We would like to thank Arnaud Zimmern very much for supporting the study of foreign languages at SMU in his recent column, “Don’t let foreign languages fall to the wayside.” In the fall of 2008, when the General Education Review Committee began to discuss the new university curriculum with groups on campus, the first comment we heard was a request for enhanced language instruction. Members of the Student Senate spoke of this need first, and their petition was echoed by faculty from divisions all over SMU.
With the implementation of the new university-wide second language requirement in the fall of 2012, all students who are not already bilingual will be expected to improve their skills in a second language to the equivalent of two semesters past their level upon enrollment at SMU, up to the end of the intermediate sequence of the language of their choice.
Alternatively, students may choose to take one year of a language they have not studied in high school, which we hope will generate increased interest in lesser-studied languages, as we note at the end of this column.
While the faculty is exploring computerized language study as one of the routes students might take to attain the desired level of linguistic competence, we are happy to report that our research has suggested that the vast majority of students will satisfy the requirement in a more “holistic” way, in the classrooms of the various SMU campuses, on study abroad programs or through a combination of the two.
Computerized language study was included as an option only because we want to give students as many routes as possible to satisfy the requirements, but we recognize the limitations of that method.
Like Mr. Zimmern, the faculty of world languages and literatures strongly believes that language and culture are inextricable and that, for this reason, one cannot know a culture well without proficiency in the language in which it expresses itself; likewise, one cannot know a language well without proficiency in the culture that has shaped its meanings in the past and continues to do so in the present.
After students complete their language requirement, we hope that many of them will build on that initial commitment to the language, and go on to minor or major. Increased student interest in our upper-level course offerings will bring in its wake more advanced courses for students to choose from.
As far as the state of our department staffing, sadly, the real numbers are bleaker than Mr. Zimmern’s figures suggest, particularly with regards to our Russian area, which is currently staffed by only one instructor, who is not even full-time.
To clarify, Mr. Zimmern’s numbers are accurate with reference to the interdisciplinary Russian Area Studies program; however, of the six faculty members listed, only Professor Zimakova teaches Russian language classes.
Things look better for the French area, which has seven full-time lecturers and three tenured or tenure-track faculty; additionally, we will be requesting permission to search for a tenure-track assistant professor of French next year. Still, many of our languages—including Russian, Arabic, Japanese and Latin—are staffed by only one or two people.
Such small numbers certainly hamper our efforts to offer advanced classes, much less majors in these languages. Nevertheless, the new Arabic program is thriving, and we now offer an Arabic minor.
As we mentioned above, we hope that, once the new language requirement is implemented, more students will consider taking a language they have not studied in high school, which will then justify us offering introductory courses in a wider variety of world languages. Perhaps in the near future we will be able to staff additional new languages, with success similar to that of Arabic.
Elizabeth Russ and Denise DuPont are both associate professors of Spanish, and Professor DuPoint serves as interim chair of the department of world languages and literatures. They can be reached for comment, respectively, at [email protected] and [email protected]
