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2006 Symposium

2007: English Literacy for the Global University

The June Communication Symposium is an annual meeting of faculty and staff from both the Pittsburgh and Qatar campuses of Carnegie Mellon University. This year's symposium took place June 11-13, and the theme was "English Literacy for a Global University."   The three major departments sponsoring this event were the Department of English, the Department of Modern Languages, and the Intercultural Communication Center.   The overall goal of the symposium was to build one intellectual community that aims toward developing effective approaches for assisting students to develop the professional and technical English communication skills that they will need to function effectively in the emerging global knowledge economy.

Other objectives included:

1. Maintaining connections, both academic and collegial, between the Pittsburgh campus and the Qatar campus.
   
2. Discussing and troubleshooting the challenges both campuses share for educating multilingual students in English.
   
3. Discussing and troubleshooting challenges for communication education that might be unique to a particular campus but could be applicable to both.
   
4. Hearing different teachers' perspectives (both in the classroom and in the support center contexts) about teaching students who speak many varieties of English.
   
5. Laying groundwork for developing various research trajectories.