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Date: | Thu, 8 Jan 2009 13:20:37 -0500 |
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Amber,
Your message gave me a chuckle-- most of us also stumbled into the
language lab business. An old IALLT joke was that Pam Castro was the
only graduate student ever who had the professional goal of being a
Lab Director (and she has been out of the field for a while now).
And I am as well, although I stay connected. I can tell you that I
fell into it when I read a job description for an open position at UC
Irvine and thought, "Who in the world besides me would have this
unusual combination of knowledge and experience?" That was
pre-internet days (oh good grief, let me be honest-- it was
pre-personal computing days!), so it took me 2 years to find out that
there were other odd ducks like myself dispersed among institutions
across the U.S. And in those days, we were very isolated-- there
weren't other technology + pedagogy-oriented folks other than the
language center director at any given campus.
My background (at the time) was a BA in Spanish linguistics (and a MA
in Precolumbian Art!), a knowledge of the language teaching
methodologies at UC Irvine (where I had studied Spanish, French and
Italian), and a really strong background in audio recording (and
lesser background) in video production (having spent my college
social time at the campus radio station and personal time with my
video-producer husband). Judi Franz, who was my assistant and took my
place when I left UCI in 1999 first came to the Lab with the
credentials of having a BA in French and having been the "AV geek" at
her high school (in addition to her incredible organizational and
personality skills!).
Requirements certainly have changed since then, but the thing that
connects all successful Language Center folks is an interest in and
desire to continually explore, build skills, keep up with the
technology-- and not just keep up with it, but to carry it to places
that we think it should go--- and share their knowledge and expertise
internally with their faculty and administrators and externally with
language technology colleagues.
In addition to other responses you may receive here, IALLT has
compiled periodic surveys of the state of the profession that you can
find in back issues of the IALLT Journal (although the last one was
several years ago).
LeeAnn Stone
World Language Specialist
Cengage Learning
Past IALLT President (1989-1991) [and constant IALLT promoter]
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LLTI is a service of IALLT, the International Association for
Language Learning (http://iallt.org/), and The Consortium for Language
Teaching
and Learning (http://www.languageconsortium.org/).
Join IALLT at http://iallt.org.
Otmar Foelsche, LLTI-Editor ([log in to unmask])
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