By Ava Schwab | Reporter
Keyser Auditorium was filled to the brim Tuesday with students, faculty and fans alike, all eager to hang onto the words of the winner of the prestigious Cherry Award.
The Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching is a prestigious national teaching award created by Baylor alumnus Robert Foster Cherry.
“The Cherry Award is designed to honor great teachers, stimulate discussion in the academy about the value of teaching, and encourage departments and institutions to celebrate their own great teachers,” Dr. Kevin Dougherty, professor of sociology and vice provost for faculty honorifics, said.
The finalists for 2026 are Dr. Melissa Gross, associate professor of movement science and director of the Behavioral Biomechanics Laboratory in the School of Kinesiology for the University of Michigan; Dr. Lendol Calder, professor of history at Augustana College; and Dr. Jamie Rankin, university lecturer in German and director of the Princeton Center for Language Study at Princeton University.
All three finalists were invited to speak on Baylor’s campus, with Rankin’s lecture taking place 3 p.m. Tuesday.
Rankin began his speech by reflecting on his trip to the small town of Hohenschwangau, Germany, where he realized that grammar alone wasn’t enough to truly immerse himself in a foreign language.
“I made an important discovery during that entire trip, and that was that nobody really cared if I could explain subject, verb, inversion … different prepositions … or talk about a couple infinitives,” Rankin said. “I had acquired plenty of knowledge about the language, and I had acquired some vocabulary, just not the right vocabulary.”
This, he said, was a challenge as he learned more languages in graduate school. Further, Rankin found that students were fluent in what they knew but were easily overwhelmed with the sheer amount of vocabulary.
“It was this problem, the problem of not knowing enough of the right vocabulary, that prompted me to start researching second language vocabulary and to try to figure out if we can do something about this.”
Rankin framed his lecture to discuss what words students need to know to be “functionally proficient” in a language and how they should prioritize learning.
“If you don’t know any grammar, you can’t say much,” he said. “But if you don’t know many words, you can’t say anything.”
Rankin continued by joking about his early experiments designing a new German textbook and the importance of sentence structure.
“While my students were spending spring break in Cancun, I spent an exhilarating week in a seminar room trying to decide how these words would be positioned chapter by chapter,” Rankin said.
Out of that week came a free online resource built from the 1,200 most frequent German words. This website, built manually by Rankin, shows structures of these words based on various research for learning languages.
“You can read them in stories, listen to them and even quiz yourself,” he said. “Because not all students learn best from lists — some need to hear, see or feel the language.”
Rankin described how learning through story deepens recollection. He said memory is the structure of language and communication.
“When you can tell a story with new words, you remember them better,” he said. “Anything that leads to more and better engagement improves vocabulary learning.”
Rankin ended his lecture by emphasizing the importance of hands-on learning, especially when learning a language for the first time.
“Engagement is the single most important thing for learners,” Rankin said. “Promoting engagement — that’s the most fundamental task for teachers.”
Calder will present his lecture at 4 p.m. Monday in room 240 of the Paul L. Foster Campus for Business and Innovation, and Gross will present at 3 p.m. Oct. 27 in Cashion 506.
