The College of Arts and Sciences encourages faculty and students to link their academic experiences at the university to initiatives that benefit the community as a whole.

The IWL received a grant from Jefferson Trust to launch the Language Forward Initiative in 2018 fall. The initiative creates real-time immersive online programs that aim to expand opportunities for UVA students to interact with native speakers abroad.

The Faculty Retreat, newly launched in Spring 2015, aims to bring world language and literature faculty to a relaxing and thought-provoking workshop setting for professional development.

IWL has currently hosted two fall symposiums, the first on October 31, 2012 and the second on October 30, 2015.

The Speaker Series creates an interactive platform for nationally and internationally renowned scholars and researchers to share cutting-edge research findings and practices in the teaching and learning of world languages, cultures, and advanced technology with UVa faculty across different world languages and disciplines.

With a Grant for Learning awarded in Spring 2012, Emily Scida (Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese) spearheaded a series of five monthly roundtable discussions on foreign language teaching and learning.  The roundtables created an interdepartmental learning community of teachers, bringing together GTAs, lecture

Faculty in Chinese, French, Spanish, Swahili, and teaching English as a second language have created a wide spectrum of community-based engagement projects and courses. 

In 2014, colleagues from French and Spanish initiated a project to integrate ePortfolio pedagogy in beginning and intermediate language courses.

The Virginia STARTALK Chinese Teacher Academy, developed and directed by Miao-fen Tseng, has received up to 1.5 million since 2008.

For many years, faculty in the IWL community have incorporated Contemplative Pedagogy in language teaching and learning and have yielded fruitful outcomes. Contemplative approaches center human flourishing and well-being and foster deep learning through focused attention, reflection, and self-awareness of body-mind connection.

The Consortium for Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTLs) is an initiative among University of Virginia (UVA), Duke University, and Vanderbilt University. It was initially launched by joint effort between UVA and Duke in fall 2013 and expanded to a three-institutional partnership in fall 2015 when Va

The Institute of World Languages (IWL) Mentorship Program at UVA is designed to build supportive, cross‑departmental relationships among language‑teaching faculty.

The Institute of World Language (IWL) aims to promote and support Open Educational Resources for Language Learning (OERLL).