Linfield College has become a temporary home for four new foreign language teaching assistants.
Clément Hossaert from France and Mathias Steinlechner from Austria have been awarded Fulbright grants to take courses at Linfield and share their language and culture with Linfield students. They are among 400 young educators from 50 different countries who traveled to the United States through the Fulbright program to internationalize U.S. colleges and universities.
Hossaert received his master’s degree in French, European and American literature from the Université de Lille III Charles de Gaulle. As a teaching assistant for beginning and advanced French classes, he is in charge of two weekly conversation classes and meets individually, and informally, with a Linfield French students. “My role is to take care of conversation classes,” said Hossaert. “Students meet with me once a week and we are able to talk about anything.”
Steinlechner is the German teaching assistant and is also pursuing his master’s degree in English and history at the Leopold Franzens Universität Innsbruck. He plans to teach high school when he returns home to Austria. “Because of my educational background and the focus of my thesis I’ve always dreamed about a year in the U.S. where I could experience the culture and language first hand,” said Steinlechner. “When I heard about the Fulbright program, I immediately knew that this is what I wanted to do. The only thing I regret is that I won’t have more than one year here.”
In addition to the Fulbright grant winners, two additional students, Nozomi Imai from Japan and Alba Gonzalez Elipe from Spain, are also serving as foreign language teaching assistants.
Imai received her bachelor’s degree in English communication from the Tokyo Kasei University, and is currently a full-time student at Linfield majoring in international relations. She is also teaching three Japanese classes. “I thought joining this program would be very interesting,” said Imai. “With this program, I can challenge myself not only in an academic prospect but also as a language teacher. I would like to improve my teaching in the next two years and I enjoy learning a language and its culture with the students.”
Gonzalez Elipe completed degrees in child psychology and elementary education and holds a master’s from the University of Alicante in Spanish and English as a foreign language. During her university studies, she spent a year in Germany and experienced teaching Spanish to German students. “Having worked with youth in England and Poland, I’m excited to assist Linfield students in their acquisition of Spanish and to help those returning from study abroad enrich their knowledge of the Spanish-speaking world,” said Gonzalez Elipe.
Having young native speakers in the foreign language classes helps to strengthen Linfield classes and students’ language skills, according to Peter Richardson, professor of German. Assistants provide tutoring, which are opportunities for them to show Linfield students what contemporary student life is like in their countries. They also provide examples of different voices with accents representing different areas of the world.
“The assistants also audit Linfield courses while they’re on campus, bringing international perspectives and mature voices to bear on a wide range of topics,” he added. “They interact with our students outside of class as well—in clubs, at language tables, at international events, on intramural teams, and so on—demonstrating that people from other countries are human, that they don’t bite, and that our students have much to gain from learning more about faraway cultures from someone roughly their age.”
