Karen Kelton

Karen Kelton is the Project Manager in the Texas Language Technology Center and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of French and Italian.  She has supervised lower-division French courses since 1989 and was the Coordinator of Lower Division French from 2003-2006.

Karen's fascination with the potential of computer-aided instruction dates from her first UT Project QUEST award in 1990, when she created Hypercard stacks to teach French pronunciation.  Curriculum development, in particular, building a technology-enhanced first year French program, has been the unifying focus of her work at the University of Texas. 

She has done project coordination and pedagogical design on software projects since 1996, first on the CD-ROM to accompany the textbook Parallèles: Communication et Culture, Prentice-Hall (with Carl Blyth and Eric Eubank) and then on Tex's French Grammar: grammaire de l'absurde in 2000, and Français Interactif in 2000 and 2004.  These projects received first place awards for Innovative Use of Instructional Technology in IITAP competitions in 1997 and 2004.

Karen and her husband Phil have three grown children and spend their time commuting between Austin and McDonald Observatory in West Texas, where her husband has worked for over thirty years.  They love to travel and explore France with UT students when she directs the UT Summer Program in Lyon, France.

Karen started learning French with the Alliance Française in Dacca, Bangladesh, an impressionable twelve year old abroad for the first time in the Kennedy era of can-do idealism.  She still has her first textbooks, a series of small square blue books known to French learners around the world: Cours de Langue et de Civilisation Françaises (Mauger, 1955). Learning languages and understanding civilizations, communicating across cultures (French, American, Bengali) – what could be more important today?  Her goal as a foreign language teacher has always been to encourage one student at a time to go abroad, learn other languages, explore other civilizations, and reflect on her own.