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

Celebrating SLLC Graduates

Watch our students step into the next chapter.

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Meet the 2025 SLLC Scholarship Awards Recipients

Five language students are awarded SLLC Scholarships.

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Regina Haag Receives PTK Faculty Excellence in Service Award

The PTK award recognizes faculty that demonstrate excellence in teaching, research and service.

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Languages Compete in SLLC Mini World Cup 2025

SLLC hosts its third mini world cup for students and faculty.

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Summer Session 2025

Unlock New Skills This Summer: Explore our 2025 Course Offerings

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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 languages and programs, our undergraduate and graduate degrees and our special programs like the Language House Living-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.

 

 


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Do data collection methods matter for self-reported L2 individual differences questionnaires? In-person vs crowdsourced data.

Crowdsourcing offers great advantages in data collection by enabling researchers to recruit a large number of participants across geographical boundaries within a short period of time. Despite the benefits of crowdsourcing, no study has explored its valid

School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Second Language Acquisition

Author/Lead: Ruirui Jia, Ekaterina Sudina
Dates:

We recruited a total of 209 in-person and 209 crowdsourced participants for comparison. Both groups completed the short versions of the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale and the Foreign Language Enjoyment Scale, provided their demographic and language learning background information, and completed the LexTALE test. Measurement invariance testing revealed that most (sub)constructs exhibited partial or full invariance, indicating stability in the measurement systems across both data collection settings. However, crowdsourced participants reported higher enjoyment and lower anxiety than in-person participants. These differences can be attributed to the more relaxed mental state of the crowdsourced participants who completed the survey outside of the classroom. 

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Caleidoscopio

Caleidoscopio es una ventana a los esplendores secretos del mundo de Carmen Benito-Vessels en 49 narraciones

School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Author/Lead: Carmen Benito-Vessels
Dates:

Caleidoscopio es una ventana a los esplendores secretos del mundo de Carmen Benito-Vessels en 49 narraciones ––algunas cuentos, otras ejercicios de memoria, algunas más observaciones sobre lo que no se entiende del mundo, pero debería entenderse—. Esta colección es un fichero de historias, a menudo hilarantes y siempre agudas, en las que una mente curiosa y elegante medita sobre lo chico en lo grande, sobre lo que solo se puede encontrar entrelíneas, sobre lo que da claridad entre la opacidad de lo grandilocuente. Si leer ficción es siempre una necesidad crítica ––leyendo aprendemos maneras nuevas de pensar–– y una empresa estética ––ciertas escrituras nos dan placer––, en Caleidoscopio de Carmen Benito-Vessels el placer critico viene de la posibilidad de ver al mundo desde un lugar que hace brillar lo que muestra.

Grupo Editorial Círculo Rojo SL (December 30, 2024)

Caleidoscopio

De-targeting the Target in Phoneme Detection: Aiming the Task at Phonological Representations Rather Than Backgrounds

This study centers some important methodological challenges faced in L2+ laboratory phonology and proposes a task innovation to tackle important questions about mental representations and acquisition.

School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Dates:

One challenge of learning a second or additional language (L2C) is learning to perceive and interpret its sounds. This includes acquiring the target language (TL) contrastive phonemic inventory, the sounds’ systematic behavior
in the TL phonology, and novel relationships between spelling and sound (GPCs; grapheme-phoneme correspondences). Many perception tasks require  stipulation of written labels for target speech sounds (e.g., phoneme detection). Listening for this target is not necessarily, or even frequently, an equivalent cognitive task between participant groups. The incongruence of phonological and orthographic domains and their GPCs poses a methodological challenge for L2C research. The author argues that phoneme detection tasks should avoid the phone of investigative interest (x) as the direct target of listener attention and redirect focus to an adjacent listening target (y). Ideally, this target should not trigger or otherwise be implicated in the phonological process or phonotactic
constraint under investigation. The careful choice of listening target (y) with both a familiar sound and a congruent orthographic label for both (or all) language groups of the experiment yields an equivalent task and better indicates implicit knowledge of the phenomenon under study. This approach opens up potential choices of phonological objects of interest (x). The two phoneme detection experiments reported here employ this novel adjacent-congruent listening target approach, which the author calls the Persean approach. Experiment 1 establishes baseline performance in two assimilation types and replicates processing inhibition in first-language (L1) German speakers in response to violations of regressive nasal assimilation. It also uses [t] as the Persean listening target to test sensitivity to preceding violations of progressive dorsal fricative assimilation (DFA). Experiment 2 investigates sensitivity to violations of DFA in both L1 German speakers and L1 English L2C German learners. Experiment 2 also uses the Persean method for the first phoneme detection investigation demonstrating sensitivity to violation of a prosodic/phonotactic constraint banning /h/ in syllable codas. The study demonstrates that phoneme detection with Persean listening targets is a viable instrument for investigating regressive and progressive assimilation, prosodic/phonotactic constraints, and prelexical perceptual repair strategies in different language background groups and proposes statistical best practices for future phoneme detection research.

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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