L2TReC Wins Prestigious Language Flagship Proficiency Assessment Grant

Congratulations to the Second Language Teaching and Research Center (L2TReC), which recently was awarded a very prestigious and competitive Language Flagship Proficiency Assessment grant.  The grant project, which partners LTReC with Salt Lake Community College, will strengthen and broaden current language assessment practices at both the University of Utah and at Salt Lake Community College. 

Specifically, the project is focused on normalizing and institutionalizing sustainable proficiency assessment practices within and across these two institutions, to align and articulate transfer and placement policies, to use assessment data to inform program curricula, and to disseminate findings for benefit of the wider teaching and research communities. The project will focus on Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Korean (self-funded), Portuguese and Russian at all levels of instruction. 

According to the Language Flagship website, the Language Flagship program is a partnership between the Department of Defense and IHEs with the mission of “creating new models of language learning that produce college graduates with professional-level proficiency in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Urdu, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Swahili and Turkish.”

Flagship programs set high expectations for participating students and provide the opportunity for these students to reach professional levels of proficiency in their target languages. 

The L2TReC/Salt  Lake Community College partnership will launch during the 2014-2015 academic year.