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Editor’s Note: Every four years, the U.S. Department of Education designates sixteen Title VI centers across the country to support language teaching and learning. The Second Language Teaching and Research Center (L2TReC) at the University of Utah, under the leadership of Director Fernando Rubio and Co-Director Jane Frances Hacking, was recently designated a Title VI center.

L2TReC was founded seven years ago to serve as a hub for second language teaching and learning research. One of its main missions is to support K-20 articulation, an important issue for language programs across the country and especially for those in Utah. With 40,000 students studying six languages in immersion programs and many adults who have lived abroad, Utah serves as a fertile landscape for articulation research.

Leveraging this context, L2TReC has three main goals:

• Identify and disseminate effective teaching practices in K-9 immersion programs
• Identify and disseminate effective bridge programs for 9-20 language learners
• Facilitate the Seal of Biliteracy in less commonly taught languages

L2TReC will first identify effective teaching practices in K-9 immersion programs and then develop video libraries that exemplify those practices. They will also use a corpus of learner language that has been developed over the past few years to document language learning. This corpus will serve as the basis for workshops and online modules for teachers to recognize and address patterns of difficulty in language learning.

L2TReC will also investigate Utah’s Bridge Program in which high school and college educators co-teach dual credit courses for high school students who have passed AP exams. Students earn high school credit and upper division college credit that counts towards a language major or minor. Similar to the K-9 articulation research and dissemination project, L2TReC will identify successful teaching practices and develop video libraries to illustrate effective practices in secondary programs.

As many states across the country have experienced, issuing Seals of Biliteracy for less commonly taught languages can be a challenge and represents a significant barrier for learners. L2TReC will train native speakers of Nepali, Tongan, and Samoan and develop a proficiency assessment so that learners of these languages have access to the Seal of Biliteracy.

All of L2TReC’s work will be documented and shared with others across the country who face the same articulation issues and Seal of Biliteracy challenges. Please visit their website directly at https://l2trec.utah.edu/.