There’s a new place for language on campus! Newly renovated and brightly painted, the SLaLS Language Centre is located on the third floor of the St. Patrick’s Building.

Home to both the university’s Modern Languages and academic ESL programs, the space boasts a dedicated language resource room, two language technology classrooms, a collaborative technology space, and faculty offices.

The Language Resource Room is a sunlit space at the western end of the building with a growing collection of language learning reference materials – dictionaries, magazines, travel books, easy readers – available for sign out. The room also offers several computers, a comfortable seating area, and multilingual language monitors staffing the front desk. Already the space has become popular with a growing number of drop-in students and teaching assistants from a variety of language classes who use the space to meet one-on-one with students. Some groups with a language/cultural focus have also held events in the room and more are planned along with film nights, language tables, and other language-related activities. Ultimately, the vision for this space is that it serve as a dynamic locus of language learning and cultural enrichment serving all students in Carleton’s Modern Languages and academic ESL programs.

The Centre’s two technology classrooms (one Mac, one Windows) were designed with interactive communicative language learning in mind. The Mac room, in particular, targets the unique (and considerable) video recording needs of large classes in the rapidly growing American Sign Language program. While the Windows room provides a versatile space for individual and/or group work. Notably, the latter is also a test site for “3D Virtual Immersive and Cultural Preparation,” an online academic ESL class taught using the Carleton Virtual platform.

Adjacent to both technology classrooms, a collaborative technology space provides a soundproof audio and video recording environment for student projects and instructional materials development. The space contains a green screen and editingsuite and is supported by an educational technical consultant.

Faculty and departmental offices for other SLaLS’ units (Linguistics, Applied Linguistics & Discourse Studies, and CCDP) can still be found in Paterson Hall.  For more information about the School, please visit the SLaLS website.

The floor is also home to the Confucius Institute and the CAEL office.