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Home > News & Events > CLA Today Archive > Spring 2002 : One World, Many Tongues

One World, Many Tongues

by Mary Shafer

It's a gray Saturday afternoon in February, and Dee Spilleth's only lament is that the threat of an incoming blizzard has prompted so many of her fellow second-language teachers to leave early from CLA's busy Language Center for their homes in greater Minnesota or Wisconsin or Iowa.

Spilleth loves being with these people, talking shop and using the U's resources to create lessons for her students at Minneapolis's South High School, where she teaches French and chairs the world languages department. The teachers are here to learn more about incorporating technology into their curricula. And although this particular project has a tongue-twisting name—it's called Content Based Language Learning through Technology (CoBaLLT)—Spilleth describes it more simply. “It's a godsend,” she says.

In her passion for her work, Spilleth is hardly unique among teachers of foreign language—at any level. From the second-grade Spanish immersion teacher to the multilingual U professor to the instructors and specialists who teach the teachers—you will hear the same passion, indeed, almost urgency, about the importance of language education.

Andrew Cohen is one of the most vocal.

“If you know only one language, you're a prisoner, stuck in the tyranny of that one language,” says Cohen, a professor of linguistics and English as a Second Language (ESL), who directs the U's Language Resource Center—one of nine such centers in the country with federal grants to study how language is acquired.

“Learning another language frees you, broadens your mind, and enhances your cognitive flexibility. The more languages you know, the more doors open to you.”

Enter the Language Center

Open those doors completely, linguists say, and the panorama today would reveal more than 5,000 spoken languages. The U offers about 45 of them, ranging from popular Western tongues like French, Spanish, and the four Scandinavian languages to less-often-studied languages like Ojibwe and classical Greek.

Since the mid-1980s, the College of Liberal Arts has required every undergraduate to demonstrate proficiency in a second language as a condition for graduation. And that means real fluency—not just accumulated classes or credits, but actual test-based competence in reading, writing, speaking, and listening.

The requirement was already in place when Jenise Rowekamp arrived on campus nine years ago as a graduate student with a part-time position in the University's Language Center. At the time, the Language Center wasn't much more than a corner in Folwell Hall where language faculty could check out audio and video equipment and seek instructional help from its faculty director, secretary, and two graduate students—all of whom were part-time.

With her own passion for other cultures—she's taught English in a refugee camp in the Philippines—and a knack for program building, Rowekamp over the years has built a center that has married language instruction firmly to the exploding field of computer technology.

Picking up space for a computer lab here and a technology library there, Rowekamp has created a network of media support services and a 30-person staff who serve a broad clientele of U faculty in CLA and elsewhere, students, staff, and K-12 teachers. Today, the Language Center has helped language education at the U become a whole new world, where cutting a CD-ROM, digitizing a video, or designing a Web page are part of the everyday landscape.

“Language teaching today is not about just learning touristy language,” says Rowekamp. “It's about creating an aware, interactive student body, who have real ability in another language.”

To get a sense of how this is done—and how technology helps it happen at the U—watch Janneke Oosterhoff. An education specialist in Dutch, Oosterhoff spent two weeks last summer in her native Netherlands armed with a video camera. Back at the U, she has edited the video, imported a bit of background music to accompany the images, and turned it into a lesson for the teaching assistants who attend one of her workshops. On their individual screens in the Language Center's computer lab, the teaching assistants watch a 58-second video of a Dutch shopkeeper as he packages fish, whistles, and chats with customers.

“Shop owners talk a lot like some teachers,” Oosterhoff laughs. “Blurry.”

At the end of the video, students are directed to complete sentences—in Dutch—based on the virtual Netherlands trip they have just experienced. For the teaching assistants, it's an additional tool they can use in their classes.

Education specialist Marlene Johnshoy has watched these graduate students over the years and knows what the Language Center has meant to them.

“I hear from teaching assistants who go elsewhere. They rave about this place,” says Johnshoy, whose own master's degree from the U is in Hispanic linguistics. “They say we have an actual technology center, whereas somewhere else they may have a computer. They just don't have the technology support where they are.”

For Diane Tedick, a professor in Second Languages and Cultures in the College of Education, the Language Center is “fabulous,” a place where students seeking their initial teacher licensure can come to learn their specialty. “I've been fortunate to bring classes here to learn technical applications,” Tedick says. “I help them understand pedagogy and they learn the technical part here.”

As for Oosterhoff, the virtual trip to the fish market helps students understand what she believes about teaching languages. “It's another way of looking at the world,” she says. “It's not just about language, but a world view, a way to think.”

The why of language

It can be fairly easy to rhapsodize about the importance of learning a foreign language. In fact, the reasons can seem quite obvious—from creating well-rounded resumes to broadening world perspectives. Scratch the surface, though, and the reasons seem to run deeper. Just ask Alice Hsu, whose own second language is English.

Hsu is a freshman biochemistry major at the U. Born and raised in Taiwan for the first 13 years of her life, she learned English as a second language to her native Chinese.

“When I started learning English, it was something I had to do,” Hsu says. “I was doing the routine type of learning: memorizing definitions, reading books, writing essays, and doing conversation practices. At the end of my first year in English, I barely passed the grade.

“The principal of the school met with all the students who were on the borderline individually. He said he once struggled with English as well. One day when he was finally able to converse in English, he realized learning a foreign language is not translating the meaning of a word or a sentence, but learning to think in that language and learn the logic of it. From that day onward, I started using an English-English dictionary instead of the English-Chinese one.”

Adds Hsu, “one language is Picasso, and another language is Mozart. They are different ways of expressing one's emotion. To understand someone from another culture fully, one must start with their language.”

Tom Jensen, a securities attorney whose master's degree is in German studies from the U, puts it this way: “In today's world, you absolutely need the perspective of stepping outside your own culture, and the best way is to learn a language.

“It's easy when you're only working in your native language to get comfortable with meanings. Learning a language takes you out of that. You take a breath, step back, and look at how words are used and how they fit together and how they work together.”

Jensen even believes it has helped him in his profession as a securities attorney, where he works with lengthy, complicated documents and words with multiple layers of meaning. “I have a keen perception for how words are defined and put together. And that's of the utmost importance. If you get it wrong, you do your client a great disservice."

But to get to the deeper benefits of language acquisition, Cohen believes every individual must take self-responsibility.

“It's so crucial to be a proactive learner and not expect the course to do it for you,” says Cohen, who knows 11 languages and “keeps up" with six. “If you expect the sources to do it, you'll be one more statistic in the refrain of, 'Well, I studied three years, and don't remember a thing.' It's all about taking responsibility for lifelong learning.”

One of Cohen's concerns, though, is that not enough University students study abroad.

“We have a very small percentage doing study abroad—about 5 percent—whereas in private schools it may be as high as 90 percent. It's not just an economic issue; we're pretty provincial. I haven't done a survey. This begs for empirical investigation.”

Going global-virtually

In the meantime, the Language Center may be the closest thing some students have to an opportunity abroad—even if the experience is virtual. Its benefits are lost on no one who has experienced it.

“Computers are highly motivating for kids,” says Denise Anderson, a third-grade teacher in a St. Paul Spanish immersion school, who is in the COBALLT program. “You take a little boy who loathes cursive writing; he hates it. All of a sudden here's this computer—and he's jazzed. It's one more tool we can use to ignite a passion for learning. And it stretches us as teachers. The U promotes language teaching through content, not language analysis. Here, we get a mix of content, acquisition, and technology.”

Says Johnshoy, “The world is getting smaller and smaller. And we need to understand that world. Learning language is one step and this setup is part of it. And the Internet is part of it. We used to subscribe to a Mexican newspaper and get it in a few weeks. Now we can read it online.

“To understand how important it is to understand other cultures, you don't have to go any further than September 11.”