Founded in 2014 at The Graduate Center of City University of New York (CUNY), the Center for Integrated Language Communities (CILC) focuses on the teaching and learning of languages other than English, with a special focus on community colleges and minority serving institutions. CILC is one of sixteen national Language Resource Centers (LRC). These centers, first established by the U.S. Department of Education in 1990, share the common goal of developing resources to strengthen foreign language education in the U.S.

CILC conducts research and develops and disseminates materials which serve to better integrate lingua-cultural communities of practice, both small and large, from families, churches, and companies to K-12 schools, colleges, and governmental organizations. CILC projects emphasize areas such as heritage language learners, the use of educational technology to foster intercultural connections, and literacy development in languages other than English.

New Projects 2022-2026

• The Text-based Pedagogy Training (TxBPT) project develops, pilots, and disseminates modules for instructors on how to integrate text-based activities into existing courses.
• The Text-based Task Repository (TxBTR) project develops, pilots, and publishes text-based tasks for elementary and intermediate second and heritage language courses in five languages (Arabic, Japanese, Italian, Russian, and Spanish).
• The Text-based Effectiveness Research (TxBER) project investigates the academic outcomes of using text-based tasks with students at community colleges and Minority Serving Institutions.
• The Heritage Interpreting (HI) project researches the impact of an interpreting curriculum specifically designed to address strengths and needs of future interpreters who are heritage speakers.
• The National Dialogue on Literacies-Oriented Language Education (NDLLE) project hosted the CILC Summer Institute in 2025, which explored the opportunities that a focus on literacy development can afford to students and programs alike.

Announcement

• In September 2025, the U.S. DOE cut funding to the entire Title VI Language Resource Center (LRC) program, affecting all 16 centers. As a result, many LRCs will be unable to carry out some of their activities planned for the originally-funded fourth year (2025–2026) of the current cycle.
• While we have no choice but to suspend some of CILC’s originally funded projects, we will do our best to continue the work for which we can find the resources to do so. The CILC team remains committed to our goal of supporting the teaching and learning of languages other than English across the nation, through professional development, research, no-cost pedagogical materials, and professional dissemination.

Completed Projects 2014-2018

• The Language at the Community College Nexus (LCCN) project facilitated discussion on language instruction in the community college context and to generate knowledge about students and instructors of world languages at community colleges across the U.S. This project hosted the national Community-College-Language Forum (2014 and 2016) and administered the Students and Instructors of Languages at Community Colleges Surveys to a national sample in Fall 2015.

• The Heritage Arabic eBook (HAeB) project developed materials and curated resources for the teaching of Arabic to heritage language learners. Materials and resources were designed with the goal of advancing sociolinguistic awareness and developing proficiency and literacy in colloquial and Modern Standard Arabic.

• The Writing Proficiency of Heritage Language Learners (WPHLL) project investigated the writing proficiency of heritage language learners and disseminated research-based pedagogical recommendations. This project has produced biographical and linguistic profiles of heritage writers of Chinese, Korean, and Spanish, research findings on the relationship between writing proficiency and biographical data, as well as recommendations for the teaching of writing to heritage language learners at Intermediate and Advanced levels of proficiency.

• The Heritage Telecollaboration (HT) project developed materials and compiled resources for integrating telecollaborative projects—domestic or international—into heritage and mixed heritage/L2 courses. This project produced sample telecollaborative modules for the teaching of Chinese and Spanish in heritage and mixed heritage/L2 courses and provides consultations and on-demand workshops to facilitate the integration of telecollaborative pedagogies into existing courses.

• In Fall 2017, CILC launched the Teleplaza (Tpz)project, a portal that supports telecollaborative connections among heritage Spanish and Latinx Studies courses at the college level within the United States. Through Teleplaza, instructors partner with instructors at other institutions to implement telecollaborative projects in their courses by proposing their own telecollaborative projects or responding to another instructor’s call for partnership.