Tired of all that construction around grounds? Don't worry - at least one building will be completed and ready for students by fall 2002: the Monroe Lane Language House.
"Given every possible crystal ball we can use, the house is going to be up in time," said Robert Hueckstaedt, chairman of the department of Asian and Middle Eastern languages and cultures.
The house, located on the corner of Jefferson Park Avenue and Monroe Lane and across from Student Health, will be home to seven different languages. Students of Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Hindi-Urdu, Italian, Japanese and Persian will have the opportunity to live in an environment of total language immersion in the new house.
Language houses are important because they offer "a chance to be able to use the language outside of class -_ that's invaluable," Huekstedt said. "Even if you're making some mistakes, the language becomes much more alive" in such an environment.
Currently, the University has four language houses: the French house, the Spanish house, the Russian house and the German house.
"I've always wanted to live in a language house, but there was never any opportunity for me," said Katie Spencer, a third-year College student and student of Arabic. "U.Va. is so diverse, but we only had four languages represented before."
Interest in the seven languages in this house has been increasing, Huekstedt said. Chinese, which has the biggest program in the AMELC department, has about 160 students this year, he said.
The Monroe Lane Language House will have room for about 75 students, with a block of about 10 rooms for each language.
There also will be a "language assistant" for each block, who is a native or near-native speaker. That person's responsibility will be to make sure the language is spoken, to hold chat sessions and to coordinate cultural activities.
The Housing Division of the University of Virginia is spending over 7 million on the building, which will have four floors, a dining room, a kitchen, laundry and vending facilities, study and seminar spaces and bedrooms, Director of Housing Mark Doherty said.
The house will have ethernet capabilities for every room, air-conditioning and elevators. It may also have satellite dishes to provide access to the programming from the nations represented by the seven languages of the house.
According to its online brochure, the new Monroe Lane Language House, which is located next to the Spanish and French houses will be part of the "Language Precinct at U.Va."
"The house is going to give us an excellent opportunity to achieve synergy with the other language houses in the area," Doherty said.
Applications for the house are already online and organizers hope there will be a lot of interest, Hueckstedt said.
"I'm definitely going to apply," Spencer said. "And a lot of people I've talked to are interested"
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