Department of Foreign Languages

Mission

Consistent with Bradley University's identification of major global concentration areas for curricular emphasis (Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Japan, and Israel), the Department of Foreign Languages endeavors to meet the diverse needs and interests of the Bradley University students through sequenced, coherent programs of undergraduate level coursework in German, French, Spanish, Hebrew, and Japanese.

Through the judicious balancing and integration of skills-based and content-based learning activites at all levels of foreign language instruction, the Department has as its primary enabling objectives:

to provide students with high quality major or minor programs in German, French, and Spanish;
to provide students with significant exposure to those less-commonly taught languages identified as central to the university's mission;
to provide foreign language students with those necessary professional skills and experiences which will enable productive employment in foreign-language related areas after completion of the undergraduate degree;
to collaborate and interface productively with those professional and non-professional programs of study at the university which see foreign language competence as central to realizing their own distinctive education missions;
to cooperate in the identification of high quality study abroad programs which enable students to realize most fully their language competence through life experiences outside the United States; and
to provide those kinds of liberal arts and sciences-based learning experiences which enhance the university's primary function, that of developing graduates who:

a) possess open, resilient, and ceaselessly inquiring minds;

b) are able to think, to create and to analyze critically facts, attitudes, and values;

c) have developed a high degree of awareness of and sensitivity to cultural diversity both at the national and international levels; and

d) appreciate the nature, history, and role of the arts and sciences in general and language specifically in the global context.