Less Commonly Taught Languages
According to a recent MLA study, only 162 of the approximately 5000 languages in the world are taught in United States Colleges and Universities. Of the approximately 1,400,000 students enrolled in foreign language courses, three languages—Spanish, French, and German—account for 74% of enrollments, with more than half of all students taking Spanish.
Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTLs) typically are defined as “all of the world's languages except English, French, German, and Spanish.” Twelve languages (Italian, American Sign Language, Japanese, Chinese, Latin, Russian, ancient and modern Greek, ancient and modern Hebrew, Arabic, Portuguese, and Korean) account for 93% of LCTL enrollments. The other 147 LCTLs enroll an average of 175 students. When individual studies opportunities are included then perhaps 300 languages can be studied in United States Colleges and Universities—only half of which are studied in a given year. About 38 LCTLs are taught in the U.S. at the K-12 level.
Almost 47 million Americans speak languages other than English. Approximately 16 million of these are Less Commonly Taught languages. To see what languages are spoken in the US by state and county, go to http://www.mla.org/resources/census_main.
One reason that LCTLs are taught in so few schools is that low enrollments make it difficult to justify the costs of instruction.. For example, in 2002 nationally a total of 1,593 studied Swahili, 314 students Turkish, 79 Twi, 35 Catalan, 23 Uzbek, and 5 Galician. And when the languages are available often nobody takes them. For example, the CARLA database lists 13 institutions as able to teach some version of Mayan and 10 institutions able to teach Náhuatl (the language of the Aztecs), but in 2002 according to an ADFL study no students enrolled in either.
Are LCTLs more difficult to learn?
LCTLs range from the easiest languages to the most difficult to acquire as a second language. Many LCTLs are no more difficult than Spanish or French, taking an average of 480 hours of instruction to achieve intermediate level-2 proficiency. Examples of such languages are: Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, Haitian Creole, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Swahili, and Swedish. Languages such as Bulgarian, Dari, Farsi (Persian), modern Greek, Hind-Urdu, Indonesian and Malay are similar in difficulty to German (average 720 hours with the best achieving level 2+/3 at 720 hours). Languages such as Russian Hungarian , Polish, Thai are only moderately more difficult than German (average 720 hours with the best achieving level 2/2+ at 720 hours), whereas Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are much more difficult than any of the others mentioned (average1320 hours with the best achieving level 1+ at 720 hours).
Why is it important to study and teach LCTLS?
Margo Glew answers the question saying,
|
“As globalization continues in government and business, there is an increasing need for Americans to speak less commonly taught languages. Whether it is a sales representative who speaks Portuguese or an embassy guard who can speak Greek, competence in less commonly taught language is becoming more and more critical to the effective functioning of both business and government. Finally, there is the issue of the cultural make up of the United States. AS the demographics of the United States changes, so too does the ethnic heritage of many Americans. For example, 1990 census data reflect significant increases in population for several ethnic groups of LCTL speaking heritages. Between 1980 and 1990 the population of African Americans grew 13.2 percent; American Indians, 37.9 percent; and Asian and Pacific Islanders, 107.8 percent …. In addition to the growing population of Americans in these groups, many Europeans Americans also come from LCTL-speaking heritages. Americans of Eastern European, Russian, and Mediterranean heritages, for example, all come from LCTL-speaking cultures. Many, if not most, Americans today can trace their ancestry back to LCTL-speaking groups. Given the incredibly diverse ethnic make up of American culture, it is not surprising that many Americans are seeking out opportunities to learn the language of their parents and grandparents.” (M. Glew, “Why offer instruction in the less commonly taught languages?” CLEAR NEWS, volume 5, issue 2; Fall 2001. |
In a February 2004 issue of the journal Science, Linguist David Graddol estimated that by 2050 Mandarin Chinese will be the world’s most important second language with Arabic, Hindi/Urdu, English, and Spanish tied for next most important. Present foreign language enrollments do not reflect the global importance of Arabic, Chinese, and Hindi-Urdu. In 2002, only 3.3% of students studying foreign languages studied these three languages: Chinese: 34,153; Arabic 10,584; Hindi 1,430.
The 9-11 attacks on the United States have brought into focus how important it is that US Universities teach LCTLs. The U.S. State Department’s Strategic Languages Initiative has identified the following 12 LCTLs as being of strategic importance to the United States: (listed with national 2002 enrollments followed by the number of US institutions capable of teaching it and average number of students per institution):
- Arabic (10,584; 274; 38.6)
- Bahasa Indonesian (225; 32; 7.0)
- Bengali (54; 12; 4.5)
- Hausa (40; 15; 2.7; 2.7)
- Hindi (1,430; 75; 19.0)
- Persian (1,117; 47; 23.8)
- Pushtu (14; 4; 3.5)
- Swahili (1,593; 106; 15.0)
- Tajik (0; 4; 0.0)
- Turkish (314; 52; 6.03)
- Urdu (152; 22; 6.9)
- Uzbek (23; 12; 1.9)
To facilitate their study a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant program was set up to supply trained native speaker teachers as instructors for little cost to the host University. CMLL had 2 out of the total 60 FLTAs (3%) in the first year of the program (2003-2004) and has 4 in the second year (2004-2005) with the original two staying on as regular GPTIs to complete Masters degrees. This has enabled us to strengthen our Arabic offerings to a minor and to add Turkish as a minor and Uzbek. It also enables us to seriously consider adding Hindi or Swahili in the near future.
Presently CMLL offers regularly scheduled courses in the following LCTLs:
- American Sign Language (ASL) *
- Arabic * +
- Chinese *
- Greek * ** +
- Italian * +
- Japanese *
- Latin * ** +
- Portuguese * +
- Russian * ** +
- Turkish *
- Uzbek +
- Vietnamese
*= undergraduate minor offered; ** = undergraduate major offered; + = graduate minor available.
Starting in 2005-2006 we will offer courses in Hebrew on a two-year cycle (beginning in odd numbered years and intermediate in even-numbered years. .
In addition we can offer individualized instruction at the undergraduate and graduate levels in
- Catalan (reading only)
- Galician (reading only)
- Miskito
To learn more about CMLL’s LCTL offerings, click on any of the above languages. You can also contact the Faculty Coordinator for LCTLs or the CMLL Academic Program Advisor, Liz Hildebrand.
CMLL aggressively has been exploring additional ways to offer a wider range of LCTLs in a cost-effective manner on an as-demanded basis.
We have applied for membership in the National Association of Self-Instruction Language Programs (NASILP). It provides member institutions with self-instruction material. Students do independent study for credit in the language working with on-campus native-speaker or fluent tutors who can be undergraduate, graduate, faculty, or even qualified native-speaking citizens not associated with TTU. Potentially we could offer cost-effective basic language instruction in the following languages we presently do not offer. (Total national 1998 and 2002 enrollments are shown in parentheses.) Which of these we could offer in a given semester would depend largely on the availability of tutors.
It is our intent to make available individual instruction in as many of these languages as we can—restricted only by availability of suitable tutors and approval of appropriate special instruction fees to allow significant interaction with tutors and expert external grading of exams.
We anticipate NASILP membership activation to be effective in time to begin offering their individual instruction courses in Spring 2005. Initially we will implement our membership in using the CMLL prefix for individual instruction courses.
Current plans are to obtain approval for a new course prefix, LCTL and for a LCTL minor where one can mix and match the study of several LCTLs to form an undergraduate minor. One idea we are exploring is to allow beginning study of more exotic LCTLs to be upper-level for students who have fulfilled their language requirement in another language. For example one might combine lower-level Spanish with Galician and/or Catalan and/or Miskito studied at the upper level. Or Turkish or Russian at the lower level with Uzbek at the upper level. Eventually we might even be able to offer mixes of Arabic and Urdu or Hindi and Urdu.
In some cases it might be possible to combine NASILP offerings with using FLTAs as tutors since languages above marked with an asterisk are strategic languages. Indeed many of our FLTAs have multiple language proficiencies.