Claire Bradin Siskin, Elizabeth Wylie-Ernst of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Beatrice DeAngelis and Sarah Williams of the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures, and Brett Wells of the Department of French and Italian Languages and Literatures have received an Innovation in Education Award from the Advisory Council on Instructional Excellence for 2007-2008.

Their project is "A Tool for Assessing Oral Proficiency in Foreign Languages." The University of Pittsburgh Oral Proficiency Language Assessment Instrument (UPOLAI), a software tool by which students’ oral proficiency in various foreign languages can be measured, will allow large groups of students to be tested simultaneously and evaluated according to a fixed and objective set of criteria. It represents a new and much more efficient way of testing foreign language proficiency at the University of Pittsburgh.