Associate Provost for Continuing Education
s Associate Provost for Continuing Education at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, Dr. Betty Lou Leaver is responsible for all of the Institute’s resident and non-resident, post-basic
foreign language instruction in support of Department of Defense linguists stationed worldwide. Specifically, Dr. Leaver oversees all intermediate and advanced language instruction, distance teaching programs,
coordination and support of the world-wide command language program, diagnostic assessment services, translation and interpretation instruction and services, delivery of online courses, special projects and
language teaching detachments at field sites worldwide.
Dr. Leaver has spoken and written on a wide variety of foreign and second language acquisition, especially recently in the area of acquiring near-native proficiency, and has worked on these issues with
ministries of education in 22 countries, including Russia, where she earned her PhD in Second Language Acquisition (SLA).
At the Defense Language Institute (DLI), she is currently the Associate Provost for Continuing Education. Prior to that, she has served as chief academic officer at New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) in
Amman, Jordan and visiting dean at NYIT in Bahrain; Language Program Manager at NASA in Houston and liaison to the Gagarin Center for the Training of Cosmonauts in Star City, Russia; a previous tour at DLI as
Dean, School of Slavic Languages and, later, as Dean, School of Central European Languages; and Russian & Ukrainian Language Training Supervisor at the Foreign Service institute, US Department of State.
She has published a dozen books on SLA, nearly 200 articles, and, with colleagues, won the 1997 best quality research award from the International Performance Improvement Society for investigations into
Russian and Arabic cultures.