Award and the Scholarship for French Study Abroad Endowment Fund Award.
Cake, cookies, and punch will be served.
Ten new language teachers Skyped into our K-12 pedagogy classes this year, and two visited in person. They delivered informal presentations about their student teaching experience, first years of teaching, and specific course material, as well as answering questions for our current students.
Three LAN faculty members have redesigned classes to emphasize urban education issues as part of the Chicago Teacher Education Pipeline, incorporating visits to Chicago Public Schools as an integral part of the course. A popular event among students and at the schools served is the visit from ISU Spanish students who serve as simultaneous interpreters for teachers and parents at Report Card Pick Up Day in Little Village.
Our K-12 pedagogy classes have a formal partnership with the UNITY Community Center in Normal. This spring our Spanish teacher candidates were responsible for seven weeks of programming at UNITY, teaching beginning Spanish to elementary school students. Next fall the class will provide 14 weeks of programming and then another seven weeks in the spring.
· ISU has the largest world language teacher preparation program in the state and one of the largest in the country?
· there are 116 students in the LAN Teacher Education program (13 in French, 9 in German, and 94 in Spanish)?
· right now eleven LAN student teachers are working in high schools all over Illinois from Chicago to Peoria to Champaign?
· we had language teacher candidates working all over the local community, teaching at UNITY Community Center, Mulberry School, and Evans Junior High?
Have any of you noticed the digital sign in the hallway of the second floor of Stevenson? It provides timely information about registration, study abroad, relevant articles about language acquisition and study, club meeting dates and times, and more.
We have recently added RSS feeds to the sign from 6 different foreign language newspapers from around the world in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish, in addition to in English. The next time you walk by the sign, stop for a minute or two to see if you can read the news in another language!
We’ve come to the end of another busy and successful academic year, one that started off with a weeklong celebration of the European Union and ended with a campus visit and poetry reading by celebrated author, Ana Rossetti.
Along the way, we were treated to a fabulous one man Molière show starring Timothy Mooney. We were honored to have several alumni visit campus to offer their wisdom, advice, and support to our current students. Our teacher education programs were nationally recognized by NCATE for their excellence. Professor Andy Weeks delivered the prestigious College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Lecture. And our ever-energetic student groups —Chinese Club, French Club, German Student Organization, Italian Club, Japan Student Association, and Spanish Club (to name just a few)— provided hundreds of hours of language conversation, cultural activities, and community service both locally and around the globe.
We also note with profound sadness the passing of Allison Zak, who will be greatly missed.
Once again, our dedicated faculty not only taught and mentored a wonderful cohort of students, but they also remained leaders in their academic fields, delivering numerous research papers and publishing many scholarly books and articles.
As your thoughts begin to turn toward summer, I wish you a very well-deserved and relaxing break from the pressures of academic life. Good luck on finals. To those of you who are graduating, congratulations! We are very proud of you. To those of you who will be back next year, we look forward to seeing you on campus and in the corridors of Stevenson Hall.
Eamus Aves Coccinei!
Alumna, Christine Meier, visited campus on April 3 to give a German Career Session to our German majors and minors and any students, interested in German Studies. Christine received a B.A. from ISU in International Business with a concentration in Marketing and German in 2004 and is currently involved with German-based renewable energy companies and their activities in theUnited States. Her presentation on her successful career [including her work with the German American Chamber of Commerce in Chicago and study/internship abroad experiences with the prestigious Congress Bundestag Youth Exchange program] was very inspiring and well received by our students.
Thanks to everyone who attended Spring Fest. We hope you can make it next year.
Ana Rossetti, one of Spain’s most accomplished and celebrated authors, gave a poetry reading on April 9, 2012. She has published more than 30 books of poetry, narrative, and children’s literature.
