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UNLIKE the more traditional, classroom-based language learning program, the Five College Self-Instructional Language Program presents a unique set of challenges to the director who is faced with the task of integrating the heritage language learner into the program. 1 Whereas a professor has the daily opportunity to facilitate and control the linguistic contact between heritage and the nonheritage learners in the foreign language classroom, our program, being without a professor by definition, has no such opportunity. Rather, as the program's name suggests, students in our program work essentially on their own, coming together for small group conversation sessions. The only time they meet with a professor of the target language is during the final exam. This system poses some unusual problems for foreign language acquisition while offering the director the flexibility to design special tracks that accommodate both the heritage and the nonheritage learner. Because the profile of student learners changes from semester to semester, our program design is always in a state of flux. This article discusses the Five College experience with heritage learners from the inception of the program in the fall of 1991 through the spring of 1995.
The foundation of our program bears directly on the topic of the heritage language learner. During 1990–91, the Korean Student Association (KSA) organized an effort to establish Korean as a language and literature track in the Asian Studies departments and presented the Five College deans with a petition signed by over 150 students. The interest of the students was evident. The dilemma that faced the Five College deans was equally clear. How could we satisfy what was obviously a burgeoning need in our community and add some of the more frequently requested, less commonly taught languages like Korean without making permanent alterations to a language faculty that already offered ancient Greek, Arabic, Chinese, Danish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Sanskrit, Spanish, Swedish, and Vietnamese? After carefully investigating our options, we decided to affiliate ourselves with the National Association of Self-Instructional Language Programs (NASILP), based in Temple University's Department of Critical Languages. 2 By May 1991 we were affiliated, and I, as director of the Five College Foreign Language Resource Center (the research and development facility for the Five College foreign language and literature faculty) was asked to develop a program to meet our needs. 3
The task, while not as herculean as it may at first appear, did involve some notable challenges. For example, the final program had to win approval by the Five College deans as well as the individual faculties. As with any nontraditional program or course, the issue of whether credit would be offered for the courses immediately leapt to the forefront. In the end, all institutions agreed to give self-instructional courses half the credit normally granted for traditional language courses. The controversy over credit was grounded in a genuine concern for quality control, so for that reason we instituted strict standards for the program. Three components must be available before we will include a language in the program: professors of the language, native speakers to serve as conversation partners, and appropriate text, audio, video, and computer materials. Since we originally found ourselves in the predicament of not offering the less commonly taught languages because we had no such professors, this obstacle was the first one we tackled. We found target language professors at other American colleges and universities and contracted them to fly to our campuses at the end of the semester to give oral exams. The professors also serve as consultants during the semester; students with questions about the grammar or content of a language can write the professors directly by e-mail. The professors also provide important help with placement exams.
Because of our colleges' large international student community, the second necessary component, a supply of native speakers, is the least problematic. Before we hire the speakers, they are interviewed by target language professors to make certain they are indeed fluent speakers of the language. To emphasize that the speakers are hired to facilitate conversation and not to teach grammatical concepts of the language, we dubbed them “conversation partners.” Recognizing that the conversation session is intrinsic to the successful completion of the course, we pay our native speakers $20 a session, so that students flock to our office to be considered for the job. Because being a conversation partner is highly sought after, it is not only a lucrative position but also an honor.
The final component for a successful program is appropriate text material, which we obtain with help from our target language professors, the national headquarters of NASILP, and other consulting agencies. With the three components in place in the fall of 1991, we were ready to begin the program.
The program's format is simple: students buy the text material; use audio, video, or computer material in their home-campus language labs; receive a semester-long assignment at the beginning of the semester; are assigned to native-speaking international students on their home campuses; work on their own for an average of fifteen hours a week with text and accompanying materials; meet their conversation partners for a weekly hour of conversation drill; 4 and end the semester ready to participate in a one-on-one, orally based exam with the target language professor. The goal of the program is to make the student functionally fluent in the target language and culturally literate in regard to the target country. Although the student is exposed to the writing system of the country, there is no graded or corrected written homework and no written component of the exam. Clearly, then, the NASILP system is designed for the beginning student with no background in the target language. Herein lay my first challenge: how to incorporate into the program the students from the Korean Student Association, most of whom did indeed have some linguistic knowledge and almost all of whom had a strong Korean cultural component.
At this point our program began to deviate significantly from the national model. Unlike the student for whom most of the self-instructional material is designed, many of our students had some sort of experience with the target language before deciding to enroll. 5 The languages we offer self-instructionally include Czech, Modern Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Korean, Norwegian, Serbo-Croatian, Swahili, Turkish, and Urdu. During the first semester the program was offered, we had eager heritage students enrolling in almost all languages. Their enrolling was no surprise, because we were aware of the large number of heritage students on our campuses and because most students petitioning to get these languages offered had some ethnic link to the target language. But we were unaware of the varying degrees of language proficiency and how they would ultimately affect the structure of our program.
Because the self-instructional languages do not satisfy the language requirement at any of the Five Colleges, the requirement clearly has no effect on enrollment. 6 In fact, the typical self-instructional student has already fulfilled the requirement and isn't even really interested in the credit. In my Italian courses, I usually have several students of Italian ethnic origin who are studying the language to learn about their cultural identity, but rarely are heritage students in the majority. The large proportion of heritage students in our program (over half of the enrollment in any given semester) includes students from a variety of majors, frequently nonhumanities. Their interest in the language is usually not academic: they study it to validate their cultural identities. Perhaps a student spoke a little Hindi with a grandmother and realizes that it is dialect or a provincial form; the student wants to learn the standard, formal language and be able to function in society.
From the outset, then their goals are different from those of the student with no target-language background who needs to learn enough Modern Greek to participate in an archaeological dig in the Peloponnesus and the Middle Eastern Studies major who is already studying Arabic and wants to learn Turkish for a better chance of admission to a top-notch graduate school. Our heritage learners frequently see being able to study their language as a socially validating experience; it is the key to a body of ethnic literature that is part of their cultural background, and it is the link with a living culture that has thus far eluded them. The linguistic-cultural wealth they bring with them can contribute much to the learning experience of the nonheritage learners, but their familiarity with the sound of the language can intimidate the nonheritage learners, who may be left in the dust as the heritage learners take off. Given these differences in language learners, we had to decide how to determine the makeup of our conversation sections. Should we mix heritage with nonheritage learners, or should we divide the students into two groups based on cultural background? Who goes with whom? And more important, do all students use the same materials for their self-study? Does the student who grew up with Urdu in the household begin with basic pronunciation drill as do the students who have never heard a word of Urdu in their lives? We began to get the answers to these questions at the initial interview.
All students must begin the registration process by scheduling an interview with me. We allow only one hundred students to enroll each semester, and I insist on interviewing each student (heritage or nonheritage) personally to ascertain the student's readiness for the intensity of the program. The interviews also allow me to divide the students into heritage and nonheritage groups. The nonheritage learners I handle myself; the heritage learners get turned over to the target language professors. Anyone who has had any experience with the language must speak with the target language professor. The interview allows us to reduce the possibility of an already fluent heritage student enrolling for an easy A and, more important, to discern our heritage learner's existing skills. We determine if the student had to communicate with a relative in the target language; we discover the principal socializing language used by the student between the ages of five and ten; and finally we find out if the student ever “studied” the language at home or in an external situation like Sunday school (as many of our heritage students did). Further questions concern the student's ability to watch and understand native movies or television programs. One of the more interesting questions is whether the students consider themselves able to speak or read the target language. 7 After the interviews, we may categorize a few students as too advanced for our program, but most students are able to evaluate their abilities and know whether they need to study the language.
We now have to decide whether to intermingle heritage learners with the nonheritage students or try to put them on a special track. Our solution has been to find a happy medium—we do a little of both. Before I explain the details of our grouping system, let me point out some of the obstacles that make our system of separation and unification essential. One must always keep in mind that our program is orally based—the goal is for students to be able to speak the language at the conclusion of the learning experience—and the program is self-instructional. Primarily, the students work on their own with texts and audiovisual materials, and these materials were designed with the nonheritage student in mind. How does a person learn Hindi from scratch? How can a nonheritage student look at a page full of Korean characters and know how to pronounce them? What keeps this learning process from becoming a memory game of matching strange sounds to even stranger characters? This problem has been tackled by many, and the solutions are as varied as the experts addressing it; one of the most commonly used solutions is to write beginning texts not in the target language's script but in romanization.
Romanization serves as a pronunciation guide for those of us illiterate in the script; native speakers looking at a romanization would probably swear that it was not their language, but it allows the complete beginner to start speaking immediately. Romanization is helpful for nonheritage students in a program such as ours, but heritage students should avoid it. Although the nonheritage students use romanization in the beginning stages to become comfortable with the language's sounds, they do not learn to write in romanization. Heritage students are often already familiar with the sounds and can be much more successful matching the sounds to script. They are thus ready to start rudimentary script from the beginning. It became clear to us, then, that much of the text material appropriate for the nonheritage learner is inappropriate for the heritage learner and vice versa. Therefore it would sometimes be necessary not only to separate the heritage and nonheritage learners but actually to give them two different texts or at least put them on different learning tracks—one that includes the target script from the first day and another that uses romanization. (See Jordan for a lively overview of the pros and cons of romanization.)
The second obstacle that we were expecting is that heritage students' speech frequently reflects a regional or colloquial influence, so the learning task becomes twofold: not only must the students internalize the new, standard, formal language, but they must also simultaneously unlearn or at least compartmentalize the less standard speech with which they are familiar. If the heritage and nonheritage students are in the same conversation section, both are frustrated—-the heritage student because the old, familiar language seems unacceptable and the nonheritage student because of a new vocabulary introduced by heritage students—a vocabulary that, in fact, is not standard.
By separating the two groups, at least initially, we can provide each the maximum benefit. The assignments are essentially the same, but the order in which material is covered may differ, and, particularly if one group uses romanized texts, the texts themselves may differ. Nonheritage students meet in their weekly conversation sessions and practice the standard language they have been studying and listening to. They learn standard grammatical structures and vocabulary and enter the final exam ready to speak with the target language professor. The heritage students meet in their weekly conversation sessions and essentially cover the same ground as the nonheritage students. They practice the standard language, but they can also discuss the variants in vocabulary to which they may be accustomed. They learn that their dialects or provincialisms are not wrong but rather variations, deviations from what has been accepted as standard. They thus learn about their culture while they acquire the standard vocabulary. Of course, they also learn to match the sounds to the script. When the heritage students take the exam, they are tested over the same material as the nonheritage students; while the nonheritage students strictly speak and are spoken to, the heritage students also respond to script, something the nonheritage student does not do until the next semester.
While this kind of separation is useful for the above-mentioned reasons, it is also beneficial to bring the groups of heritage and nonheritage students together for cultural discussions. Because all students have learned the same formal, standard vocabulary for the subject at hand, they can discuss cultural topics such as wedding traditions. The heritage students are familiar with the traditions, and the discussion can elicit thoughts and reflections from these students that would have otherwise gone untapped.
We have also found that each group of learners benefits from the extra components of the course in different ways. For example, we receive and videotape daily satellite broadcasts from the target countries. Native speakers edit the footage and reduce it to segments of several minutes; we then create listening-comprehension exercises from that footage. While the nonheritage speaker will take thirty minutes to get through the initial footage, the heritage learner will be able to go further into the broadcast, maybe listening to the entire evening news to find examples of the grammatical structures being studied. We are developing a series of laserdiscs driven by Hypercard programs that simulate one-on-one conversation practice with native speakers from all over the target country. (The projects are being supported by grants from the Booth-Ferris Foundation and the Charles E. Culpeper Foundation.) When the project is finished, the students will be able to “track” themselves, choosing a software package for heritage or nonheritage learners.
Our separation, unification, and tracking system for heritage and nonheritage students has thus far worked well. Given the large number of the heritage students in our program and the program's unique structure, division of the conversation sessions offers the best solution to the problem of providing for the specific needs of each target group of language learners. The program is in its fifth year, and it continues to be immensely successful. The presence of the heritage language learner has enriched our program and our course materials because we have developed strategies that challenge members of this important component of our college community.
The author is Five College Assistant Professor of French and Italian and Director of the Five College Foreign Language Resource Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
1 Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts are the institutions in the Five Colleges consortium. Because of the proximity of the colleges and a widely used Five College bus system, students and faculty members easily travel from campus to campus. Cooperation not only among the institutions but among individual departments has led to increased opportunities for all of us. It was because of the strength of the consortium that I was able to organize and launch our self-instructional language program.
2 NASILP provides support for self-instructional language programs at a wide range of colleges and universities. NASILP's basic instructional format revolves around the text, the tape, and the tutor (a native speaker), and although they provide guidelines for the structure of individual programs, the eventual design of any institution's program depends on a myriad of factors from director to budget to university regulations and the availability of native speakers; consequently, each program is unique.
3 The Five College Foreign Language Resource Center, founded with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, officially opened in the fall of 1989.
4 Depending on the number of students enrolled in a particular level of a particular language, the number of students in a conversation section ranges from one to five; the average is three.
5 The slant of material toward complete beginners in the language is not unique to self-instructional materials. Our elementary language texts usually begin with pronunciation drills, assuming an unfamiliarity on the part of the students.
6 The deans and the organizational committee made the decision that the courses would not apply toward the requirement, a decision congruent with the halved credits that the courses carry.
7 Our interview process was established with the help of Surendra Gambhir, professor of South Asia regional studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Gambhir offers his thoughts and experiences with the heritage language learner in “Challenges of Ethnic Student Enrollments.”
Gambhir, Surendra. “Challenges of Ethnic Student Enrollments.” NASILP Journal 22 (1992): 13–20.
Jordan, Eleanor. “The Uses and Abuses of a Romanized Transcription.” NASILP Journal 25 (1995): 8–14.
© 1996 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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