Language Requirement

Published by

Clarissa

October 17, 2016

And since I’m on it: I used to be passionately in favor of making all students take a year of a foreign language but now I changed my mind. Yes, it’s beyond useful to have exposure to another language and culture. But if people don’t want this super useful exposure, why force them? It’s like forbidding the use of cell phones in class. Yes, people waste their time and money if they are on Facebook instead of paying attention in class. But that’s their choice. Why should I care if they want to spend their resources this way?

I don’t want to impose myself on unwilling students. I want to work with the willing ones only.

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12 responses to “Language Requirement”

xykademiqz

October 17, 2016

Many (perhaps most) colleges actually require a certain number of years of a foreign language in high school, so really the kids should not be completely clueless in one foreign language when they enroll.

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1. sheddingkhawatir
  
  October 17, 2016
  
  They really shouldn’t be, but sometimes things happen like there are budget cuts and the Spanish teacher is told she’s now teaching German and French too (true story, and no she didn’t speak either German or French).
  
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Alex

October 17, 2016

I feel somewhat similarly about how STEM is placed on a pedestal. While I support the idea of making everyone take some kind of science class in college (I’m open to a wide range of ideas for what it should be, what should be emphasized, etc.) I am deeply troubled by the mania for getting as many people as possible to major in STEM.

If it were only self-interested STEM faculty wanting enrollment, that would be completely understandable. It would still be necessary to check that impulse, but it would be completely unsurprising that people who benefit from enrollment want enrollment. However, administrators and policy-makers from non-STEM backgrounds are also jumping on the STEMmania bandwagon, and that is dangerous. When STEM is placed on a pedestal and there’s pressure to get everyone into it then the value of the subject itself takes second place to the democratic* imperative of making it accessible to the masses. It’s one thing to try to get everyone to a basic level of scientific literacy, and quite another thing to take the unprepared and try to get them to the point of mastery.

*small-d, not the political party.

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Alex

October 17, 2016

I kind of wish I’d learned Latin and Russian so that I could read the original works of Isaac Newton and Lev Landau. And Italian so I could read Galileo. Maybe we need to require these for physics 🙂

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1. Clarissa
  
  October 17, 2016
  
  I learned Latin and Russian but I don’t care about Newton and Landau. Life’s unfair! ☺
  
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xykademiqz

October 17, 2016

My university has courses for majors and for nonmajors. For instance, you can take “physics and art” course as some sort of breadth/general ed for nonmajors, but it would be idiotic to count it for anything for actual physics majors. There’s also entry-level modern physics for majors; modern physics for nonmajors who are going to be chemists, biologists, or engineers; and modern physics for nonmajors who want nothing to do with math. I was under the impression it’s like that in the humanities, but maybe not?

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1. Clarissa
  
  October 17, 2016
  
  No, we don’t even have that in math as much as the faculty would like to, and it’s very bad for the program because everybody is lumped in together: future mathematicians and future ballerinas who all take Calc I together.
  
  And in languages, we are lucky if we can scrounge up one or two part-time instructors to teach Beginners courses. Nobody has the people or the resources to have different sections for different specializations.
  
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Dreidel

October 17, 2016

Forcing a foreign language on American high school students when most of them graduate from public school barely literate and totally clueless about world history is a bad idea. The classroom time should be spent teaching them more useful skills and knowledge.

Most Americans still NEVER travel outside the United States, and if they had to study two years of a foreign language in high school or a liberal arts college, NEVER use what little they remember of that foreign language for the rest of their long lives. (This statement may sound anti-intellectual, but it’s true.)

If I’d been forced to take a foreign language back in high school, the only choice would have been Spanish. So I would obviously have continued Spanish to meet the two-year language requirement in undergraduate college to get my bachelor’s degree for medical school. Since I started college with no foreign language knowledge, I chose German instead, and to my surprise liked that language so much that I MAJORED in it — and over the long years since, fluency in German has served me much better in my career and travels than Spanish would have.

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1. sheddingkhawatir
  
  October 17, 2016
  
  The requirement at my university is one semester. On the one hand, I feel like this is pointless, and who wants to teach students just taking a requirement? On the other hand, some students don’t realize the value of a language until they take it (particularly if their previous language learning experiences were lacking). In my dream world, 3-4 years of language would be required by each major (thus showing that it is valuable to that field/profession). Not that that will happen . . .
  
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2. xykademiqz
  
  October 17, 2016
  
  Wie geht’s, Dreidel?
  
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  1. Dreidel
    
    October 17, 2016
    
    Ziemlich gut, danke! In meinem Alter habe ich mich sehr wenig zu beschweren ueber.
    
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TomW

October 18, 2016

I think there is some value in having a requirement because foreign language teaching in so many high schools in the US is just terrible and many students only discover that they have talent and interest in languages when they get to a college course that is better taught and a little more serious.

But I do think we could stand to scale it back from four semesters to just two at many institutions. Two semesters is enough for those who are good at it and enjoy it to figure that out and most of those will continue voluntarily. In my experience, the ones who aren’t all that interested can usually keep up pretty well until somewhere in the second semester where the things they’ve only half-way learned start to become a real drag on their performance and on the progress of the rest of the class. We should let them be done then. Third and fourth semester classes are more often than not extremely painful for everyone involved. The disinterested who are just hanging in there to get a C and meet the requirement are clearly suffering. But the motivated and engaged students also suffer because they want to move ahead quickly and are held back by the disinterested I-just-need-a-C crowd.

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