Binghamton University
Background and Purpose of the Languages Across the Curriculum Program
Unless they major in language or area studies, college and university students in
the U.S. lack curricular opportunities to develop competencies in languages other
than English within their areas of academic interest, despite wide recognition of
the increasing multilingual language needs of college graduates. At the same time, international
students and other students with advanced skills in languages other than English
lack opportunities to maintain and enhance their language skills and knowledge during
their college education. Binghamton University's Languages Across the Curriculum (LxC)
program responds to both of these unmet needs by employing international students
and other qualified individuals as Language Resource Specialists (LRSs) to prepare
and implement substitute assignments utilizing materials in languages other than English
for use in courses that would not not normally include such materials.
The primary premise of the LxC program is that most of Binghamton's students can and
should use their language skills as much as possible during their studies at at the
University and that the use of materials in their various languages should be linked
to students' highly varied subject-matter interests.
Faculty, regardless of their individual language proficiency, offer LxC options in
their courses to broaden and enliven course content by including non-English learning
materials. Such materials, which are used in ten to twenty percent of the assignments
in an LxC-supported course, provide intercultural perspectives on course content and
foster language skills in LxC-participating students.
Language Resource Specialists (LRSs), who are selected for their linguistic background
and disciplinary expertise, work in consultation with course faculty and the LxC
staff to locate topically appropriate materials, construct class assignments around
them, and lead weekly study-group discussions in English) with participating students
to help them relate the content of the assignments to the content of the course as
a whole.
Participating students, who need have only intermediate reading proficiency in the
LxC-supported language in order to perform LxC assignments unassisted, indicate their
interest in LxC participation in the first two weeks of the semester. The LxC staff
identifies and trains LRSs for languages in accordance with demand, and study-group meetings
begin in the fifth week of the semester. Because LxC assignments substitute for the
English-based assignments they would otherwise perform, and because the LRS provides assistance to participants who have difficulty performing LxC assignments, LxC-participating
students should not,except for the weekly study-group meeting, experience a greater
workload than that of nonparticipating students in the same course.
The long-term goal of LxC is to establish a campus-wide expectation that students
will make meaningful use of the foreign languages they know in any class at any level
anywhere in the University curriculum Since Fall 1991 LxC has supported undergraduate
courses in all three divisions of Harpur College and graduate and undergraduate courses
in the international business and accounting programs of the School of Management.
Supported languages in one or more of these courses have included Chinese, French,
German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Spanish
Program Director
H. Stephen Straight, Associate Professor of Anthropology and of Linguistics, and
Director, Linguistics Program
Associate Directors
Marilyn Gaddis Rose, Distinguished Service Professor of Comparative Literature and
Director, Translation Research and lnstruction Program
Ellen H. Badger, Associate Director for Administration, and Director, International
Student and Scholar Services
Maritza Valencia, Associate Director for Training Other Program Staff
Diwakar Sahai, Program Assistant Kim Baldwin, Program Secretary