The Consortium's conferences have included large national audiences. By seeking to pose new questions about foreign language education, the Consortium has, again and again, charted new territory. The conferences have covered the following topics:
— “ The Governance of Foreign Language Teaching and Learning (Princeton University, 1987). The Consortium's first conference provided the first occasion for considering the status, credentials, and professional training of adjunct faculty and resulted in the publication of The Governance of Foreign Language Teaching and Learning, ed. Peter C. Patrikis. (New Haven: The Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning, 1988.) The Consortium was invited to conduct a Roundtable on the governance of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean language studies at the Fiftieth Anniversary Meeting of the Association of Asian Studies (April, 1991).
— “ Language Learning and Liberal Education (University of Chicago, 1988). This national meeting sought to challenge the goal of native-speaker emulation in foreign language teaching and to ask how that teaching was part of undergraduate education. Papers are available in Language Learning and Liberal Education, ed. Peter C. Patrikis. (New Haven: The Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning, 1988).
— “ Foreign Language Acquisition Research and Classroom Practice (University of Pennsylvania, 1989). While there have been many conferences on the two parts of the title of this conference, this occasion was the first on which the two distinct activities were examined in unison. Papers are available in Foreign Language Acquisition Research and the Classroom, ed. Barbara Freed. (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Co., 1991).
— “ Text and Context: Cross-Cultural and Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Language Study (Cornell University, 1990). This conference examined foreign language education from the perspective of other humanistic disciplines, especially sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and literary theory and resulted in the publication of Text and Context: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Language Study, eds. Claire J. Kramsch and Sally McConnell-Ginet (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Co., 1991).
— “ Language and Content: Discipline-Based Approaches to Language Study (Brown University, 1991). Foreign language across the curriculum is now a major trend in college foreign language programs, and this was the first conference to examine the different forms of the trend and to pose questions about its advantages and disadvantages. Papers are available in Language and Content: Discipline-Based Approaches to Language Study, eds. Merle Krueger and Frank Ryan (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Co., 1992).
— “ Advanced Japanese Language Instruction (Princeton University, 1991). This gathering was the first national conference to address the advanced level of instruction and to bring together different factions within the Japanese language teacher profession.
— “ Advanced Chinese Language Instruction (Stanford University, 1992). This meeting was the first national conference to address the advanced level of instruction and to assess what might be common needs among radically differing programs.
— “ Computing for Publication, Pedagogy, and Research in Chinese (Dartmouth College, 1994).
— “ Transformations: Technology, Foreign Languages, and Undergraduate Education (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1999). This conference attracted some two hundred teachers of twenty languages and administrators from seven countries and almost ninety colleges, universities, and professional organizations.
—“ Foreign Language Literacies: New Perspectives on Reading (Brown University, 2000). Seeking to bring together new research and new practices on reading foreign language texts, the papers for this conference ranged from cognitive science and literacy research to cross-cultural computing and the ethics of reading. Papers from the conference are collected in Reading Between the Lines: Perspectives on Foreign Language Literacy, ed. Peter C. Patrikis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.)
—“ Foreign Language Collaborations and the Web (University of Pennsylvania, 2002). An examination of existing and potential collaborations among students, faculty, institutions, and countries for foreign language teaching and learning, followed by a Tech Fair.
— Reassessing the Foreign Language Curriculum in the Age of Globalization: Responses to the MLA Report on Foreign Languages and Higher Education (Brown University, 2008). A conference to examine the findings and recommendations of the report from May, 2008, by the MLA's ad hoc committee on foreign languages entitled "Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World".