When Medill senior Barbara Myers travels to Japan next year, she wants to be more than a tourist. So she is taking first-year Japanese this year so when she arrives, she can see what the country is really like.
“I don’t just want to go shop in Tokyo,” said Myers, a former Daily staff member. “I want to actually do the things that other tourists don’t do. I want to see what the country is like for myself.”
Myers is part of a booming number of college students who are filling foreign language classrooms nationwide, according to a study released Nov. 6 by the Modern Language Association. More than 1.4 million college students are enrolled in foreign language courses, and U.S. colleges saw a 17.9 percent jump in students taking a foreign language since the group’s last study in 1998.
Rosemary Feal, the language association’s executive director, said a variety of factors are behind the trend, but growing attentiveness to global issues is among the most important.
“I think students are just more interested in the world,” Feal said. “The world is getting smaller and smaller.”
Northwestern is no exception to increasing interest in foreign languages, according to foreign language faculty.
Richard Lepine, director of NU’s Program of African and Asian Languages, said his faculty has had difficulty keeping up with students’ demand for language classes. From Arabic to Swahili, he said more students than ever before are enrolling in every one of the program’s language courses.
To meet students’ demands, the program is opening more language sections to students and offering greater diversity of languages — new courses this year cover Turkish and Persian.
Lepine said the number of students enrolling in Arabic has increased the most by far, a trend in line with the Modern Language Association’s findings for enrollment nationwide. The study found a 92.5 percent national jump in students taking Arabic since 1998, the largest increase among all of the languages surveyed.
“In the past two years, Arabic was something that fluctuated,” Lepine said. “Starting last year, enrollments bloomed. I’ve been here 16 years, and Arabic has never had so many students.”
Other language faculty also pointed out recent jumps in enrollment. Department of French and Italian Chairman Bill Paden said enrollment in French is up modestly, with enrollment in Italian increasing significantly.
But Department of German Chairman Volker Durr said his department has seen no significant changes in foreign language enrollment. He said the first- and second-year German language classes have about 100 students each, an enrollment level that has remained stable over the past several years.
Like Myers, many NU students said they enroll in foreign language courses to learn more about the world and to prepare them for travel abroad. Andrea Calabrese, program assistant at NU’s study abroad office, said study abroad enrollment has surged, up to 435 students for the 2003-2004 school year. The year before had 392 students studying abroad, she said, and 385 studied abroad the year before that.
Myers said she hopes to study abroad next year as part of the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme, a teaching program sponsored by the Japanese government. She said taking Japanese now not only gives her a window into another culture but also gives her a window into her own.
“I think the rest of the world, in a lot of ways, perceives Americans as idiots,” Myers said. “But that’s not me. I don’t want to be a bad representative of this country wherever I go.”
