About Us
Language is infrastructure. It determines whether a landowner understands the easement offer on the kitchen table, whether a patient and a doctor can understand each other, whether a child who speaks Spanish at home finds a book in it at the library, and whether a community’s stories outlast the people who remember them.
The RLLC is the rural research and outreach program of the Department of English and Languages at Tarleton State University. We work alongside the schools, libraries, museums, clinics, county offices, and community organizations of eleven rural counties — in English and in Spanish, with children and with adults — on the reading, writing, translating, teaching, and storytelling that daily life in those counties actually requires.
Chair, Rural Language, Literacy, and Culture Initiative:
Dr. Jill Davis-Steele jdavis1@tarleton.edu
Collaborators:
Department Head, English and Languages:
Dr. Anne Widmayer awidmayer@tarleton.edu
Our Region
Bosque · Brown · Comanche · Eastland · Erath · Hamilton · Hill · Jack · Palo Pinto · Somervell · Stephens
Eleven counties across Central West Texas — 9,616 square miles, an area larger than Vermont, holding roughly 242,000 people at about 25 residents per square mile. Forty-eight incorporated towns, and many more communities with a school, a post office, or a name on a sign but no municipal government of their own. Fifty-six independent school districts serve the region, and eighteen public libraries — at least one in every county. Each of the eleven counties maintains its own historical commission. Nearly one in seven residents speaks a language other than English at home. Tarleton has built substantial rural capacity: a medical school in development for rural healthcare, a rural economic development institute, and the Center for Rural Resilience. None of that work addresses language, literacy, or culture. That is the gap this initiative fills.
What We Do
Language Access
Spanish English interpreting and translation across clinics, schools, courts, and county offices — building on the department’s medical interpreting certification and its work toward court interpreting. Making sure what an institution says actually reaches the people it was meant for. About 30,600 people in our eleven counties speak Spanish at home — roughly one in seven residents, and ninety-two percent of everyone in the region who speaks a language other than English.
Reading and Literacy Programs
Bilingual story hours for children, reading programs for adults, and partnerships with the public libraries and school districts that are often the only literacy resource in a county. Eighteen public libraries serve the eleven counties, at least one in every county — in many of these communities, the only literacy resource within half an hour’s drive.
Students in the Community
Tarleton students working in classrooms, libraries, clinics, and county offices — real projects with real audiences, so that coursework produces something a community can use and students graduate having done the work rather than studied it.
Stories, Culture, and Collections
Oral history, folklore, regional literature, and community archives. Collecting what communities want kept, and leaving it with them.
Clear Public Writing
The documents institutions send rural residents — permits, tax notices, clinic forms, school letters — rewritten alongside the offices that issue them, so a reader can act on them without help.
Why This Work
In a rural county, language is doing a dozen jobs at once. Clinics, schools, courts, and county offices depend on what they write reaching people and being understood. Libraries, local museums, and county historical commissions hold what a community has decided to keep. Children learn to read — or don’t — in towns where the nearest bookstore is an hour away. Families speak Spanish at home and English at the counter. Very few of the institutions doing that work have anyone on staff trained in how language actually works: written or spoken, in English or in Spanish, for a county commissioner or for a five-year-old.
That training is what a Department of English and Languages is.
- Teaching people to write.
- Translating and interpreting between languages.
- Reading closely and knowing why a text lands or fails.
- Collecting and keeping the stories a community tells about itself.
Our faculty work in composition and rhetoric, professional and technical writing, creative writing, literature, folklore, translation and interpreting, and the medical humanities — expertise that is scarce in rural counties and almost never available close to home.
We would rather it did public work than stayed inside a classroom. So we partner with public libraries, county historical commissions, local museums, and school districts, and we build reading and story programs for children as readily as we revise a county form — because literacy starts long before anyone has to fill one out.
Applied to a real translation, a real archive, a story hour, a form a family can finally get through, this work produces something a community keeps. Students who do it learn more than any assignment teaches, because a reader who actually needs the information is a harder audience than an instructor reading for a grade. And a department that works in public becomes part of the region it sits in, rather than a building its neighbors drive past.
The Texas Folklore Society, founded in 1909 and headquartered in our department at Tarleton since 2020, is part of what we bring to this. The larger part is a faculty whose training is in precisely what rural institutions most need and least often have.
Work with us
We want to hear from:
- School districts, teachers, and librarians
- County and city offices
- Clinics, hospitals, and health organizations
- Museums, historical commissions, and community archives
- Employers and workforce organizations
- Anyone with a document their readers can’t get through, or a story worth keeping
There is no cost to partner with us, and no commitment required to start a conversation.
What’s Underway
Regional High School Writing Project
An invitational writing competition reaching all fifty-three high schools in our eleven counties, with awards, a spring recognition event, and a summer writing workshop.
Legends and Folklore Student Engagement
Composition students work with the Texas Folklore Society and the Texas Legends program to research, document, and preserve the stories and folklore of our region.
County Language and Literacy Portrait
Composition students building the first county-by-county picture of language and literacy conditions across the eleven counties, with a plain-language brief returned to each county.