Translation Laboratory Education Reading for Research Foreign language reading courses for small groups of graduate students from many disciplines are offered under the sponsorship of the Graduate College and with the collaboration of the language departments. For direct access to texts central to a discipline and to current writing which will not be translated, advanced study and research usually require the ability to read more than one language effectively. At the University of Iowa, this ability is developed in a two-stage process. In the first stage, departments of foreign languages provide graduate students with initial grounding in the grammar of a language and with practice in reading general texts. Many of these courses are avaiIable during the summer session.
Courses are available to graduate students in all disciplines and to interested faculty.
Perhaps the most important strategy to be developed is the use of prior knowledge in the field as contextual clues to an understanding of the text. In order to stimulate discussion and generate research questions, each study text is chosen for its wide range of applicability to several related disciplines. Reference resources in the language of instruction are surveyed. Progress in courses is evaluated on the basis of information mastered as well as of linguistic performance. Instruction in the program is provided by the Translation Laboratory, which specializes in discipline-based applications of foreign language knowledge.