LCTL 4 Application Information

Are you a LCTL instructor interested in furthering proficiency-based online language instruction and collaborating with colleagues across institutions? The Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL) Partnership, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is seeking to add an additional language to the ones the grant has supported (Hebrew, Hindi, and Swahili). Therefore, the LCTL Partnership is launching a call for partners in the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) who are interested in becoming part of a working group to develop online language courses for their language, with commitment to the project from Spring 2020 through Spring 2022.

The grant will support three language professionals in the same language to create a working group. The working group will consist of one Language Specific Coordinator and two Language Specialists from different Big Ten institutions that will work closely with constituents from MSU. Over the course of 5 semesters, the working group will develop and pilot online a suite of 3 to 4 complete online courses, with the goal of more students in their language achieving at least intermediate high proficiency. The detailed description of the roles and responsibilities of a Language Specific Coordinator and Language Specialists is in this PDF.

With this call, we invite language personnel to collaborate across BTAA institutions in creating a working group proposal for any single LCTL.

A proposal of no more than 5 pages should:

  • Identify the key personnel (one Language Specific Coordinator and two Language Specialists) that would participate as a working group. (Please note that all collaborators must be at a United States institution and at least two of the three partners must be Big Ten Academic Alliance institutions.)
    • Give a brief description of each person’s background
      • Include familiarity with online materials development (such as familiarity with Learning Management Systems and Google Drive)
      • Include experience working collaboratively
    • State why each person would like to participate in this project
    • Specify who will serve as coordinator and who would serve as specialists and why
    • Specify how you intend to collaborate and get the work done in the proposed time frame (see action plan bullet point below)
    • Please be sure that each person confirms with their department chairs and other stakeholders that he/she would be supported in their participation in the project
  • Describe the language program for the selected language at each institution:
    • What levels are currently taught? What are the enrollment numbers? What actions you are willing to undertake for long-term maintenance of the selected language?
    • Are you willing to pilot these fully online materials with your students during the second semester, knowing it may mean shifting some instructional time to online?
  • What is the state of the support nationally for the instruction of your language?
  • Propose a plan of action for developing a suite of online language courses (3 to 4 courses) focused on improving the students’ language proficiency (e.g., topics, teaching approach, student engagement, etc.) The proposed courses should meet the needs of all stakeholders (and in particular advanced language learners) and have the potential to increase enrollment numbers.

Working group proposals will be evaluated on the following criteria:

  • Completeness and feasibility of proposal
  • Instructor group strength and potential to collaborate effectively
  • Innovation (e.g., focus on proficiency-, task-, project-based teaching approach; connections with non-language programs) and transformational impact
  • Demonstrated need of support (institutional and national) in the language

We request that proposals be sent to lctlpartnership@celta.msu.edu no later than 5pm (Eastern time) Friday, October 11th. After that time, we will contact the top proposals for a group interview. Once a final proposal is chosen, we will solicit official letters of support from interested partners to start the subaward process.

Questions?

The Project Manager will hold two open Q&A sessions on Zoom for interested parties who wish to discuss the project.

  1. Thursday, September 19th from 1-3pm
  2. Monday, September 23rd from 9-11am