Contact: Travis Fahey

802-443-5198

tfahey@middlebury.edu

Posted: May 31, 2002

MIDDLEBURY,

VT- The Middlebury College Language Schools will hold commencement

for its 88th summer session in Mead Memorial Chapel on Friday, Aug. 16

at 8 p.m. Mead Chapel is on Hepburn Road off College Street (Route 125).

The public is invited to attend the event.

President

John M. McCardell, Jr. and Dean of the Language Schools and Schools Abroad

Michael Katz will award degrees to nearly 150 master of arts candidates

in French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish. Ten candidates will receive

a doctorate in modern languages. Awards for distinguished study will also

be given to select students in the schools of Arabic, Chinese and Japanese.



Michele Forman, Middlebury Union High School (MUHS) teacher, Middlebury

College honorary degree recipient and former Arabic student at Middlebury’s

Language School, will deliver this year’s commencement address. Forman

became Vermont’s first teacher to receive the National Teacher of

the Year Award when President George W. Bush presented her with the honor

last year. Forman has spent the last year speaking on education topics

throughout the country and abroad as part of her duties as national teacher

of the year. Among many other accomplishments, Forman recently started

and will continue to teach a not-for-credit course in Arabic at MUHS to

an average crowd of roughly a dozen students. The students, who go to

the class at 6 a.m. once or twice a week, study Arabic culture out of

personal interest. Forman teaches it on her own time. She said learning

and teaching the Arabic language has provided her with a new historical

and cultural perspective, which she incorporates into many of her classes

at MUHS.

Following

Forman’s address, an honorary Doctor of Laws degree will be conferred

upon Raphael Confiant, associate professor of Creole at the University

of Antilles-Guyanes in Martinique and a founding member of the literary

Créolité movement.

Middlebury

College Professor Emeritus of Music Emory M. Fanning will accompany the

commencement procession and recession on the Mead Chapel organ.

Middlebury

College’s first Language School, the German School, was founded in

1915, followed by the French and Spanish Schools in 1916 and 1917, respectively.

Since then, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic programs have

been added. Next summer, a ninth school, the Portuguese School, will open.

The language programs follow an immersion philosophy, at the heart of

which is the Language Pledge - a formal commitment to speak, read and

write only in the students’ respective language of study for the

duration of the summer session.

Middlebury

also offers language programs at the C.V. Starr-Middlebury Schools Abroad

located in Buenos Aries, Argentina; Paris and Poitiers, France; Mainz

and Berlin, Germany; Ferrara and Florence, Italy; Irkutsk, Moscow, Voronezh

and Yaroslavl, Russia; Getafe, Logroño, Madrid and Segovia, Spain;

and Montevideo, Uruguay.



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