NFLC Advanced Language Courses
The National Foreign Language Center at the University of Maryland has leveraged its decades of experience developing courses, learning materials, and assessments in over 100 languages to deliver advanced language courses. Upcoming classes are listed below.
Our language refresher courses are open to everyone and designed for learners with at least intermediate proficiency who want to strengthen and refresh their skills through engagement with authentic, timely, and culturally rich materials. Through regular interaction with course content and active participation in live sessions, students reinforce their core language competencies and develop greater accuracy, fluency, and confidence in speaking, listening, reading, and writing.
To support government and military linguists and prepare them to carry out their missions, the NFLC-UMD works closely with government stakeholders to offer courses centered on current, relevant, and authentic curriculum taught in carefully sequenced thematic units that integrate culture, area studies, and language.
The Advanced Language Courses are organized around thematic units. Each thematic unit aims to answer an essential question and a series of subquestions. The essential questions and subquestions span five topical categories designed to expose students to the vocabulary and linguistic features necessary to improve their global proficiency. This thematic approach infuses culture and area studies into the course, while maintaining a focus on language proficiency gains.
Individual lessons are primarily based on authentic passages (broadcasts, editorials, social media posts) that are created by native speakers for native speakers of the target language. The authentic materials include support tools to help students engage with them. These support tools may include prereading activities, glossaries, transcripts, translations, and graphic organizers. For those students who may have slipped slightly below level, instructors provide additional scaffolding to assure that students can fully comprehend the training materials.
The NFLC-UMD’s courses are designed around its research-based principles of effective language teaching, which maximize students’ proficiency gains:
- Implementing a standards-based and thematically organized curriculum
- Integrating culture, content, and language in the classroom
- Adapting and using expertly leveled authentic materials
- Using the target language and providing comprehensible input
- Facilitating a learner-centered classroom
- Conducting performance-based assessments
