At West Virginia University they have a total of nine languages that are offered to their students. Compared to most schools nine languages are indeed a huge variety. But of these nine languages only six of them are offered to major or minor in. Those languages are the basic ones that are offered almost anywhere. Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Chinese are the languages a student could major or minor in. Japanese is offered for students to only minor in. The Japanese minor was just established last semester, so WVU is bettering its Foreign Language department a little bit. The last two languages that are offered with no minor or major are Arabic and Portuguese. So students can take a few classes that are available in Arabic or Portuguese but not enough to satisfy one's hunger. To view WVU's foreign language department to look in detail about the majors and minors follow this link. http://forlang.wvu.edu/undergrad. There are still so many languages that WVU could offer and that would attract more students. Korean, Hindi, Bengali, Vietnamese, Thai, Hungarian, Greek, Swedish, Hebrew, and Finnish are just a small list of languages that WVU could pick up and add to their roster.
There are so many stake holders that would have an interest in this matter. From all the students from WVU to future students that the new languages attract to WVU. Everyone has interests and for most people that interest could involve a certain language. This language being offered at WVU could be the reason why they would choose that school over the others. Other stake holders for this issue are WVU's faculty and bored and businesses. WVU's faculty and board would get more funding and more students if more languages were offered. It would also cost money and time as well to find and hire teachers and add more class rooms. Businesses and big companies would be more willing to hire people that have more foreign languages in their backgrounds than ones that don't. Having these languages skills will help WVU find more jobs. People need others that can speak the language of the country they want and need to do business with.
For this first entry, I'm going to repeat here what I posted on Jocelyn Waggoner's blog, since you're exploring similar issues:
ReplyDeleteI really appreciate the topic that you're exploring in your blog. I'm interested in hearing more about your strategy for the blog and the other writing projects that you'll develop on this topic. Are you planning to examine the social, cultural, political, and/or economic causes of the present (sorry) state of foreign language education in the U.S. and here at WVU? Are you planning to explore the consequences? Highlight some contemporary foreign language programs that try to address this program? (Say, for example, some of the programs that have grown from the National Security Language Initiative: http://exchanges.state.gov/youth/programs/nsli.html and http://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/competitiveness/nsli/index.html) Or, are you planning to outline some policy solutions that would bolster foreign language education in the U.S. and/or at WVU? Or do you plan to do a combination of some or all of these approaches?
Some other websites might what to follow regularly:
http://www.languagepolicy.org/ (the Joint National Committee for Languages (JNCL) and the National Council for Languages and International Studies (NCLIS))
http://www.mla.org/ (Modern Language Association; look here especially under the "Resources" tab, including "Surveys, Reports, and Other documents," "Related Organization," "Public Policy Links," and "Language Brochures."
Also, two periodicals are devoted solely to cover the higher education industry and often feature articles on foreign language education topics:
Chronicle of Higher Education http://chronicle.com/section/Home/5
(To access the full content on this website, find the journal through the WVU Library's "electronic databases" link)
Insider Higher Ed: http://www.insidehighered.com/