A Letter from the Director of Graduate Studies
Welcome to the pages on graduate studies in French at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Department offers masters and doctoral programs in three main areas: French Studies, French Linguistics and French Language Teaching. The Department also participates in the interdepartmental Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education (SLATE).
I invite you to consult the list of faculty and their recent publications to appreciate the rich variety of their research. The Department has hosted a series of major scholarly conferences in the last several years: the annual Twentieth-Century French Studies Colloquium in spring 2003; the 10th International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences in fall 2005; a colloquium in honor of the sixtieth anniversary of the Départements d'outre-mer and the Territoires d'outre-mer: A 60 ans: la départementalisation à la croisée des chemins; a Conference on Interfaces and Visualizations; and the Rhetoric of the Other V conference. The Department has also hosted an annual Tournées French Film festival during the last three years.
The Department values the teaching and mentoring of graduate students, and students receive close attention from the faculty. We offer one of the best training programs nationally in language pedagogy. Well established teaching exchange programs with universities in Dijon, Metz, Liège, Québec, and the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon, enable students to spend a year abroad. The Department also funds students so that they can present their research at professional conferences.
All of the students we admit receive financial aid either in the form of teaching assistantships, fellowships, or research assistantships. Several of our students have received external fellowships and grants (for example, two of our students have received Chateaubriand fellowships for research in France; one, a grant from the Educational Testing Service in Princeton to gather data for her dissertation in Paris).
To apply to our graduate program, please follow this link
For priority consideration for financial aid, students applying to enter in the Fall of 2009 should complete their application by January 15, 2009.
According to the UIUC Policy Statement regarding the appointment of Non-Native Speaking Graduate Students as Teaching Assistants, updated March 1, 1997, all non-native English speaking graduate students who are candidates for classroom teaching assistantships must take the SPEAK test or Test of Spoken English (TSE) and receive a score of 50 or higher. If this policy applies to you, please take the test before coming to the United States.
If you have any questions about our graduate programs or if there is any other way in which we could be of assistance, please do not hesitate to contact me, Professor Peter Golato, Director of Graduate Studies, at pgolato@illinois.edu.