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The Institution
The Middlebury Language Schools was established in 1915, with German as the first language offered. Since its inception, the immersion environment and the Language Pledge, an agreement all students keep to use only the language of study for the duration of the program, have been the hallmarks of its success. During the summer session, we offer a combination of non-degree language immersion courses from beginner to advanced alongside graduate degrees — a Master of Arts a Master of Arts in Applied Languages and Doctorate of Modern Languages, a degree structure unique to Middlebury.
Students can currently study Abenaki, Arabic, Chinese, English as an Additional Language, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, and Portuguese in our programs, with graduate offerings in all languages except Abenaki, Korean, and Portuguese. Each language school draws faculty from around the world to teach each summer.
The Language Schools is part of Middlebury, which also includes the undergraduate institution Middlebury College, the graduate institution Middlebury Institute of International Studies (in Monterey, CA), the Middlebury C.V. Starr Schools Abroad, the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English, and the Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences. Each of these units functions with some degree of independence while also enjoying collaboration across the institution to achieve greater goals.
Mission Statement
The Middlebury Language Schools welcome students from all walks of life and all parts of the global community. We provide expert education in languages and culture through innovative, immersive instruction and the demonstrated effectiveness of the Language Pledge to enhance linguistic excellence and intercultural understanding
Program Theme
In its earliest years, the Language Schools provided a language immersion environment for language teachers in the United States who were unable to travel to Europe during the height of World War I. Language teachers have always been an important part of the Middlebury Language Schools community, from the teachers who work in our programs each summer to the teachers who attend to sharpen their skills or obtain a graduate degree. Thus the proposed licensure track program outlined in this portfolio brings us back full circle, in a way, to the origins of our longstanding success in the field of language education. We strive to engage our students not just in the teaching of language, but instead a vision of teaching in language — an environment in which both teacher and student are using the language as a tool of inquiry, exploration, and communication.
Over the past several years, we have been developing supports to help students interested in teaching licensure achieve their goals through alternative programs such as Vermont's Peer Review program. Seeing increased demand for these options, we have decided in the past year to pursue an official licensure track so that we can support our graduate students' goals and contribute to the field of world language education in a more systematic fashion. Our initial new program review proposal was approved in November of 2023, and since that time, we have been exploring in detail which state requirements we are already prepared to meet, and which will required our increased attention and investment in the years to come.
With six courses in the proposed sequence undertaken in the target language, our candidates will have exemplary depth of knowledge in key content areas, as well as the linguistic fluency to teach about cultural topics in the target language. Our candidates will benefit from being immersed not only in the target language, but also in the teaching environment of our time-tested, century-old language program, where they will be able to see highly effective teaching modeled both in and out of the classroom.
Existing Program at Middlebury College
The chart below shows the existing approved licensure preparation pathway available at Middlebury College, the undergraduate institution. As explained above, Middlebury College and Middlebury Language Schools operate separately under the Middlebury umbrella — there is no simultaneous overlap between students in the undergraduate program at Middlebury College and the graduate programs at Middlebury Language Schools (although some Middlebury College graduates may later attend Middlebury Language Schools' graduate programs). Language departments at Middlebury College function separately from the Language Schools, which each have their own director and internal administrative structure that has control over curriculum and admissions. There is little overlap in faculty across the two domains of the institution.
Faculty Currently Working on This Program
Thor Sawin, Associate Dean of Language Schools, Curriculum
Thor first joined Middlebury in 2013, on the faculty of the Teaching Foreign Languages/Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS). Before joining Middlebury, Thor did a Dual MA in TESOL and Linguistics at Michigan State University, and then taught for 3 years at LCC International University in Lithuania, teaching German and training teachers of English as an International Language. Thor also trained English teachers and German at universities in China (Yanbian University) and South Korea (Handong Global University), before earning a PhD in Linguistics (Second Language Acquisition and Linguistic Anthropology) at the University of South Carolina. During ten years of training language teachers at MIIS, Thor sought to support language teaching beyond Middlebury by becoming a school board member and eventually president for the Dual Language Academy of the Monterey Peninsula, a Spanish-English public dual immersion school. Thor also helped run teacher training projects through the US Department of State's Fulbright (Switzerland), English Language Specialist (Serbia), and English Language Programs (India & Bangladesh, Azerbaijan) offices, and taught German four times for Middlebury Language Schools in the summer programs, and taught twice for Middlebury College in the Winter Term. In April 2023, Thor joined Middlebury Language Schools full-time, charged with language advocacy, supporting curriculum, faculty development and research on learning. A major reason for the cancellation of language programs at the university level is a lack of opportunity for students to develop interest and skills in language in secondary school, often due to a critical shortage of qualified world language teachers. That shortage is also the main reason school districts move to close or restrict their language offerings. Thor is passionate about helping Middlebury, with its unique history and expertise in language education, be a force in addressing this critical shortage of world language teachers.
Mairead Harris, Associate Director of Chinese School, Lecturer in Chinese & Language Schools Teaching Licensure Project Staff
Mairead completed the Vermont Alternative Pathway (Peer Review) program in 2013, obtaining state teaching licensure for Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, and English Language Learners (ELL) for grades PK-12. During the time she underwent Peer Review, Mairead worked as a Spanish language teacher for grades K-6 at Rutland Town Elementary School on a provisional teaching license; after obtaining licensure, Mairead taught Chinese in grades 6-12 at Stowe Middle and High School from 2013 to 2021, spending most summers during that period working at the Middlebury Language Schools teaching adults in the immersion setting. For the academic year 2020-2021, Mairead served as the Coordinator for the Lamoille South Unified Union (LSUU) School District's Virtual Academy, completing the required internship hours to apply for an administrative license for the state of Vermont under the supervision of Valerie Sullivan, the former Curriculum Director at LSUU. In her time at Stowe High School and LSUU, Mairead developed a Chinese language program from scratch, growing enrollment from 30 students in 2013-14 to a peak enrollment of 123 (in a school with a total enrollment of roughly 450 and no language requirement). Mairead developed robust program infrastructure, including multiple overnight and international travel experiences for students, a years-long exchange program with Xiangjiang Middle/High School in Guangzhou, China, and a full-time teaching internship program funded through revenue from the exchange program. When faced with the pandemic and resulting changes in international education and local school finance, Mairead made the difficult decision to leave public K-12 education as a full-time career, and is now working as a full-time Lecturer in the Greenberg-Starr Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Middlebury. Despite this shift, she has remained committed to supporting public education, and particularly languages within the public education system. For the past five years, Mairead has been working to educate graduate students at the Middlebury Language Schools about Vermont's Peer Review option, as well as similar alternative licensure options in other states. This work led to many of the conversations about the need for an official licensure program through the Middlebury Language Schools; since Thor Sawin has taken on the role of Associate Dean for Curriculum, Mairead has been working with Thor on designing the proposed licensure program.
Cooperating Language School Directors
Nader Morkus, Director of the School of Arabic
Cecilia Chang, Director of the School of Chinese
Armelle Crouzières-Ingenthron, Director of the School of French
Bettina Matthias, Director of the School of German
Elizabeth Gerner & Yaron Peleg(outgoing) / Adi Raz(incoming), Co-Directors of the School of Hebrew
Donato Santeramo, Director of the School of Italian
Motoko Tabuse, Director of the School of Japanese
Sahie Kang, Director of the School of Korean
Jacobo Sefami, Director of the School of Spanish
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