Department of Foreign Languages

The Department of Foreign Languages teaches undergraduate language, literature, culture, linguistics and pedagogy. It was created in July 2003, a result of the merging of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures—minus Spanish, which formed its own department at the same time—and the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Languages. It includes fifteen full-time faculty: five in French, three in German, two in Japanese, two in Classics (Latin and Greek), and one professor each in Arabic, Chinese, and Russian. Twenty-three part-time instructors, two GA’s and two assistants from the Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistants program make possible the teaching of the beginning and intermediate levels of language, including 1000- and 2000-level Italian.

Our major/minor programs are in French, German, and Latin; we have minors in Chinese, Japanese and Russian. Approximately a third of our majors are also in the College of Education. Still others combine their foreign language major with a major in the College of Business or in other departments of the College of Arts and Sciences. We are increasingly participating in interdisciplinary programs: two of our faculty are co-listed in Women’s Studies, several of our professors are active in the Medieval Institute, and we are playing an important role in the development of newer campus-wide areas of study, including Canadian Studies, Linguistics, and Japanese Studies with the Soga Japan Center. The department houses a number of WMU study abroad programs: we direct programs in China, Egypt, France, Germany, Japan, Quebec and Russia.

The department has a professionally active faculty in literature, linguistics and pedagogy. To mention but a few of the professors’ more recent accomplishments, Dr. Molly Recchia has published a critical edition of the medieval French manuscript La Vie Seint Marcel de Lymoges. Dr. Peter Blickle's 2002 book, Heimat: A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland, has come out in a second, paperback edition. Our professor of Chinese, Dr. Xiaojun Wang, has co-authored the most used introductory Chinese textbook nationally and internationally, Integrated Chinese. Dr. Peter Krawutschke is president of FIT, the Fedération Internationale des Traducteurs, and treasurer of ATA, the American Translators' Association. As far as events organized by our faculty are concerned, Dr. Vincent Desroches heads the successful Francophone Film Festival, an annual international film competition that began in 2001 and in 2007 has added a conference on film and pedagogy. The Arabic Linguistic Society held its annual conference here in 2006, and Mustafa Mughazy has since been elected to head the international organization.

One of our goals over the next several years is to strengthen our undergraduate program both in terms of what it offers students and in the development that it offers to faculty—two interrelated ideas. We want to build up our ties to area elementary and high school foreign language programs, look critically at and grow our curriculum (a process already in progress), and give professors greater support for research. We have developed a proposal for an M.A. program that draws upon our combined strengths in language, literature and linguistics, and are applying for grant funding to hold a summer institute for area high school teachers of foreign languages.