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University of Maryland School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Home

SLLC Hosts Poetry in Conversation Event in Honor of Lauretta Clough

Family, friends, faculty and staff come together for the inaugural poetry reading in Clough’s memory.

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First Comes Draniki, Then Comes Connection: Elle’s Semester in France

Double linguistics and French major Elle Kaminski ‘25 reflects on her Spring 2024 semester abroad with Maryland-in-Nice.

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Honoring ‘Las Muertes’

Ana Patricia Rodríguez and two of her students highlight how D.C.’s Salvadoran diaspora uses art to grapple with painful past in new documentary

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Learn the Language You Love: Amaya’s Journey to Morocco

Boren Scholar Amaya Greenberg’s '25 shares the story so far of her linguistic and cultural journey in Morocco.

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Terp Goes for Trampoline Gymnastics Glory

Jessica Stevens, who studies criminology and criminal justice and Russian, competes in the Paris Olympics.

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Welcome to the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures in the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland, College Park.

We invite you to learn more about our undergraduate and graduate degrees, our fields of study, and special programs like the Language House Living and Learning Program, the Language Partner Program, the Persian Flagship Program, Project GO, and the Summer Language Institutes.

About Us

Undergraduate Programs

Undergraduate Programs

The School is a transdisciplinary teaching and research unit. Our students, faculty, and staff investigate and engage with the linguistic, cultural, cinematic, and literary worlds of speakers of ArabicChinese, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, JapaneseKorean, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish, as well as Cinema and Media Studies.


Graduate Programs

Graduate Programs

The School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures offers three Ph.D. programs, four M.A. programs and an advanced graduate certificate in Second Language Acquisition. Our students pursue successful careers in academia, the government, secondary education and the private sector.

Graduate Programs

Faculty and Staff

Faculty and Staff

Search our directory to learn about our faculty and staff.

Directory

Alumni

Alumni

Stay connected with SLLC as an alum by sharing news of your accomplishments, joining our newsletter, attending events and giving back.

 

 


Hearing and Writing German Sounds: Influences of Phonetic Training on L2 Perception and Spelling

Can auditory training boost learning novel grapheme-phoneme correspondences? This study reports sound categorization and spelling results for a consonant and a vowel after high- and low-variability training in early L1 English learners of L2+ German.

School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Dates:

Non-readers, who lack alphabetic literacy, may perform differently from alphabetically literate readers on tasks that draw upon phonological awareness, or may fail to perform them at all, despite their lexical and grammatical capabilities. But for alphabetically literate, reading adult learners of a second or subsequent language (L2+) in instructed foreign language (FL) settings, phonological representations typically entail both speech sound categories and orthographic labels, domains connected by grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) on a language-specific basis. A long tradition of auditory phonetic training research demonstrates benefits for aural perception of novel L2+ contrasts, but such training studies focus almost exclusively on gains in L2+ aural perception and articulatory production rather than connection to the orthographic domain. Our study investigates how phonetic training impacts the phonological and orthographic domains, including category perception and target-language (TL) GPCs, across the crucial differences between first language (L1) categories vs. L2+ categories and between naïve pre-learners in cross-language speech perception vs. L2+ learners in L2+ speech perception at early stages of exposure. The paper reports preliminary results on one novel vowel condition (represented by German Ü) and one novel consonant condition (represented by German CH). The L2+ Sound Learning Lab, led by Dr. John H.G. Scott (principal investigator) presented these findings at the 2023 Boston University Conference on Language Development. This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

The Routledge Handbook of Multiliteracies for Spanish Language Teaching multimodalidad e interdisciplinariedad

The first volume to connect the multiple disciplinary perspectives that contribute to a pedagogy for multiliteracies and to bring together renowned and young scholars to offer the most recent research and a multifaceted view of this field.

School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Dates:

The Routledge Handbook of Multiliteracies for Spanish Language Teaching: Multimodalidad e Interdisciplinariedad provides a comprehensive, state-of-the-art account of the main theoretical, curricular and pedagogical foundations for implementing and researching a pedagogy for multiliteracies in Spanish Language Teaching.

The volume is specifically designed to meet the needs of scholars, teachers, and undergraduate and graduate students who wish to develop their knowledge about the latest research and new trends in the field of multiliteracy applied to Spanish Language Teaching from an international perspective.

The Routledge Handbook of Multiliteracies for Spanish Language Teaching multimodalidad e interdisciplinariedad

The Senselessness of the Heroic Act and the Experience of War in The Ascent

This chapter examines Larisa Shepitko’s harrowing war film, The Ascent (Voskhozhdenie, 1976), in an attempt to address the following question: What are the consequences, on the level of meaning, of the film’s exploration of material experience?

School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Dates:

This chapter examines Larisa Shepitko’s harrowing war film, The Ascent (Voskhozhdenie, 1976), in an attempt to address the following question: What are the consequences, on the level of meaning, of the film’s exploration of material experience? In terms of plot, the film is unusual in how it humanizes collaboration with the enemy, an act usually befitting only villainous characters in Soviet cinema. The film as a whole, and the first half in particular, emphasizes what Lucía Nagib calls the “realist mode of production”—in particular, through on-location shooting in which the actors endured conditions similar to those experienced by their onscreen characters. The “documentary” approach to the production of a historical film serves to recuperate a sense of contingency, in opposition to the teleological developmental narrative of Soviet History, a gesture that fits into the post-war, post-Stalin-era Soviet “counter-cinema” attempt to break with the entrenched norms of socialist realism. I argue that in rejecting the psychological development of the two main characters and in focusing, particularly in the first half of the film, on the materiality of experience under the extreme conditions of the war, the film exceeds the boundaries of its ostensible central ideological conflict and its engagement with the Soviet mythology of the Second World War. Rather, the film poses broader, universal questions of moral life under extreme circumstances, and provides the audience with the conditions for engaging those questions through their own experiences—and their experience of the film. 

 

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Choose the SLLC

Land Acknowledgement

Every community owes its existence and strength to the generations before them, around the world, who contributed their hopes, dreams, and energy into making the history that led to this moment.

Truth and acknowledgement are critical in building mutual respect and connections across all barriers of heritage and difference.

So, we acknowledge the truth that is often buried: We are on the ancestral lands of the Piscataway People, who are the ancestral stewards of this sacred land. It is their historical responsibility to advocate for the four-legged, the winged, those that crawl and those that swim. They remind us that clean air and pristine waterways are essential to all life.

This Land Acknowledgement is a vocal reminder for each of us as two-leggeds to ensure our physical environment is in better condition than what we inherited, for the health and prosperity of future generations.

Office of Diversity and Inclusion