Professors Monika Chavez, Department of German and Sally Magnan, Department of French and Italian, are quoted in an article in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education: “Foreign-Language Departments Bring Everyday Texts to Teaching” by Burton Bollag (subscription only, excerpts below).
“If you compare textbooks to those 10 years ago,” says Sally S. Magnan, a professor of French at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, “you see that culture is much more engrained. It goes well beyond the culture boxes,” to which tidbits of culture used to be relegated, she says. The new approach builds on a major reform in language education that took place three decades ago.