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Archive 2: COMPETENCIES AND REQUIREMENTS
05: Foreign Language Competency
In the spirit of enhancing the contact between members of the faculty who deal with things international, we've instituted this year a series of bag lunches every other Friday at Weston for all faculty who work in areas having to do with other cultures. Out of these lunches, attended so far by the group of people I thank below, has emerged first and foremost a tremendous enthusiasm for the project of reviewing the international curriculum at Williams, and also a set of preliminary proposals for your basket of goodies. Please understand that we have in no way polled the entire foreign language faculty (though we're well represented here, for the most part), much less the entire group of internationally oriented faculty, before we present these ideas. Nonetheless, a good number of people from remarkably various disciplines have agreed that the following are worthy of further discussion and investigation, at the very least. We hope you do, too.
We think it would be good to pursue the goal of increasing the study of foreign language and culture at Williams in two general ways: by requiring certain competencies of students and by increasing the number and kinds of internationally related courses or portions of courses that are available to students. More specifically we suggest discussion of the following:
- A language competency or proficiency requirement at the college. The requirement could be met either by successfully negotiating some kind of evaluation upon admission, or by completing an appropriate number of courses in a language the student has already begun, or in a new language (up to the proficiency level of the 4th semester. Study abroad via either direct enrollment or a program that has a significant proportion of work in the foreign language would also count. We feel that such a requirement would be significantly better than an outright language course requirement for the following reasons:
- It would sharpen the message the college sends about the importance of
learning a language in school; the earlier students learn languages, the
better.
- It would allow the language programs to present a balanced curriculum of
language courses and upper-level culture courses; in fact, it would probably have
the effect of increasing interest in those upper-level courses.
- It would, frankly, be more manageable on a staffing level than would a
traditional language requirement, which would force us to become purely a set
of service departments for a specific requirement
- Finally, we would be more likely to have students in our classes who wanted to be there if languages weren't the only specific requirement at Williams.
- It would sharpen the message the college sends about the importance of
learning a language in school; the earlier students learn languages, the
better.
- A series of multi-disciplinary, probably team-taught courses introducing students to various (large) parts of the world (e.g. Africa, Latin America, etc.). They would be geared toward first-years or sophomores. The "Asia and the World Course" in Asian Studies might be a good model.
- The enhancement of what is currently called the Program in Literary Studies. The Chair of that program, Julie Cassiday, will soon be sending to the CEP a proposal to change its name to Comparative Literature, and to add a second track to the major. We heartily support these proposals, and will look forward to working with the CEP to implement them.
- The expansion of the offerings in Linguistics, perhaps to the level of a Program. As Leyla Rouhi has outlined in a separate memo, there is significant student demand for Linguistics courses, and Linguistics is the quintessential interdisciplinary field. Adding faculty in this area could benefit the language programs and also other departments in Divisions II and III.
- The possibility that foreign-language discussion sections or research components could be added to relevant courses outside of the foreign language programs themselves (e.g. in History, Art)
- The addition of highly intensive, immersion-style language courses to the Winter Study curriculum. Successful completion of such courses might possibly allow acceleration of a student's progress through the language sequence, but we certainly wouldn't want to guarantee this.
The last two items would be facilitated by consideration of a credit-hour system instead of our current system of requiring a specific number of courses. Such a change would encourage faculty to offer and students to take courses with components that will enhance their educational and intellectual experience in general, including foreign language work.
Submitted by Gail Newman, with thanks to Leyla Rouhi, Shinko Kagaya, Kasumi Yamamoto, Sam Crane, Valerie Weinstein, Kristen Welsh, Julie Cassiday, April Overstreet, Bill Darrow, Lily Panoussi, Isabel Roche, Darra Goldstein, and Matthew Kraus for their help in formulating these ideas.