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2008: Developing Disciplinary Literacy

Please join us June 9, 10, and 11 for the 2008 June Communication Symposium at CMU in Pittsburgh. This year’s symposium theme is “Developing Disciplinary Literacy,” and we need your help to make the discussions worthwhile. The last three symposia have yielded rich exchanges and ideas. This year’s symposium aims to build on the first three by emphasizing ways to support the development of discipline-specific literacy abilities as students enter and complete their academic majors.

With help from three experts in the field of language and literacy, we will
work on the challenges associated with supporting English literacy in your
field. We hope that this year’s participants will leave the symposium with
practical, hands-on guidelines for setting literacy targets, developing
course materials, and enlisting appropriate support for their courses.

The June Communication Symposium is an annual meeting of faculty and staff from both the Pittsburgh and Qatar campuses of Carnegie Mellon University. The two departments sponsoring this event are the Department of English and the Department of Modern Languages. The overall goal of the symposium is 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 include:

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.