About the Language Center

The Stanford Language Center was established in 1995 with a charge to strengthen the language requirement as part of efforts to enhance the undergraduate curriculum at Stanford University.

Elizabeth Bernhardt was appointed Director in July of 1995 and began her duties on September 1 that year. Professor Bernhardt, whose academic appointment is in German Studies, is an applied linguist who has conducted pioneering work in comprehension assessment.

Mission Statement and Program Structure

Language programs at Stanford University prepare students to have a foreign language capability that enhances their academic programs and enables them to live, work, study, and research in a different country. Stanford students need to be able to initiate interactions with persons from other cultures and also to engage with them on issues of mutual concern.

In order to accomplish this goal for Stanford students, language programs are proficiency-oriented and standards-based. A proficiency orientation refers to emphasizing doing rather than knowing. We try to make sure that students learn to speak, listen, read, and write in ways that are immediately useful in a real-world setting. Based in research and theory on language and on discourse functions, this orientation is adaptive, compensatory, and developmental, not additive. Standards-based refers to the World Readiness Standards on Foreign Language Learning that attend not only to linguistic dimensions, but also to connections that learners make between languages, cultures, and various academic areas; to comparisons between languages and cultures; and to a knowledge of communities that speak a particular language. Our programs are attentive to the pragmatics of each language and culture and respectful of the relationship between genre and function.

In first-year programs, we emphasize speaking and writing – forms that enable learners to produce language at the sentence level in order to interact with native speakers in an immediate time frame, often in service encounters. We also focus on reading and listening genres such as short news and weather reports; short film and book reviews; as well as straightforward expository prose, often descriptive in nature. These are forms that native speakers living within a culture encounter and use on a daily basis.

Second-year programs build on what is learned in first year by moving students from a sentence-based interpersonal level of language into a presentational, paragraph-based mode that expands the students’ linguistic as well as interpretational repertoire. Students are asked to conduct research on topics of their academic or professional interest and are taught to present on those topics in a manner that is linguistically and culturally appropriate.

Teaching Staff and Students

The Language Center regularly offers at least 40 languages from around the world. At present, there are sixty full-time lecturers, thirty part-time lecturers, and a small cadre of graduate students who teach each quarter. The Language Center has a quarterly enrollment of more than 1500 students. This figure indicates that, in the aggregate, the language programs constitute one of the largest sectors of the required undergraduate programs at Stanford.

Proficiency Objectives

For all languages at Stanford, proficiency objectives in each of the skill areas have been established for one year of study. For the most commonly taught languages, such as French, German, and Spanish), listening, speaking, reading, and writing objectives are set at the intermediate-mid level on the ACTFL proficiency scale. In the non-cognate languages, the levels are generally set at novice high on the ACTFL scale.

Technology

Since 1996, Stanford has conducted its written placement testing online so that more time can be spent during orientation for oral assessments. In the Digital Language Laboratory, Stanford teachers are able to efficiently assess students’ oral performances in language on a daily basis, if they choose. Performing oral assessments online and conducting Simulated Oral Proficiency Interviews (SOPIs) are critical uses of technology that bring about high performance among students and a high level of satisfaction among instructors.