The Linghetti Team

Immersion University will work with the founders of The Linghetti Project in helping developing its revolutionary language acquisition program. Besides the Immersion University students and staff, the following Linghetti team will provide their expertise in teaching and mentoring IU students:

• Loren Szendre, a linguist and computer programmer who speaks six languages and has studied hundreds more. After achieving his ABD in linguistics from the University of Chicago, he began supporting his family instead as a world-class computer programmer. Nonetheless, he has also been working on The Linghetti Project for over a decade.
• Karl Clinger, a programming expert who provides consulting and training for such organizations as the FBI, Cisco, HP, IBM and Intel.
• Shane Dixon, Ph.D, the co-creator and lead instructor for the world’s largest TESOL-certification program, sponsored by Arizona State University. Teach English Now! trains 100,000 people a year in how to teach English.
• Justin Shewell, Ph.D, the other co-creator of the Teach English Now! TESOL-certification program and lead multimedia technologist for the program.

With their leadership, Immersion University’s Entrepreneurial Language Instruction students, as part of their work-study program, will help develop courses in 1,000 languages, taught in the other 1,000 languages within the next five years. And the program will keep building from there. To fully appreciate what it means to teach even “just” 100 target languages in 100 instructional languages, think of each course as a strand of spaghetti, one end being the language of instruction, the other end being the target language. Pimsleur is offering a plate with 51 strands of spaghetti, and Rosetta Stone a plate with only 31 strands of spaghetti. Then the waiter walks in with a plate of Linghetti, with 100 languages taught in 100 languages. That’s a very big plate with 10,000 strands. With the help of Immersion University’s staff and students, more than 600 multilingual volunteers, and numerous short-term translators, 500 courses – far more than any competitor – will be developed in Year 1, and Immersion University students will learn from Linghetti’s team how to achieve success as virtual or physical classroom teachers. In the process, they will also gain access to the finished curriculum for their own professional uses.