Collaborations
Supporting Urdu as an LCTL in the U.S.
The Initiative for Multilingual Studies‘ Associate Research Professor, Dr Hina Ashraf has partnered up with the Assessment and Evaluation Language Resource Center to provide technical assistance to the only known Urdu-English Dual Language Immersion program of Allen Jay Elementary School in North Carolina. Her research team visited the school, met the school community and parents, visited classrooms and collected data.
Informed by this data, IMS and AELRC conducted a two-day professional development workshop tailored to address teachers’ need of developing learning and assessment in DLI, and use of backward design model in an LCTL program. Teachers were keen for a continuation of such training, and the IMS is committed to explore avenues that could facilitate and sponsor professional development for teachers of LCTLs in the United States, and especially Allen Jay ES.
Partnership with HaBilNet
The IMS is a partner with The Harmonious Bilingualism Network, HaBilNet, a philanthropic foundation in Belgium whose mission is to support the well-being of bilinguals and their families ( https://www.habilnet.org)
The director of HaBilNet, Dr. Annick De Houwer, and the faculty director of the IMS, Dr. Lourdes Ortega have designed and co-organized two invitational colloquia where junior and senior researchers of bilingualism met to share expertise and experiences working with multilingual children and families. HaBilNet1 took place in La Hulpe, Belgium, on May 24-25, 2018. HaBilNet2 took place in Frankfurt, Germany, on May 12-14, 2022.
Collaboration with Legal English Program at Georgetown Law School
The IMS is collaborating with the Legal English Program at the Georgetown Law School to support the education of international and domestic multilingual lawyers. As part of this collaboration, Linguistics graduate students have conducted research in the Legal English Program.
Recent dissertations as an output of this colloration:
Bradford Salen, in-progress
Rostros Del Río
The IMS supported the collection of videographic interviews with remote Indigenous communities, an amazing project undertaken by Georgetown alumnus Jeff Wong and his colleague Henry Maillet involving a boat expedition along the 1,300 km or 800 miles of the Paraguay River to create the first Guaraní-Spanish bilingual corpus. Check out the the documentary teaser and their story on this webpage (new window).
Teacher Pipeline Resources for Dual-Language Immersion in the U.S.
The IMS collaborated with the DCLIP on a study of teacher pipeline resources for dual-language immersion in the United States
Research team: Erin Fell, Vashti Lee, Valentina Michelotti, and Malik Stevenson
