JoLLE Summer Newsletter

The deadline for unthemed manuscript submissions that will be considered for the JoLLE Fall 2017 Issue is August 31, 2017 @ 11:59 EST. Please submit your papers to jollesubmissions@uga.edu. For more information, please click HERE.

Everyone has a story, and as educators, we are often too busy to hear the stories of our students and their concerns about our programs. In Pamela F. Marcott’s "Pursuing a Foreign Language Education: A Current Student’s Perspective", the author provides an autoethnographic snapshot of her foreign language education, highlighting positive and negative experiences during her years of Spanish study, from high school through her sophomore year at Wake Forest University. Marcott connects her studies with the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) push for more culturally relevant pedagogy, as reflected in its 2007 report, “Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World.” Though she went on to study physiology and biophysics at the PhD level, Marcott shows us how foreign language at the high school level, when it equips students with a multicultural lens, can better prepare students for college level study, and motivate them to pursue higher level language studies. Supporting the MLA’s suggestion that “interdisciplinary courses” that combine the language with other fields, like business and medicine, could help students “draw a connection between classes required for a student and classes that are interesting to a student” (p. 87). Understanding language programs from a student’s perspective allows language educators to gain a deeper understanding of how our programs benefit our students, while at the same time, inspire us to strengthen these programs, both at the high school and college levels. To read or revisit Marcott's original article, please click HERE.