Alumni and Community

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Alumni

Our web site helps inform prospective and current students, the campus and community, as well as our alumni about what is going on in the department. In recent years we have been so pleased to hear words of encouragement, gratitude, and stories of success from our alumni. Please take a moment to visit our alumni webpage here. We invite you to send us an update about where you are and what you are doing by completing our Alumni Survey!

 

Community

Improving Educator Quality Grant

In 2005 and 2006 the Department of Modern Languages received a U.S. Department of Education grant in the amount of $138,000 from the Kentucky Council on Post-Secondary Education to assist Kentucky P12 world language teachers in strengthening their pedagogical skills. The grant project was entitled "Improving Student World Language Performance: Using Assessment as the Guiding Force in Standards-Based Instruction." The participating P12 teachers engaged in an intensive summer seminar on the WKU campus or abroad and also attended a year-long series of workshops and conferences to develop expertise in new means of assessing student performance and in the development of standards-based units of study. They also profit from consultations with and mentoring from other P12 and postsecondary master teachers. Dr. Linda S. Pickle and Dr. Laura McGee were the grant directors.

FLEX Program

In the spring 2004 semester, three Modern Languages faculty member began a 12-week Foreign Language Exploration (FLEX) program in collaboration with the Bowling Green Public Library. Instructors Benedicte Bossut (French), Gustavo Obeso (Spanish), and Tim Straubel (German) offered four weekly sessions to introduce K-3 students and their parents to their respective languages. Two Modern Languages students assisted each instructor, giving those university students a wonderful opportunity to interact with the community and practice their own language skills. This program was repeated in both semesters of the 2004-2005 academic year.