AAUSC 2014 Volume - Issues in Language Program Direction: Innovation and Accountability in Language Program Evaluation

This volume provides language program directors with an overview of innovative methodologies, guidelines, and frameworks in language program evaluation and focuses on topics such as the integration of professional standards, university benchmarks, departmental goals, and outcomes assessment in language program evaluation. These ideas and examples equip language program directors with the essential tools and knowledge to help innovate and transform their language programs.

Table of Contents:
Methodologies, guidelines, and frameworks for language program evaluation. 1. Evaluation Capacity Building in College Language Programs: Developing and Sustaining a Student Exit Survey Project - Kimi Kondo-Brown (University of Hawai’i at Manoa), John McE. Davis (Georgetown University), and Yukiko Watanabe (UC Berkeley). 2. The Development, Management, and Costs of a Large-Scale Foreign Language Assessment Program - Elizabeth Bernhardt and Monica Brillantes (Stanford University). 3. Student Analytics and the Longitudinal Evaluation of Language Programs - Peter Ecke & Alexander Ganz (University of Arizona). 4. Designing an Embedded Outcomes Assessment for Spanish Majors: Literary Interpretation and Analysis - Judith E. Liskin-Gasparro and Raychel Vasseur (University of Iowa). 5. Seat Time vs. Proficiency: Assessment of Language Development in Undergraduate Students - Elena Schmitt (Southern Connecticut State University). Language program evaluation in relation to professional, institutional, and departmental goals and identities. 6. From Frameworks to Oversight: Components to Improving Foreign Language Program Efficacy - Carol Klee, Charlotte Melin, Dan Soneson, Elaine Tarone (University of Minnesota). 7. Promoting Change in “Two-tiered” Departments: An Exploratory Evaluation of Conflict and Empowerment among Language and Literature Faculty - Alessandro Zannirato (Johns Hopkins University). 8. Foreign language Course Grades as Pre-requisites and Programmatic Gatekeepers - Alan Brown (University of Kentucky). 9. Do we speak the same language?”: The iterative development of an institutionally mandated foreign language assessment program - Lindsy Myers & Nathan Lindsay (University of Missouri-Kansas City). 10. Reframing Assessment: Innovation and Accountability between the Global and the Local – Ted Cachey (Notre Dame).

About the Author :
John Norris has a Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition from the University of Hawaii and is an associate professor in the Linguistics Department at Georgetown University. His research and teaching interests include educational assessment, program evaluation, language pedagogy (task-based language teaching in particular), and research methods. John's publications have appeared in journals such as Applied Linguistics, Foreign Language Annals, Language Learning, Language Learning & Technology, Language Teaching Research, Language Testing, Modern Language Journal, TESOL Quarterly, and Die Unterrichtspraxis. His most recent books explore the topics of language teaching (Task-based language teaching: A reader), evaluation (Toward useful program evaluation in college foreign language education), assessment (Validity evaluation in language assessment), and research synthesis (Synthesizing research on language learning and teaching). Nicole Mills is coordinator of the Beginning French Language Program at Harvard University and previous coordinator of Beginning and Intermediate courses at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on topics associated with curriculum design, self-efficacy in foreign language learning and teaching, social networking, action research, and project-based learning. She has various publications in the Modern Language Journal, the Foreign Language Annals, Language Learning, the CALICO Journal, the International Journal of Applied Linguistics and in several edited volumes. She holds a Ph.D. in Educational Studies and French and a master's degree in French literature from Emory University.