What We Provide
Institutional membership in NASILP provides access to the Association's resources and services, especially in the area of curriculum design and instructional methodologies that incorporate a high degree of assessment (quality control) through a network of specialists from universities throughout the U.S. and Canada.
It serves as the only national forum for the interchange of ideas and expertise for the development and support of self-instructional academic curricula for low enrollment languages. Any academic institution may apply for membership.
NASILP provides member institutions with:
- Resources
- Consultation
- Curriculum design and operation
- Annual Workshop Conference
More than 110 institutions, from the secondary school district, the community college to small college, and small and larger research institutions nation-wide have already established NASILP self-instructional language programs (SILPs). The benefits of offering a self-instructional language program are:
- SILPs allow a wide variety of language offering from the most commonly-taught LCTLs such as Italian and Japanese to the least commonly-taught LCTLs such as Apache, Kazakh, Lao, and Romanian.
- SILPs allow an institutions to enhance program cost-effectively: additional expense for faculty for each new language can be avoided; this includes recruiting time and costs, salary, and benefits giving students the opportunity to study the LCTLs which would otherwise be unavailable to them.
- SILPs have proven to be an academically sound, rigorous, and viable alternative to traditional instructor-based languages instruction.