CERCLL is thrilled to announce that it has been awarded federal funding from the US Department of Education that will renew its status as a Title VI Language Resource Center through August 2026. The highly competitive grant competition has resulted in sixteen new and continuing centers across the country; we are pleased to be included among this national network of centers!
This is the fifth round of funding that CERCLL has received, to develop resources for teaching and learning foreign languages and culture, and to offer professional development opportunities for educators regionally, nationally and internationally. Housed in the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona (UArizona), the Center is led by Co-Directors Beatrice Dupuy [Professor of French, Public and Applied Humanities, and Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT)] and Chantelle Warner (Associate Professor of German and SLAT), who work closely on CERCLL’s projects and initiatives with faculty and scholars at the University of Arizona and beyond. In addition to the Title VI grant, we receive substantial support from the UArizona office of Research, Innovation & Impact, as well as our own College and other entities on campus and our national collaborators.
CERCLL’s thirteen projects and seven initiatives address four focal areas that share in our sustained commitment to integrating culture, literacy, and language learning: inclusive L2 pedagogies, intercultural perspectives in K-12 classrooms, L2 multiliteracies in action, and socially-situated materials for LCTLs.
New projects include the following, with Project Leaders noted first:
- Mahmoud Azaz (UArizona): Developing Sociopragmatic Competence in L2 Arabic
- Jill Castek (UArizona): Worlds of Experience: Immersive International Virtual Field Experiences with Language Teachers
- Nicole Coleman (Wayne State University) and Janice McGregor (UArizona): Bringing Ungrading to Language Learning Contexts
- Wenhao Diao (UArizona), Yi Xu (University of Pittsburgh), Jie Zhang (University of Oklahoma): A Corpus-based Chinese Language Textbook for Intercultural Communication
- Julieta Fernandez (UArizona) and Chantelle Warner (UArizona): An Introduction to Applied Linguistics for Language Educators
- Tara Hashemi (CSU Fresno) and Beatrice Dupuy (UArizona): Sustainability Literacy and Intercultural Citizenship in Multiliteracies-Oriented L2 Curricula
- Kris Aric Knisely (UArizona): Making Gender-Just Language Education Happen
- Kristen Michelson (Texas Tech University) and Bruna Somer-Farias (Michigan State University): Multiliteracies Language Teaching In World Language Classrooms
- Narges Nematollahi (UArizona): Multimodal Persian Dictionary
- Jieun Ryu (UArizona), Poonam Chauhan (UArizona and UC Davis): Learning Hindi Online through Current Social Issues
- Kathy Short (UArizona): Learning about Language and Culture in K-8 Classrooms
- Blaine Smith (Vanderbilt University): A Framework for Scaffolding FL Students’ Digital Multimodal Composition
In addition to these projects, CERCLL will organize the biennial Intercultural Competence Conference–an event that draws scholars from around the globe–for its ninth and tenth iterations in Spring 2024 and 2026. We will continue to host the biannual Language Teacher Symposium (LaTeS) and participate in a series of community college outreach events for regional educators. Other professional development opportunities will reach national and international audiences, including several Professional Learning Online Network Spaces (PLONS), our webinar series, and summer institutes. We also plan to continue work with groups at our institution, to host campus and community events such as the annual UArizona Language Fair and the “Tucson Meet Your Languages” booth at the Tucson Meet Yourself folklife festival.
Further information about all these initiatives will be available on our website–we look forward to sharing the details, and to bringing more resources and professional development opportunities to our national and international community of educators, as a Title VI Language Resource Center for the next four years!