WILD – Weekend Immersed in Language Development
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Sponsored by the Alabama Association of Foreign Language Teachers
Co-sponsored byThe Alabama Humanities Foundation,
 a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities
1209 Chesterfield Rd. Huntsville, AL  35803

Project Directors:
Linda Paragone, AAFLT Exec.  Director
Mirella Hodges, AATSP Vice-President

| Stay tuned for 2008 dates and additional information. |

The Alabama Association of Foreign Language Teachers seeks to enhance the opportunities for foreign language teachers and students to improve their spoken language skills and fully realizes that travel abroad is not accessible to most teachers and students on a regular basis. Therefore, the AAFLT has provided several opportunities to its teachers and students to practice and improve their skills in residential, immersion experiences led by fluent scholars.

The AAFLT is proud to announce that the 4th annual Weekend Immersed in Language Development (W.I.L.D.) student experience will be offered in December for students of Spanish, French, AND German who have completed at least one full course of the target language and who are at least in the 10th grade in the fall. This 2 ½ day residential program will take place at the YMCA Hargis Retreat just outside Birmingham. The activities planned will include daily living experiences as well as cultural and academic learning experiences. The purpose of the project is to put the students in a setting where they will use the language they are acquiring in a non-threatening, relaxed atmosphere whose goal is communication. Therefore, activities will include physical activities, film discussion, games, music, art, history and grammar. Throughout the weekend, second language acquisition will take place either directly from lectures and reading/writing experiences or indirectly through daily living experiences and games.

For some of the activities, the students will be grouped according to their level of study, but for the majority of the time the students of varying levels will be mixed so they may learn from each other as well as from their instructors. The planning committee consists of university and high school scholars. It will begin on Friday evening, and end in the early afternoon of Sunday. It is opened to 30 students of French, 30 students of Spanish, and 30 students of German. The students will be chaperoned and instructed by 18 teachers/scholars. The students will be selected based on their level of study, grades in their language courses, their teacher and personal letters of recommendation and an essay explaining what they hope to gain from the experience and how learning a second language can help them in their career choices.

For further information, contact the program directors:
Mirella Hodges (juanamirellahodges@yahoo.com)  
Linda Paragone at (Linda.paragone@knology.net)