The award is part of a $180,000 grant to the State University at Binghamton from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, designed to help UB and five other SUNY institutions develop adaptations of Binghamton's successful Languages Across the Curriculum (LxC) program.

Basic premise of the LxC program is that written and audiovisual materials in foreign languages can and should be used throughout the university, and that use of these materials should be linked to the subject matter interests of students.

Unless students major in language or areas studies, they lack opportunities to develop foreign language competencies in their areas of academic interest. International students lack opportunities to use their English skills during the course of their education. LxC programs address these problems by enlisting international students as language resource specialists to prepare foreign language materials for use in courses that would not usually include such materials.

For example, students who have a reading knowledge of Spanish (or another language) and are enrolled in a course on international business or comparative policies, could meet in a weekly study group to discuss course-specific articles they had read. The articles would substitute for some of the regular course assignments as well as allow students to obtain intercultural information and international perspectives on course matter.

At Binghamton, in an upper division history course entitled "AIDS," four students shared responsibility for a 60-minute presentation on AIDS in the Spanish-speaking world, based on readings they had done with the help of a Nicaraguan graduate student in sociology. The readings covered such areas as the spread of AIDS-causing HIV in the Spanish-speaking world; the cultural context for the spread of the virus in Latin America; how the intervention of the Roman Catholic church clerical community resulted in abandonment of some efforts to encourage the use of condoms; and a comparison of the success of the AIDS fight in Spain and Latin America.

Among the targeted areas for the program at UB are anthropology, geography, history, political science and management, although other disciplines will be considered. Interested faculty members contact Mark Ashwill, project director, at 645-2292.