The Consortium’s workshops are small meetings focusing most often on a single language, pedagogical concern, or technological issue. The workshops that cover the state of a field have the tradition of being the first such gatherings of their kind. Participants prepare overviews of their program in advance, bring locally produced materials, and have the opportunity to discuss practical matters and needs for future development. Some have even resulted in the establishment of new professional associations (e.g. the American Association of Teachers of Czech).
To date, Consortium workshops have included:
— training in the use of Consortium-sponsored software (Dartmouth, 1987).
— training for oral proficiency interviews in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish (University of Pennsylvania, 1988).
— a study of materials for third-, fourth-, and fifth-year Russian.
— assessment of the need for materials for intermediate and advanced Chinese.
— the teaching of American language and culture to international teaching assistants. The presentations at that workshop have been published in a special issue of English for Specific Purposes; An International Journal.
— culturally authentic oral proficiency examinations for South Asian languages. This was the first workshop to gather together teachers from a wide variety of South Asian languages and resulted in the publication by the Consortium of new, culturally authentic situation cards for oral proficiency interviews. The cards are availble from Dr. Vijay Gambhir of the University of Pennsylvania (mail to: vgambhir@sas.upenn.edu).
— Russian cultural literacy. The Consortium has supported several projects in this area: a set of computer-assisted exercises for intermediate Russian based upon the protocols of university life, a fourth-year textbook in Russian on Russian cultural history, a reader of post-glasnost literature, unrehearsed interviews in the new Russian, and preparation of advanced materials on current debates within the new intelligentsia.
— review of curricular needs for intermediate and advanced Japanese. This workshop resulted in two publications: Change and Challenge: Intermediate and Advanced Japanese Language Instruction; Report on A Symposium, 5-8 October 1989, Cambridge, Massachusetts (New Haven, CT: The Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning, 1990) and in Japanese "Henka-e no cho¯sen - America ni okeru nihongo kyo¯iku no ayumi," (The Challenge of Change: the History of Japanese Language Instruction in the United States), Nihongo Kyoiku Tsushin, vol. 1, no. 2, Spring, 1990.
— the curricular issues of intermediate German (Yale University, 1991).
— the development of the virtual language laboratory (Stanford University, 1994).
— new trends in the teaching of African languages. The Consortium has thus far sponsored three workshops for African languages: one took place in conjunction with meetings of the African Studies Association in Seattle in 1991 and focused on current trends in teaching and learning; the second focused on issues of discourse analysis and preparation of curricular materials and took place at Berkeley in 1992; the third which explored computer applications for enhancing instruction took place at Yale in 1993.)
— the state of Czech language teaching (University of Pennsylvania, 1992).
— the state of Hungarian language teaching (University of Pennsylvania, 1993).
— the state of Polish language teaching (University of Pennsylvania, 1994).
— the state of French minority languages (University of Pennsylvania, 1997).
— the state of minority languages of China (University of Pennsylvania, 1997).
— the state of Tibetan language studies (University of Pennsylvania, 1998).
- the state of Modern Greek language teaching (Brown University, 1998).
- the state of Korean language teaching (Columbia University, 1999).
- the state of advanced Spanish language teaching (MIT, 2000).
- adapting and disseminating the web-based, multimedia program Cultura (Brown, 2004).
- programming for LCTLs at Research Institutions with special attention to Turkish (Princeton, 2006).
- Social Computing Technologies: Experiences, Challenges, Opportunities (MIT, 2006).
- Composing Textbooks for African Languages (Columbia, 2007).