About

History of the Center

The Center for Language Excellence (CLE) was launched on July 1, 2014, by the College of Arts and Sciences. CLE supports language instruction across all language programs and departments by providing activities that acknowledge and share best practices, sharpen existing strengths, conduct research, and provide support to programs with limited capacity and present a full spectrum of professional development opportunities for their language instructors.

The creation of CLE enhances support for language-related research such application of language to any field including language and literacy education, applied linguistics, speech and hearing sciences, instructional design, and artificial intelligence. CLE offers a series of workshops and encourages all language instructors to participate in these workshops and other activities that the center organizes.

CLE looks forward to continuing working with all campus units that deal with language learning, teaching, and research. The Center supports efforts to streamline language-related activities in language departments, programs, and resource centers.

Our Vision

We embrace bottom-up approach in making decisions. Our language coordinators highlight scenarios collected from their departments and suggest topics for the discussion. We share ideas and come up with suggestions or solutions across language coordinators which in turn introduce them to language instructors, Foreign language Teaching Assistants (FLTAs), and Associate Instructors (AIs) in their departments.

Informed decisions

Our leadership style allows for comprehensive institutional communication and sustainable collaboration as we consider many opinions when making decisions. We collect informed feedback for organizing and evaluating our events. Our workshops are based on faculty suggestions and initiatives. Data collection is integral to the planning of events and measuring performance.

Inclusive environment

We hope members of the language community feel included and valued, which fosters a supportive and communicative environment where all language learners and instructors can advance and develop together. Our workshop evaluation forms help us to determine faculty needs and interests.

Effective dialogue

We thrive for creating a more informed and insightful community with targeted goals. We invite all language coordinators to participate in CLE’s decision-making process.

Strategic partnership

We thrive to create an opportunity to discuss problems, reach out, harvest knowledge, and build trust across departments and other centers on campus. We create partnerships for accomplishing sustainable collaboration and mutual goals.

Shared solutions

We communicate common issues with all language instructors that will result in quicker problem solving and more efficient solutions. Our shared resources and annual Pet Peeves events are examples of such efforts.

Engaging environment

We believe that our core values can increase engagement and fulfillment among language instructors and language learners. We strive to create an institutional culture where everyone interested in languages and cultures can participate and contribute.