Letter to the Editor:

By Nicolas Shumway     12/3/13 6:00pm

I often hear people say something like "I took four years of (name a foreign language) in college, and now I can't say a blessed thing." I mumble a noncommittal response, but what I really want is to ask "And whose fault is that?" followed by "Consider all the wonderful people you'll never meet, the marvelous experiences you'll never have, the places you'll never visit, and the mountains of information that will never be yours because you choose to remain monolingual."

And yes, "choose" is the right word, especially for Rice students. Over the last three years, the Rice Center for Languages and Intercultural Communication has invested much thought and many resources into constructing a language program worthy of the Rice name. We are particularly pleased with the recruitment of Rafael Salaberry as the CLIC director, whose appointment began this semester. Internationally renowned as a specialist in second-language acquisition, he is ideally suited to provide the leadership we need.

Restructuring our program began with an outside review committee that in 2011 wrote a comprehensive, sometimes complimentary and sometimes critical, report on how Rice taught languages. Headed by Elizabeth Bernhardt, who directs the excellent language center at Stanford University, the committee asserted that our students needed at least six classroom contact hours per week, especially at the introductory level, and that we needed to implement an assessment program that looked less at course completion and more at competence - i.e., what students can actually do with the language and not what courses they've completed.

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Of these two recommendations, finding the additional classroom hours posed the biggest problem. Rice students carry heavy schedules, although they are probably not busier than their counterparts at Yale, Harvard, Stanford and Princeton, all of which require at least five contact hours per week in introductory language courses. Still, when we started experimenting with five-day-per-week schedules, students complained, and enrollment in some of our courses sagged. 

We have therefore come up with an ingenious solution. Beginning this coming fall, introductory courses will be taught only three days per week - Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays - but class periods will last 100 minutes rather than the usual 50 minutes. Research in language acquisition shows that longer periods evenly spaced over time are more effective than more frequent short periods. This new schedule will also leave Tuesdays and Thursdays free for other courses, thus allowing more flexibility in student schedules while making more classrooms available for popular Tuesday/Thursday time slots.

The new accelerated first-year courses will carry six credits each and be renumbered 101 in the first semester and 201 in the second. Third- and fourth-semester courses will continue to be taught three hours weekly and will be numbered 202 and 203. 

These changes, however, will involve much more than rescheduling. Language curricula will incorporate more cultural information, so much so that the second semester of an introductory course will qualify for distribution credit in the humanities. We will also experiment with new approaches to language acquisition by which students develop awareness of how they learn, thus allowing students to become their own learning laboratory. A second-language course should both teach a language and prepare students to become their own teachers. Using emerging technologies, the new courses will allow access to more information and a great variety of computerized and online learning activities.

In addition to these changes, the CLIC and foreign literature faculty are identifying a growing number of intensive language courses to be taken abroad during the summer. These courses will be the equivalent of intermediate and advanced courses at Rice. The CLIC is prepared to offer 20 $5,000 scholarships per summer to support language study in countries as varied as Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Jordan and Spain.

Our goal is to make Rice a national point of reference for superb language instruction. We also look forward to hearing future Rice graduates say, "I studied a second language at Rice and participated in one of the CLIC's intensive summer language courses in (name the country), and it changed my life."

 

Nicolas Shumway

Dean of Humanities

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