Middlebury College is one of the foremost language learning centers in the United States. The university founded in 1800 offers full immersion language sessions in Arabic Chinese French German Hebrew Italian Japanese Portuguese Russian and Spanish. The gift members of the Language Schools are language teachers linguists artists musicians and other skilled professionals from more than 30 countries.

The college only enrolls about 1300 students each year into the Language Schools in order to assert a student/faculty ratio at about 6:1. Between the small class sizes the full immersion environment and many highly qualified instructors from round the world a nine-week summer language session is equivalent to about one full academic year of language study.