Introduction

One of the distinctive features of Language Flagship programs is an overt strategy for developing language skills across a wide range of subject matter. The effect is an expansion of the traditional undergraduate foreign language curriculum to include general education topics, area studies and work in the students' respective major disciplines. Individual Flagship programs, while sharing this common goal, have tailored their pedagogical approaches to interdisciplinary language learning to meet the needs of local students and conditions. Some programs provide individualized tutorials; some offer content classes taught in the target language by an expert in the field and some favor a language across the curriculum approach that permits language specialists to teach subject matter not normally associated with foreign language study. The strategies that programs have adopted to foster interdisciplinary language learning, and the pedagogical approaches that accompany them, are the focus of this chapter.

Traditionally, foreign language programs in the United States have concentrated somewhat narrowly on the language and literature of the target culture, often with the intent of preparing students for graduate work in the same discipline. The Language Flagship program, on the contrary, aspires to create global professionals, that is, individuals with a strong disciplinary background in their diverse areas of expertise combined with Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) 3 (Appendix A) proficiency in at least one language in addition to English. ILR 3, General Professional Proficiency, requires an ability ‘to speak the language with sufficient accuracy and vocabulary to participate effectively in most formal and informal conversations on practical, social and professional topics’ (Interagency Language Roundtable [ILR], 2015). The challenge for domestic Flagship programs, in order to realize this goal, has been to expand traditional language and literature curricula to include the practical and social topics that characterize global professionals and, because Flagship students major in so many different disciplines, the professional topics that students will need in their future careers.