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The Language Center Teaching Award

The Language Center Award for Innovations in Language Teaching

This award recognizes and encourages creative and original innovations in language teaching that promote effective language learning practices.

Who is eligible: GW faculty members of any status with at least two years teaching experience in a GW language department (CSLL, EALL, and RGSLL) are eligible for the award. (Note: Language Center faculty members with an administrative role are not eligible.)

What the award includes: The award recipient(s) will receive (or share) a $1000 prize, a certificate of recognition and his/her/their name(s) on a plaque to be displayed in the Language Center. Award presentation will take place at a formal ceremony, during which the recipient(s) will give a short presentation on his/her/their award-winning innovation in language teaching.

For more information, please visit the Language Center (Phillips Hall 216) or email inquiries to language@gwu.edu.

2009 recipient

Richard Robin, Russian professor in the Department of Romance, German, and Slavic Languages and Literatures, received the second Language Center Award for Innovations in Language Teaching on May 6, 2009. The award recognizes innovations in language teaching that inspire students' extraordinary engagement with a language and culture, while promoting effective language learning practices.

His work, CIBER Business Russian, now in development and field-testing through grants from the GW CIBER introduces business oriented topics into the sixth semester of Russian. It seeks to help students meet five goals: (1) move students from ACTFL Intermediate Low in speaking (simple sentences) towards paragraphed speech; (2) introduce simple business topics based on students’ current everyday experience in areas such as jobs, travel, media, and medical insurance — through authentic monologue and dialogue speech — and provide templates for real-life simple business correspondence to supplement traditional student academic composition; (3) provide opportunities for students to use their Russian in work-related environments. Each unit opens with authentic print/internet materials and ends in a business case and simulation. When complete, the materials will include a hard-copy book, a companion interactive website, and a web-based video comprehension packet.

You can see the scope of Professor Robin's innovative work at: http://home.gwu.edu/~rrobin/ciber.

2008 recipients

Shoko Hamano and Wakana Kikuchi-Cavanaugh, Japanese professors in the East Asian Languages and Literatures department, received the first Language Center Award for Innovations in Language Teaching on May 7, 2008. The award recognizes innovations in language teaching that inspire students' extraordinary engagement with a language and culture, while promoting effective language learning practices. Hamano and Kikuchi-Cavanaugh were honored for their online program, "Visualizing Japanese Grammar," which uses computer-generated animations to demonstrate and explain Japanese grammatical concepts that tend to be difficult for English-speaking Japanese learners to grasp.