We are pleased to announce that ILETC has been awarded a grant from the U.S. Department of Education to reopen the Center for Integrated Language Communities (CILC), one of only sixteen National Language Resource Centers. This puts CILC and the Graduate Center in a prestigious national network of innovative Language Resource Centers, housed at universities across the country, including Duke, Georgetown, Penn State, and UCLA.

Originally founded in 2014, CILC’s mission is to help students in the United States develop the translingual and transcultural competence they need to navigate between the communities they come from and the ones they aim to engage with in their post-college lives.

For this grant cycle, CILC’s projects are focused on fostering the development of literacy in second and heritage language learners, all within the context of community colleges and minority serving institutions, through five projects:

• Training Modules for Text-based Language Teaching will develop, pilot, and disseminate modules for instructors on how to integrate text-based activities into existing courses.
• Repository for Text-based Language Learning Tasks will develop, pilot, and publish text-based tasks for elementary and intermediate foreign and heritage language courses in five languages (Arabic, Japanese, Italian, Russian, and Spanish).
• Researching the Effects of Text-based Tasks on Language Learning will investigate the academic outcomes of using text-based learning tasks.
• Heritage Interpreting will develop, pilot, and research the impact of an interpreting curriculum specifically designed to address strengths and needs of future interpreters who are heritage speakers.
• A National Forum on Literacy will provide a space for a national dialogue on the opportunities that a focus on literacy development affords to students and programs alike.

Visit cilc.commons.gc.cuny.edu to learn more about CILC.
To contact the CILC team, email us at cilc@gc.cuny.edu.