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CALIFORNIA State University, Long Beach, is a large, urban, comprehensive university in the greater Los Angeles area. Its student population of 35,000 mirrors the rich ethnic and cultural landscape of southern California. The Department of Romance, German, Russian Languages and Literatures resulted from the merger of three departments in 1992: French and Italian, German and Russian, and Spanish and Portuguese. Among the many reasons for merger were the economic recession, shifting student needs and interests, radical changes in the pedagogical approaches to the teaching of foreign languages, the redefinition of the boundaries of literary teaching to include more interdisciplinary material and methods, and the ever-increasing need to incorporate technology.
The new department is very different from the foreign language departments of the past. Our greatest triumphs and limitations derive from the recognition of that difference and from our struggle to find innovative ways to meet the demands of a world in which the role of foreign language and intercultural communication and understanding continues to expand. While foreign language study is needed now more than ever, departments such as ours still fight negative stereotyping among colleagues who remember little of their experiences with foreign language study except conjugating verbs. This attitude is puzzling in a national environment in which public opinion increasingly supports the value and place of foreign language study in the entire educational curriculum. The speech at CSULB by former United States Education Secretary Richard Riley, in 1998, confirmed this trend when he declared twice—in an hour-long analysis of education in the nation today—that everyone should learn two languages in addition to English. As the need for foreign language skills confronts us daily—in economics, politics, joint military operations, medicine, science, literature, film, news—translation and interpretation services are of paramount importance. The breakdown of the Berlin Wall; the growing influence of the European Community; the role of Japan in Asian and foreign investment; the development of the Chinese marketplace; the precarious economic, social, and political situation in Latin America; and the roller coaster ride of the Russian economy require communication and understanding.
As an increasing number of school districts implement or prepare to implement foreign language study in the elementary grades, we can expect, over the next ten years, to enroll greater numbers of students proficient in one language or more or, at the very least, students who are interested in studying foreign languages because they recognize their value. One of the biggest challenges foreign language departments have traditionally faced is the multiple areas of the curriculum that they are called on to address. Over the past ten years, the situation has been further complicated. The need to maintain and update the language and literature courses, while expanding and designing new course offerings that serve specific linguistic communities and market needs, has stretched our faculty and budgetary resources to the limit. Such new offerings include heritage language courses for speakers of Spanish and the courses required for the new major in Italian studies and French studies. Courses needed to meet specific employment opportunities include the new curriculum for the translation and interpretation studies major in Spanish and integrated foreign language area studies programs such as international studies or international business that require a knowledge of foreign language texts across disciplines. In film studies, we added seven new courses, one of which is a general education course. The success of the Spanish translation program has led to the introduction of coursework in French translation studies; for the past four years the French program has published the student journal the Translators’ French Quarter, which benefits from both external and internal funding. We have also strengthened our commitment to the training of future teachers of languages and literatures, both at the secondary level through our direct involvement in the Single Subject Credential Program and through the training of teaching associates who cover a significant number of the first- and second-year language courses in French, German, and Spanish, the three programs that offer master’s degrees. The curriculum in all the graduate and undergraduate courses in all five language areas has undergone revision to some degree over the last seven years not only to meet the demands alluded to above but also to comply with the restructuring of general education that has been taking place on our campus.
In teacher education the department has responded to the need for augmented offerings in applied linguistics crucial for our majors in French and Spanish who wish to pursue a teaching career. The single-subject coordinator for foreign languages has designed a course, New Technologies in the Learning of Languages Other Than English, that is cross-listed with the College of Education. As a result, several areas have undergone changes since 1997: translation and interpretation, film studies, second language acquisition, heritage language acquisition and teaching, technology-assisted instruction in languages other than English, two business-Spanish courses leading to the EXIGE exam, capstone experience in the French program, and foreign language methodology. We have a new language coordinator position. In addition, we have three new majors: BA in translation and interpretation studies, BA in French studies, BA in Italian studies, and new Arabic and Hebrew first-year courses. The department plays a role in several minors and certificate programs: a Latin American studies minor and certificate, a Middle Eastern studies minor, a Jewish studies program, a European studies certificate, and a medieval and Renaissance studies minor.
In technology, we have secured a new refurbished language lab and a language lab director. We are now in the planning phase of integrating technology into the foreign language classroom.
California high school graduates need to have completed (with a C or better) two years of a foreign language before being admitted to the California State University system. Therefore most students in Spanish and some in French start at the second-semester level. They can use up to six units of language study toward the general education distribution requirement, and many just take one or two semesters to fulfill that requirement. In Spanish we have kept the lower-division offerings to seven second-semester sections and two or three sections of each third and fourth semesters. We could offer double the number and fill them, but because of the limitations of the part-time allocations awarded by the college and the need to staff the upper-division and graduate courses, we have maintained that balance for almost a decade. Over 40% of our majors and minors in Spanish transfer from a community college after having completed the general education requirements. Because French and German draw most of their majors and minors from the lower-division courses, we have opted for offering more sections of 100- and 200-level courses. In Italian we have observed a steady increase in enrollments over the last two years. Most 100-level courses have thirty students. In Spanish we cap each section at thirty-five. French offers six to eight sections of 100-level courses with an average of twenty-two students. The fall typically enrolls more students because of transferring trends and healthier part-time allocations. To study the enrollment trends, I have used two measures: lower-division courses (100–200) and upper-division courses (300–400). A full accounting of enrollments for 2001 and 2002 also would include the enrollments for summer session. Since 2001, summer session has been state supported for all unmatriculated students, in effect creating a third semester at the same tuition costs per unit. This is commonly known as YRO (year round operation) by the California State University chancellor’s office. Many students have taken advantage of this development, in particular at the upper-division levels in Spanish.
French
Demographics have greatly affected enrollments in the French program at California State University, Long Beach. At one time the program catered primarily to students of European origin with ties to France and an interest in continental Europe. Today approximately half the students enrolled in the French program are of Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, Hispanic, or African American origin. French has played a role in their lives, either as the language and culture of France, the colonizer, or as part of an elite education in Iran, Lebanon, or Syria. Our secondary school student teachers and teacher candidates increasingly voice the need for the program to reflect the entire francophone world. Those working with predominantly African American students cite high interest among their students for French-language African and West Indies literature. Our diverse student population has taught us a great deal about what our expectations for cultural and literary competence should be. Many students are already part of the francophone world, they are trilingual if not quadrilingual, and they have firsthand information and experiences that give them a global perspective. We have restructured the cultural and literary components in our classes accordingly. Through the curricular changes we have implemented and those we are currently contemplating, we intend to graduate students with a BA in French from California State University, Long Beach, who are knowledgeable about the history of France, with an emphasis on cultural history; the evolution of French political history, especially the French Revolution and France’s role in modern political discourse; French theater and the fine arts; French colonialism, particularly in Louisiana, Canada, Southeast Asia, North Africa, West Africa, and the West Indies; postcolonialism and its continuing social impact; religious diversity and its history; France’s role in the European Community.
A reconceptualizing of literacy that widens the focus from France to the francophone world as a whole leads to a number of programmatic changes. Feedback from a baseline study conducted in 1995 as part of our participation in an MLA-funded grant showed that our two survey courses lacked definition and continuity, making it difficult for students to acquire and retain knowledge by any means other than rote. We have since tried to organize the content of the survey courses around the general topic of France’s self-image and the representation of the other through the centuries. It is hoped that this frame may ensure some degree of continuity to these courses. The new capstone course (French 480) affords the student an opportunity at the end of the major to reflect on these issues again in a more in-depth form, suitable to that level. By thus framing our courses, what was once a laundry list of names, genres, and titles has acquired meaning and some parameter of qualitative comparison beyond the aesthetic that can be applied to literary study. We determined that a survey course on the francophone world was of paramount importance for future teachers, who would be called on in ever-increasing ways to teach their students about the world. The course is also important for international studies majors, many of whom fulfilled their three-year language requirement by taking French and often add a French minor to their course of studies. We have therefore instituted a new required course, French 337, Survey of Francophone and Twentieth-Century Literature, and will be creating a new option that includes such courses as Switzerland as a Model for European Diversity (a French-German course with a language-across-the-curriculum component) and The Literature and Culture of the Maghreb, of the Antilles, and of Quebec. The introduction of a francophone survey course and a francophone option has made us aware of the need to include a sociolinguistic component in our phonetics course. The phonetics course is required by the state of California for all teachers of French. We are also developing a linguistics option in French and will advise those who are planning a career in teaching to select it. The option consists of our revised courses in phonetics, second language acquisition, Romance linguistics, introduction to French linguistics, historical linguistics, and our two translation courses.
In terms of enrollments, we have witnessed a modest but sustained upward trend since 1995. With the recent approval of the French studies major, we expect this trend to continue. The program is staffed with two and a half tenured faculty members, four teaching associates, and four part-time instructors. The incorporation of five courses in francophone literature, the translation workshop, and the cinema courses has generated more interest from students.
German
The German program is functioning with only two faculty members at this time. Thanks to the innovative work of the faculty, the German program is unique in the California State University for its studies approach, its outreach to students through the annual exchange of seven to ten students with Oldenburg University, and the German-American Marketing Exchange (a two-week student exchange program featuring an internship and a series of workshops), not to mention the fruitful program with German students who are specializing in the teaching of German as a second language. The German studies program is less oriented toward teacher preparation than the French program because of the small number of students in German who complete the credential program each year, reflecting a limited job market for teachers of German in the public school systems in California. Instead, the faculty has developed German-for-business courses and is revising the curriculum to reflect a cultural studies format. Relations between our German program and high school and community college teachers of German have always been strong and have been strengthened as we work toward an articulation document. At present a pilot project is under way to create a Web-based advanced placement course in German for the Long Beach Unified School District, in cooperation among Long Beach Unified School District, Long Beach City College, and the California State University, Long Beach.
Over the past few years, our German studies program has changed its curriculum from one that was primarily literature-oriented to one that emphasizes the study of contemporary German culture and society. Of increasing importance for the German program is the German-American Business Student Workshop, an intensive program of seminars and company visitations held one semester on the CSULB campus, followed by a similar program at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg. Since many German majors and minors also pursue a major or minor in business and marketing fields, this workshop has become an attractive feature of our students’ international education.
Interns from the Free University Berlin / Humboldt University and the University of Oldenburg are a special resource in the German program. For the last seven years, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in Bonn has supported recent graduates or advanced students of German from these universities to spend one semester at CSULB with the goal of assisting in teaching, curriculum development, and student tutoring. In addition, eight to twelve students from Oldenburg annually are assigned to tutor our German students for ten hours a week.
We’ve experienced a major decline in enrollments in the years between 1995 and 1999. Enrollments at the lower-division level were stronger, perhaps because we offered more sections of 100-level German. Since 1999, enrollments have been more or less constant, which in the light of continuing national downward trends we still consider an accomplishment. By contrast, the MA program has grown from six students in 1999 to sixteen students in 2002, largely because of the recruitment efforts by the program director and graduate adviser, Jutta Birmele.
Italian
The Italian program began on the CSU Long Beach campus in 1970, thanks to a gift from a community member. Since then, it has grown to become a robust minor program, and in April 2003 the major in Italian studies was approved. In May 1999, Carlo Chiarenza was selected to fill for the first time the George L. Graziadio Chair of Italian. The George L. Graziadio Center for Italian Studies was funded in 2001. Because of these two endowments, our campus has become an important venue for cultural programs such as lecture, film, and music series. Seven new courses have been approved to be added to the many multidisciplinary offerings that constitute the new major. A new tenure-track faculty member has been added, bringing the total to three and a half tenured or tenure-track faculty members. One of the most promising and important missions of the new major is to prepare secondary teachers. More and more schools are now opening Italian courses to their junior and high school students. Many students continue the study of Italian in college, creating a synergy that reinforces the connections already in place with our counterparts in the K-12 schools.
The explosion of enrollment over the period under review offers a clear picture of the state of Italian at the university. With another full-time faculty member and the major in place, we should see this upward trend continue for at least three to five years until it reaches a stable plateau.
Russian
Political changes in Russia during the last decade have completely changed the profile of students studying Russian language and culture at the university. Just as the language focus has changed, so has the cultural emphasis. Ten years ago, we viewed the program as equally divided between language and literature. Today, literature, though still a part of the offerings, has retreated to the background and been replaced by a greater stress on culture and civilization. A survey of Russian civilization (music, art, folklore, religion, etc.) has been converted into an interdisciplinary course, attracting more interest among students than the conventional literary survey from Pushkin to Solzhenitsyn. In line with this effect, perhaps the greatest change in our program has been the introduction of a Russian cinema course, which is in its seventh year. This course repackages Russian civilization in visual format, presenting fifteen films that each demonstrate an important moment in Russian culture (e.g., Russia’s ambivalence toward the West, Stalinist purges, World War II, forced collectivization, glorification of the Revolution, the thaw). This course draws three and four times the number of students as either a literature or traditional civilization class, if the statistics for the last five years are a reliable indicator. We are limited to a minor, in which all the courses emanate from our department, and a certificate program that combines courses from at least four disciplines and exists through the cooperation of multiple departments.
Enrollments have dropped precipitously since 1999. Sometimes the difference resides in the number of students attracted to the cinema course from the film and electronic arts department. The program rests on the shoulders of one tenured professor, Harold Schefski, who consistently teaches an overload. Four years ago, Schefski embarked on a fund-raising effort to endow a chair in Russian studies. He has organized several fund-raising events and has gained support from the community for his efforts to maintain the teaching of Russian language and culture.
Spanish
The Spanish program offers two BAs, one in Spanish with four different options and one in Spanish-English translation and interpretation studies. With 170 majors, 75 minors, and dozens of bilingual-concentration students for the liberal studies major, the Spanish program is the largest and most complex of the programs housed in the department. Currrently we function with six tenured or tenure-track faculty members, one tenured faculty member in the BA in translation and interpretation studies, one full-time lecturer, four to five teaching associates, and three to four part-time lecturers.
One challenge the program has faced in the last eight years is the realization that the curriculum did not meet the needs of the Hispanic heritage students. A survey of students enrolled in a course for bilingual teachers revealed that the common cultural knowledge base we were assuming in our students simply was not there. To deal with this issue, we reorganized the goals and content of our basic-core curriculum, starting with the second- and third-year language courses addressed to the heritage speaker and the nonnative speaker (the ratio of heritage speaker to nonnative speaker in the Spanish program is about 60/40). These two six-unit courses offer a review of grammar and work in the acquisition of composition skills. We altered the content to put cultural competency in a more prominent position in anticipation of the cultural studies curriculum present throughout the major.
Proficiency in linguistics is of special relevance to the Spanish program because of the variation in the linguistic capabilities of our students. The issues of limited English proficiency, Spanish for Spanish speakers, and Spanish for first-time learners require of Spanish teachers a thorough background in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and dialectology. We have made the linguistics concentration the recommended option for all Spanish majors planning careers in teaching, and at the undergraduate level we have replaced Spanish Phonetics and Phonology with Introduction to Spanish Linguistics as the linguistics course in the core curriculum. This new course, presenting the main issues in Spanish phonology, morphology, and syntax, provides a broader view of language than its predecessor did. Its philosophical orientation is primarily generativist, although other schools of linguistics are briefly discussed. Four new courses have been added to this option: Second Language Acquisition, Teaching Spanish to Native Speakers, Methodologies of Foreign Language Teaching, and Technology for the Teaching of Languages Other Than English. We also offer an internship course, Spanish 494, to those students wishing to acquire community service experience. A two-course sequence in business Spanish leading to an exam that provides an internationally recognized certification of competence was created last year. These courses attract students in international business as well as regular Spanish majors and minors.
Enrollments continue to climb even though we have restricted the number of lower-division courses, in order to use part-time allocations for the other programs. Attrition from the 100 to 200 level is very steep.
In the past three summers we have been able to offer courses such as Introduction to Literary Analysis, Spanish Linguistics, Masterpieces of Spanish American Literature, Second Language Acquisition, Latin American Civilization, Bilingual Teacher, and Advanced Grammar and Composition, and they have had very healthy enrollments (17 to 34 students).
In the few years before the merger, the French and German programs lost six faculty members to retirement, which in effect left the French program with one and a half positions, the German program with two positions, and Italian with one and a half positions. The Spanish program functioned with five faculty members for most of the 1990s until we started hiring again regularly in 1998. Since then, we have hired seven tenure-track faculty members and two full-time lecturers. We have always relied on teaching associates and part-time instructors to staff the lower-division language classes and several upper-division courses in linguistics and literature. Starting in fall 2003, the department will have a total of nineteen tenured, tenure-track, and full-time faculty members, one faculty member participating in the faculty early retirement program (he teaches only one semester), eight part-time instructors, and about fifteen teaching associates. It is interesting to note the types of hires we have made in the last few years. The fields represented are translation and interpretation, language coordination, francophone studies and Arabic, Italian studies, German studies, Golden Age and colonial literature, and Latin American theater and performance arts. We are particularly pleased that we have finally hired a language coordinator for all language programs (tenure-track position).
The departmental budget is the responsibility of the chair. The two main sources of funding for the academic year are the general funds allocated to the college and then to the department itself through an arcane formula and the concurrent enrollment revenue funds. Another source of revenue is private or corporate donations and grants. The general funds allocation for 2001–02 was $11,621, and the concurrent enrollment revenue funds allocation was $19,476, for a total operating budget of $31,097. This budget does not take into account funds from the college for intellectual events (about $2,000 a year), faculty computers (about $6,000), half the cost of printing the newsletter ($1,800), and funds for searches, including attending the MLA convention and candidates’ expenses during the campus visit.
A number of new projects, incoming faculty needs, faculty searches, development, and clerical needs have made the current office operations budget inadequate. Most of the budget is spent on supplies, photocopies, student assistants, and travel funding for faculty members. The rest goes to pay for the following: newsletter (half of the cost for 3,500 copies), graphic artist for newsletter ($600); partial funding for the French translation journal; purchase of foreign video material, printers for faculty members, furniture for faculty offices, miscellaneous computer accessories for faculty projects (e.g., zip drives, scanners, speakers, flat screens for graphics); lunches, dinners, and receptions for candidates and speakers; and honoraria not covered by the college.
Our department is rather generous in its allocation of a large portion of funds for travel to conferences in which faculty members are presenting (this year about $4,500). Each member can request up to $600 a year, in addition to the funding available from the college ($1,600 for national conferences and $2,400 for international travel). The university also provides about $300 a year for travel. Faculty members in their first year receive $1,000 to use for travel or additional equipment related to their field.
In curriculum innovation and use of technology, the faculty has access to a number of workshops, specialized assistance, and funding. Faculty members can apply for three units of release time or a stipend as well as for new computers and student assistants. Other types of grants available are for internationalization of the curriculum, general education reform, instructional innovation, and assessment projects. These generous resources have allowed many faculty members to develop curriculum and use technology to sustain program growth and attract new students. The environment in which we work has been very conducive to innovation, especially in the light of budgetary pressures.
The college has been supportive of the department in all areas (hirings, grants, technology). We requested a new language lab in 1997 and a language lab director for all the languages. We now have both. The initial cost of equipping the lab with the Temberg Devaci system (twenty-five terminals) was about $67,000. We have added another twenty terminals ($50,000) from lottery funds. The college pays for the lab director who works for the Asian and Asian American studies department and for our department.
The department has been highly successful in garnering outside funding to allow it to meet the goals of its redefined mission. This influx of funding at a time when no state funds were available for the start-up of new programs has made it possible for the department to continue to move forward in curriculum development and technology. External grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the United States Department of Education, the Modern Language Association, the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the German government, Pro Helvetia, the Swiss consulate, the French government, the Italian government, and private donors to the Italian and Russian programs together with numerous internal grants are proof of the determination of our faculty to retool in the rapidly changing environment that is higher education today.
In sum, the college has supported the department in many substantial ways. The dean has collaborated with us in grants, conferences, and fund-raising efforts. The associate deans (in charge of finances and personnel issues) have a cordial and trusting relationship with key faculty members in the department. The administration is perceived to be hard-working and fair by most of the faculty. We recognize that one reason for this positive attitude is that over the years we have developed great respect for each other despite difficult times and competing needs. Even though the California budget has dramatically worsened in the last year, the issues we are now addressing are related to workload fairness across the departments, not the bottom line. There is a consultative process that generates good outcomes and an acceptable measure of transparency.
Every faculty member is engaged in some form of scholarly and creative activity, and most are recognized scholars in their fields, both nationally and internationally. Our members travel extensively, representing the university and the department in discipline-based conferences. Moreover, the department has initiated a number of projects that underscore its commitment to the community. In 1996 our department joined foreign language departments from Arizona State University; the University of Georgia; the University of North Carolina, Greensboro; the University of South Florida; and the University of Virginia in a project sponsored by the Modern Language Association and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to review the undergraduate program in foreign languages with the prospective teacher of foreign languages in mind. Working independently on campus, each team reviewed the courses that enroll prospective teachers, examining long-standing criticisms of disciplinary majors, scholarly developments in the field, the teaching models undergraduates encounter in their classes, and the overall understanding of the field that the department’s required and elective courses are likely to convey to undergraduates. In 1997 Jutta Birmele (German studies; director, Center for European Studies) and Clorinda Donato (French and Italian) received a grant of 15,000F ($2,631.58) for promoting the educational activities of the newly formed Center for European Studies on this campus. In 1998–99, an NEH focus grant allowed our department’s faculty members to meet with teachers from the Long Beach Unified School District on a regular basis to discuss and study areas of mutual concern and interest in the Spanish for Spanish speakers curriculum. The Language Mission Project was funded by the National Foreign Language Center at the Johns Hopkins University and the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Our university was selected among 120 institutions throughout the nation to participate as one of the sixteen teams. The project allowed faculty members to explore the field of heritage language instruction. It created a campus-wide awareness of the immense untapped resources we have in our heritage language population. As a direct result of this project, California State University, Long Beach, was selected to host the first heritage language conference sponsored by the National Foreign Language Center and the Center for Applied Linguistics. In 2000 a member of the faculty received a Title VII grant to collaborate with Westminster High School in implementing a heritage speaker program. Another faculty member was awarded a School to Careers grant to pay tuition (for three years) and buy materials for twenty-five bilingual high school students, who will enroll in an introduction to translation and interpretation course through the Young Scholars Program. We are currently working with the Long Beach Unified School District to apply for a Department of Education three-year grant to train high school teachers to teach the new, more demanding curriculum for the advanced placement Spanish literature courses and exam.
Pro Helvetia, Switzerland’s foremost government-sponsored cultural affairs foundation, has been an active partner of the Department of Romance, German, Russian Languages and Literatures for the past six years. Among the projects they have funded are two Swiss courses; an annual visiting lectureship (Writer in Residence Program) in tandem with the University of Southern California’s Max Kade Institute; and the sponsorship of a play, symposium, and art exhibit in honor of Friedrich Dürrenmatt that brought our department into contact with the theater arts department and the University Art Museum. The foundation has also provided the library with excellent resource works in French, German, and Italian in addition to offering free textbooks to all students enrolled in Swiss classes and subscriptions to the best French- and German-language Swiss newspapers.
Over the past five years, the faculty has actively participated in technology-related projects. Funded through an American Council for Education Grant and Swiss Radio International, Project Headlines Interactive adapted short foreign language video news clips into courseware in three languages (French, German, and Spanish). The project has served as a prototype for much of the technological work that is currently going on in the program. A model of interactive programming, it will be incorporated into both of two projects, German Online and German on the Web.
German Online is in its final stages of development. This online reading course in German was funded through the CSU chancellor’s office so that access to a self-taught online course in German could be created. The course makes it possible for students who have no knowledge of German to begin reading texts in German through an online interactive grammar technique that isolates particular structures through a color-coded “x-ray” system. In 1998 the Federal Republic of Germany provided $450,000 in funding for the project German on the Web, with in-kind contributions by CSULB over a five-year period. The outcome was a comprehensive online program in German that will be equivalent to four semesters of college-level German courses.
In 1997 Harold Cannon created a film and television internship program for students who are proficient in English and Spanish. This internship provides them with the opportunity to work in different areas including production, marketing, news, graphics, and accounting. With fifteen years of acting experience in television shows, commercials, and films, Cannon uses his contacts in the entertainment industry to place students in the best internships available. Students currently in the internship program work at the Spanish channels KVEA and KMEX, Premiere Films, ABC Studios, Esparza Productions, and Com Data Video. The program has also served as outreach for the department, since a number of the interns come from other programs in the university, including film and electronic arts.
Foreign Language Alliance Intra-regional is a sharing of BA and MA courses between the French and German programs of CSU Long Beach and CSU Fullerton. This program has been in effect since 1995, when both campuses lost at least half of the faculty members teaching in these programs within the same time frame. The program works well because of the proximity of the two campuses, which facilitates commuting time for faculty members and students and because of the good will on the part of the faculty and the students from both institutions to work together. The different expertise of the faculty on both campuses also works in our favor.
Our department is highly committed to study and work abroad. It is one of our primary goals to have all majors and minors spend as much time as possible in a country where the language the student is studying is spoken. Although the California State University System has a year-long study-abroad program and some of our students participate in it, the traditional nature of the program and its length does not suit most of our students. For this reason, a number of faculty members have sought to establish alternatives to the CSU program and to find ways to help students finance trips that are often beyond their means. Several scholarships in Italian and German have been established in the last three years.
In 1997 the Center for International Education established a one-to-one exchange program with the bilingual University of Fribourg in Switzerland. The university is set up as an institution fully functional in two languages, French and German, and the Italian program at the university is also well developed. In addition to the program in Fribourg, the exchange with the University of Neuchâtel has been reactivated, and an exchange agreement with the University of Lausanne has been signed.
Since 1986 CSULB students and German students have been participating in a marketing workshop exchange that teaches them the principles of international marketing through study and face-to-face meetings. The Long Beach students go to Germany at the end of May for a week of research seminars, company visits, and social activities. The Hamburg students come to California in mid-November for a similar program. This is the only class in the College of Business Administration that takes students abroad and one of the few programs anywhere that requires American and foreign marketing students to work together.
Since 1994 the German program has had an exchange program with the University of Oldenburg, Germany, that has averaged an exchange of seven students a year. Students from here typically go with two years of German language study before beginning their course work in the German university. Students who wish to study Spanish can do so at the Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara (Mexico) and the Universidad de Belgrano (Argentina) exchange programs. Both programs receive between four and six students every year, in addition to the students who participate in the CSU year-abroad programs in Querétaro, Mexico; Santiago, Chile; and Madrid or Granada, Spain. Also, a number of students every year choose to participate in a program abroad as independent students. Italian studies has established an exchange program with the University of Florence, which involves exchanges between students and faculty members. Other programs, including a collaboration with European studies, are also being developed.
To conclude, a number of initiatives, external and internal funding, curricular and programmatic development and innovation, good working relations with the administration, and a collegial atmosphere have all contributed to the success of the department. With the exception of Russian, all programs are either in a stable situation (German) or increasing in enrollments (French, Italian, Spanish). We will continue to monitor the changes and avatars of the profession and the marketplace to ensure responsive and responsible programs for our students and the local and global communities.
Claire Emilie Martin
Part of the French, Russian, and German program sections were written by Clorinda Donato, Harold Schefski, and Jutta Birmele, respectively, for the departmental self-study completed in 2000.
| Full-Time Tenure Track |
Full-Time Non-Tenure Track |
Part-Time | Graduate Student TAs | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| French | 3 | 0 | 3 | 3-4 |
| German | 2.5 | 0 | 1 | 4-5 |
| Italian | 3.5 | 0 | 2 | 1 |
| Russian | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Spanish | 7 | 1 | 7 | 5 |
| 1995 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| French | |||||
| Introductory sequence | 218 | 329 | 287 | 348 | 253 |
| Advanced courses | 63 | 121 | 112 | 63 | 101 |
| German | |||||
| Introductory sequence | 10 | 83 | 80 | 78 | 88 |
| Advanced courses | 61 | 42 | 42 | 40 | 43 |
| Italian | |||||
| Introductory sequence | 131 | 173 | 161 | 211 | 253 |
| Advanced courses | – | 49 | 35 | 85 | 47 |
| Russian | |||||
| Introductory sequence | 31 | 29 | 29 | 14 | 35 |
| Advanced courses | 13 | 30 | 23 | 4 | 2 |
| Spanish | |||||
| Introductory sequence | 274 | 343 | 399 | 552 | 365 |
| Advanced courses | 116 | 122 | 466 | 328 | 516 |
© 2003 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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