July 3, 2006

Institute takes critical look at languages

Why would anyone come to ASU in the summer to spend four hours a day, five days a week, for nine weeks, learning to speak Polish? Or Armenian? Or Tatar?

Patrick Rumley, a student at George Mason University in Washington, D.C., gladly rented an apartment in Tempe for two months to study Armenian.

“I’m majoring in government, and I’m interested in the upcoming elections in Armenia – and ASU is the only place in the United States where I found to study Armenian,” he says.

The Armenian class is part of ASU’s Critical Languages Institute (CLI), a series of eight-credit, intensive courses offered each summer in less-commonly taught languages, sponsored by the Russian and East European Studies Center at ASU.

This year’s languages include Polish, Albanian, Tatar, Armenian (Eastern), Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and Macedonian. Some languages have beginning-level and intermediate-level classes.

Because tuition is waived, the only cost – aside from living expenses – is a $400 registration-processing fee, thus saving the students several thousand dollars on tuition.

Funds for instructional support are provided by the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies.

In addition to CLI, students can sign up for a three-week “practicum” following their class, where they go to countries where they can practice their newly learned language skills. The cost for these trips ranges from about $960 to $1,400, excluding airfare.

Most of the teachers come from their native countries for just the summer to teach the intensive classes.

Agnieszka Mielczarek, for example, lives in Poznan, Poland, where she teaches at Adam Mickiewicz University’s Polish Language School for Foreigners.

The teachers come to ASU for various reasons. Mielczarek, who is teaching at ASU for the third time, says she likes being here because “it is a challenge for me, and I like to do it.”

She adds: “I like Arizona very much, especially the heat. In Poland I am always cold.”

Mielczarek says it’s more difficult to teach Polish in the intensive classes than in a regular semester-long class.

“Students are more tired when they have classes each day, and it is necessary to prepare more games and more different activities to attract them to the language – and, of course, to the teacher,” she says.

In her course, eight students sit at a U-shaped table in a windowless classroom in the Farmer Education Building, learning vocabulary, verb tenses, grammar and numbers, textbooks open in front of them.

The class is mostly in Polish, but the students ask questions in English from time to time about pronunciation and grammar.

Amy Wilson, who received her degree this spring from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., in political science and Russian language and literature, said knowing Russian has helped her learn Polish.

“I have the most trouble with pronunciation,” she says.

Wilson, who is taking Polish to broaden her language horizons, adds: “I love Russian and wanted to learn a new Slavic language, and the CLI looked like a great opportunity to me. I plan to attend graduate school in the future and specialize in Russia, and I wanted to have some familiarity with another eastern European language.”

The CLI began in the ASU Department of Languages and Literatures in 1991, according to Ariann Stern-Gottschalk, assistant director.

“Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian were the first two languages, and we’ve been adding languages incrementally,” she says.

This year’s CLI has a record enrollment of 61 (or 70, when including the additional students who are going on the practicums). Just under half are ASU students. The rest come from across the United States and Canada, and there are even two high school students enrolled.

The practicums are the icing on the cake.

Steven Cottam, an ASU religious studies and history major, just returned from Armenia. He presented a slide show of his group’s experiences there.

Cottam says that being in Armenia brought the language home to him.

“You pick up the colloquialisms, and it helped us get comfortable with the language,” he says. “You get a perspective on how much you know.”

The ASU students had classes on Armenian, history and archaeology every other day, and kept notebooks of words and sentences they didn’t understand to go over in class.

“Real-life experiences are the best,” Cottam says. “I had such a good time that I forgot I learned things, too.”