Mission Statement

The mission of the Committee for Multilingual Teaching, Research, and Learning (CMTRL) is to support multilingual education, as well as heritage language maintenance and development by facilitating articulation between K-12 and higher education, promoting advanced language study, and encouraging research on early bilingualism and dual language immersion (DLI).

Established in 2013, our committee consists of faculty members and staff from UW College of Arts & Sciences and College of Education, and the Seattle Public Schools.

Goals and Activities

• We support research on immersion language education by sharing faculty resources, informing undergraduate and graduate students of research opportunities, and encouraging outreach to DLI programs in the state of Washington.
• We organize activities on campus to host bilingual (Japanese-English, Mandarin-English, and Spanish-English) high school and middle school students. These activities include academic events that leverage advanced language study while acquainting K-12 students with bilingual professionals. They aim to familiarize DLI students with advanced proficiency uses of the language they are learning, as they interview professionals who use bilingualism in their line of work. We also see these events as an opportunity to foster recruitment at UW of bilingual and underrepresented minority students.
• Through our interactions with members form the College of Education, we support recruitment for the Masters in Teaching (MIT) that certifies people to be world language teachers, collaborate to assure that classes that serve as prerequisites for MIT are offered regularly, and provide additional perspectives on curricular decisions involving the MIT.
• We build connections within UW to support teaching recruitment, at a local and international level. We collaborate in activities intended to help WA state teachers build the expertise required to be able to support the specific needs of bilingual students and heritage language learners.
• We aim to support bilingual families committed to maintain their minority language. To this end, we disseminate resources and participate in outreach activities organized by Seattle Public Schools, as well as parents.
• We serve in an advisory capacity for Seattle Public Schools and other school districts in Washington State regarding questions of DLI education.