Scott McGinnis - 2016 Walton Award Winner

Dr. Scott McGinnis (Ph.D., Ohio State University, 1990) is the Academic Advisor for the Washington Office of the Defense Language Institute (DLI). He also holds the academic rank of tenured full professor at DLI. Between 1999 and 2003, he served as the first Executive Director of the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages at the National Foreign Language Center (NFLC) in College Park, Maryland. In over three decades in the language teaching profession, he has held positions at institutions including the University of Pennsylvania and Middlebury College, and has a decade of experience as supervisor of the Chinese language programs at the University of Oregon and the University of Maryland. Dr. McGinnis has authored or edited five books and over 50 book chapters, journal articles and reviews on language pedagogy and linguistics for the less commonly taught languages (LCTL) in general, and Chinese and Japanese in particular.

Within the LCTL profession, Dr. McGinnis has worked to bring about greater interaction and cooperation among the five principal settings within which LCTL learning and teaching are carried out; namely, academic, government, heritage, proprietary, and overseas. He has twice served as president of the Chinese Language Teachers Association (CLTA), and has regularly been an invited participant for major projects on standards, articulation, teacher training, and materials development sponsored or funded by the Modern Language Association (MLA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the United States Department of Education (USEd). Dr. McGinnis is the former chair of The College Board Chinese Language Test Development Committee for the Educational Testing Service. His current professional responsibilities include serving as Coordinator for the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) for the United States Government.