Before she came to Kenyon's Department of Modern Languages and Literatures in 1992, associate professor of Spanish Clara Roman-Odio didn't think it was possible for students to become fluent in a foreign language by studying only at the college level.

"I'd always thought students needed to begin studying a language in elementary school in order to achieve any kind of proficiency," she says. "But because of the Kenyon Intensive Language Model (KILM), many students are able to enter the College never having studied a foreign language, and four years later, when they graduate, they are bilingual." Considered one of the more striking features of the curriculum, KILM is based on total immersion in a language and culture.

A native of Puerto Rico, Roman-Odio has recently shifted her research from pop culture and literature to the use of technology in the classroom. She uses innovative multimedia technology, such as a computer program where students listen to songs and transcribe the lyrics on a computer, as an aid to cultural assimilation.

"I believe this technology is particularly effective in helping students to learn foreign languages and to learn about foreign cultures," she says. In order to prove her theory, Roman-Odio has begun a research project called "Assessment Methods for Multimedia-Based Language Learning," with the help of a $15,000 grant from Middlebury College's Project 2001.