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COURSES OF STUDY
Birmingham-Southern College Catalog 2014-2015
SPECIAL PROGRAMS
Foreign Language Across the Curriculum
Birmingham-Southern College offers students opportunities to
enhance their foreign language proficiency and cultural knowledge through
coursework in other discipline areas. The Foreign Language Across the
Curriculum program adds a foreign language component to courses in a
variety of fields. Students taking these courses as FLAC courses receive an
additional ¼ unit of credit in the foreign language. Such courses allow
students to make sophisticated use of language skills, provide greater
flexibility in foreign language study (beyond the traditional language
classroom), and demonstrate the degree to which language influences
ideas. Students in the program develop a keener cultural awareness and
language skills necessary to participate more fully in today’s shrinking,
interdependent world.
Students must register for the disciplinary content course and for the
FLAC component (language courses numbered 333) during the same term.
Exceptions are students who have already had the disciplinary content
course; these students may register for the FLAC component any time it is
offered. Students taking the FLAC component do additional readings in
the foreign language and meet with the foreign language professor and,
possibly, the discipline professor one hour per week for discussion of those
readings.
Students receive ¼ unit credit in the appropriate foreign language in
addition to the unit credit for the disciplinary content course. If a student
takes four FLAC components in the same foreign language, that resulting
one unit of credit can be applied to a major or minor in that language. The
minimum language level eligibility for the program is completion of the
third semester course and consent.
Undergraduate Research
The Charles B. Vail College Fellows Program, Birmingham-Southern’s
program of undergraduate research, provides a formal structure for joint
faculty-student research and teaching. The program has a two-tiered design.
Students in the first tier, Research Fellows and Teaching Fellows, receive
academic credit for their projects. Teaching Fellows register for 298, 398 or
498, Teaching Experience; Research Fellows, for 293, 393, 493, Independent
Study. An individualized study contract needs to be completed for 293,
393, 493. Students in the second tier, Distinguished Fellows, receive a
$1,000 tuition scholarship rather than academic credit.
Vail College Fellow projects are varied and take many different forms:
teaching assistantships, writing center tutor appointments, research in the
humanities, laboratory research in the sciences, for example. Many of these
projects lead to scholarly presentations and publications.
