Language Barriers

With basketball season successfully over, Duke’s second most exciting season is about to get underway: bookbagging season.

As a senior, I no longer have the option to throw away hours of my life on ACES looking at potential classes for next year. From here on out, my Long Range Plans are going to need more than just minimum credit requirements and a handful of ALPs. I look back on my bookbagging days mostly with fondness, but there is one thing about my course-scheduling process that I will not miss: I don’t have to take any more Spanish classes.

As I stumbled through my three-semester foray into el mundo hispanohablante, I was often jealous of the engineers who aren’t forced to learn any foreign language, with the possible exception of MATLAB. Duke wants its undergraduates to develop communication skills in another language and an appreciation and sensitivity for the culture of its speakers, but engineers need the space in their schedules for more relevant classes for their complex and rigorous majors.

Although I understand the merits of a language requirement, I think our three-semester foreign language requirement is well-intentioned but poorly executed.

Like any other department on campus, the Spanish Language Program has a large number of beginners with every incoming class who need to learn a common set of basics before taking upper-level courses. Other departments can lump these students together in huge introductory lectures, but learning a language requires smaller classes in order to facilitate discussion for active and engaged learning. The SLP solution is to try and make every section of Introductory Spanish identical to the next through a comprehensive system of standardization.

In an effort towards standardization, nearly every assignment in the course is graded and collected, each counting for approximately 2 percent of your grade. In Spanish 63, my third and final foray into el mundo hispanohablante, an assignment is collected nearly every single class. Doesn’t that sound like every class you took in high school? Daily assignments help reinforce the lessons, which is especially important in learning a new language. But most college professors don’t check up on you every day; they assign readings and let you manage the material on your own.

Different people learn best in different ways, and at this stage in our academic careers, we all have a general sense of what does and doesn’t work for us. In my case, I had taken a few years of French and Latin in high school but had no prior background in Spanish. In Spanish 1 and 2, I understood how to use verb tenses better than a lot of my classmates, but my vocabulary and spelling were and still are atrocious. I often felt like I was forced into doing exercises to reinforce the material I already understood during the time I could have spent focusing on the areas where I really needed improvement. I was never allowed to be completely in charge of guiding my learning through the course of the semester because a department-wide schedule of graded assignments was always holding my hand and tugging me in another direction like an impatient six-year-old on a leash at the zoo.

And when I progressed into Intermediate Spanish, I found myself in class with students who had studied the language for several years in high school. My 28-week crash course in Spanish 1 and 2 could not compare with years of practice. Furthermore, the complex grammatical structures covered, while important for higher level language courses, were increasingly irrelevant to me.

I started taking Spanish hoping that I’d one day be able to hold a basic conversation and get the gist of what the announcers were saying during Mexican Primera soccer games on TV. Many of my classmates who began their Duke careers in Spanish 63 had already reached that level, but the language requirement forces three semesters of sequential study from this starting point as well.

In these economic times, other universities are severely cutting back their language programs. But the SLP and the foreign language requirement as a whole ought to be reassessed to see if its goals are being met. The over-structured curriculum currently meets the needs of Spanish majors, but they make up only a small percentage of students taking Spanish classes. Separate pre-major and non-major tracks would make the three semester investment more meaningful and more balanced for both the true beginners and the truly motivated. But until then, I want to wish all those non-engineering science majors the best of luck scheduling your labs around a five-day-a-week introductory language class.

And as graduation day draws near, I bid you adieu, Spanish Language Program. Or adios, if you must. I haven’t abandoned the language. I still use it every week working with middle-schoolers in Durham. I’ve just gone back to learning from WordReference.com, LearnSpanish.com and that guy who yells “GOL!” on TeleFutura.

Bradford Colbert is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Tuesday.