Foreign Language requirement revisited

[Nassira Nicola]

Well, naturally, ASL would be offered in the English department . . . after
all, it's just hand-flapping in English, right? (Coming from a university
where you can major in Sanskrit, but can't use ASL for credit, and where
Swahili is offered in the Near Eastern Languages Department, I could go on
at length about that particular brand of weirdness.)  <sour face>

But instead, here are some initial, possibly none-too-coherent thoughts on
the issue at hand. I'm guessing these are some of the arguments you're
running up against at CSUS:

-No other CSU has this type of foreign language requirement; why should we?

-Many reputable universities (again, to use Harvard, my own institution, as
an example) only require one year of foreign-language instruction, which can
be waived for students who have a sufficient amount of high school L2
background; why should we be any more demanding?

(and variations on this theme)


How exactly have you responded to these points so far?  (And has no one
realized the perversity of responding to students' lack of L2 proficiency by
*decreasing* the amount of language instruction?)


As a side note, the point about raising receptive skills is a good one, but
I can't see that a non-linguistically-oriented administrator would believe
that an extra semester would be enough to make real strides in this regard.
(Ah, if the world were run by linguists!)


In any case, the ex-high-school-debater in me is raring to go on this, but I
think a little more detail on the content of the current discourse might
help keep those of us for whom the value of more second-language exposure is
self-evident from suggesting the very same arguments you've already made, as
well as provide some opportunities to turn the other side's arguments
against them.


Still brainstorming,

Nassira Nicola
Harvard University Department of Linguistics
Class of 2004/2005
nicola at fas.harvard.edu

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