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The Rice Thresher
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Abolished requirement has little immediate effect by Elizabeth Decker thresher staff In the wake of the elimination of the language requirement, students remain enrolled in language courses and no immediate effects are apparent. The School of Humanities is making plans to better incorporate foreign languages into the curriculum now that they do not need to focus so much attention on implementing the language requirement. In future years, however, first-year language courses will not count for distribution. No exodus from language courses Despite the abolishment of the language requirement, students are not rushing to drop their current language courses, Registrar Jerry Montag said. "We could not determine any correlation with the faculty abolishing the language requirement and students dropping these courses at the last minute," Montag said. Montag said while some students did drop their language courses, it was at the same rate that students dropped other courses. Montag also said students reported dropping their language courses for typical reasons, like course difficulty, not having enough time or not getting a good grade. "I think that Rice students are serious students," Montag said. "They're interested in their education and the path to their education, and I think a change ... on a requirement ... had no effect on them." Montag said he hoped also that another reason students weren't dropping their language classes was because they were enjoying them. Language in the humanities Interim Dean of Humanities Gale Stokes said there would be no changes to the school's language offerings for next semester. Stokes reported that the foreign language departments did grow slightly this year in response to higher enrollment in beginning language classes. For example, the Spanish department added 11 lecturers to teach new sections created to handle increased enrollment in Spanish classes. The number of students enrolled in Spanish 101 increased from 111 in the fall of 1999 to 148 in fall of 2000. Stokes said it was difficult to calculate the number of students who will continue to take language classes next year after starting this year under the language requirement. Two years from now, though, Stokes expects to see a greater number of students enrolled in language courses than there were before the language requirement. The reason I think that is that I believe that language instruction has improved at Rice over the last five years, and that the courses are therefore more attractive, and secondly because there is an increasing interest among Rice students in other cultures, in study abroad, those kinds of things that lead people to study languages," Stokes said. Stokes said that language courses have been improved both by the creation of new software that allows the integration of the World Wide Web into language instruction and by a new focus on proficiency-based teaching philosophies. Web-based language courses have been made possible at Rice due to a program developed here called ExTemplate. The program allows computers to become a much larger part of the first-year language courses, Stokes said. "Using that program has involved instructors and lecturers in the introductory language courses using the computer in the classroom to a much higher degree than we've ever had in the past," Stokes said. Stokes said the language requirement also forced the language departments to adopt proficiency-based courses. To master the proficiency-based teaching style, language instructors attended seminars and workshops which improved their teaching skills, Stokes said. Stokes said that one negative effect of the language requirement was that it kept the School of Humanities from making other improvements to language instruction within the school. With the language requirement gone, the school looks forward to finding new ways of implementing language across the curriculum, Stokes said. Stokes said that the school would like to focus on creating more Foreign Language Across the Curriculum courses. The origin of FLAC courses FLAC courses were first offered last fall and are still limited in number - only one FLAC course will be offered this fall. They are one-hour classes that are paired with another class from the humanities to allow students to explore materials from a class in a foreign language. Reading, discussion and writing is done in the foreign language, but the material is scaled to the level of students who have completed the end of second-year language instruction. Stokes said that FLAC courses are intended to provide students with an opportunity to use their language skills outside of the foreign language departments. "The idea is, of course, to provide some place that you can use your language once you've gotten up to a certain level," Stokes said. "The only place in the university that you can use it now is in a literature course, and not everybody who's studying a language necessarily wants to go on to an advanced course in literature - they might want to do sociology or history or whatever." Stokes said he also hopes to find ways to encourage humanities majors to study abroad. Already, Stokes noted, humanities majors have the greatest degree of freedom in studying abroad of students here. In 1999-2000, for example, Stokes reported that 79 humanities majors studied abroad for a semester or more. To increase these numbers, Stokes wants to create a scholarship for students wishing to study abroad. The amount would be small, possibly around $3,000 for students studying abroad for a semester and $5,000 for students going for a year. "In other words, what we're trying to do is find some ways to encourage people to study language," Stokes said. "We continue to think- I think most people in the School of Humanities continue to think - that the study of language is important in the modern world, [and] it is worth spending the time on." Stokes said he hopes the School of Humanities will continue to work on finding ways to encourage the study of languages without relying on a simple language requirement. Defining distribution At the faculty meeting on Tuesday afternoon, the faculty voted 24-14 against a measure presented by Statistics Professor Jim Thompson that would make all first-year language classes count for Group I distribution credit. Second-year courses and above will count toward Group I distribution credit. All languages courses, including first-year courses, counted toward Group I distribution credit before last year. Thompson said the reality for engineering students is that the only classes they can take outside of their major have to be for distribution because of the heavy requirements of their majors. Not awarding Group I distribution credit for language classes, Thompson argued, creates a strong disincentive for students to take those courses. "If we let things stand as they are right now, this will be the strongest disincentive to students taking foreign languages that we've ever seen," Thompson said. "It will be the hardest for our majors in science and engineering to develop language proficiency that it has ever been. So we will have moved from a situation where a student coming in this year is faced with a requirement to take languages, to a situation next year where many of our science and engineering majors simply are not going to be able to do it." Thompson said that his measure would correct the current disincentive for students to study language. "What I'm now trying to help the faculty avoid is getting itself caught in a schizophrenic situation," Thompson said. "Are we going to change from a policy where everybody must demonstrate foreign language proficiency to another policy which makes it extremely difficult for some of our science and engineering majors to demonstrate foreign language proficiency?" English Professor Alan Grob argued that since the faculty had been so strongly in favor of creating a language requirement, they should continue to provide an incentive to students to take those classes by making them distribution classes. "It seems to me that if the faculty thought enough of a general language requirement to require it, the faculty should think enough of students, should think it desirable enough for students to take the 100-level courses, the beginning courses, and have it count towards distribution requirement," Grob said. French Professor Lynne Huffer, a member of the committee that is in charge of choosing which courses are Group I distribution, argued that it was not the role of the faculty to change university policies to correct difficulties students may experience with the science and engineering curriculum. "I think that if the curriculum in the sciences is such that it's difficult for them to take these courses, that that isn't something that this body should take up as something that needs to be legislated," Huffer said. However, Thompson argued that it had been university policy for first-year language courses to count for distribution until the creation of the language requirement last year, and that the motion would only restore this policy. "There is the argument that we've always done it that way," Stokes said. "However, because we did something educationally unsound in the past is no reason to do it in the future, I don't think. And I think it is educationally unsound to count those courses for distribution one." History Professor Ira Gruber explained that 100-level language courses did not meet the criteria for Group I distribution courses as determined by a committee appointed by the School of Humanities to review courses for distribution suitability. "We considered first-year language courses, and we thought that so much time was devoted in those first-year courses to mastering the basics of vocabulary [and] grammar so as not to leave time for a general education," Gruber said. Stokes said other courses offered by the School of Humanities better fulfilled the requirements of Group I distribution courses. "I think what that committee felt and what I feel is that if we have a choice between students being able to take two semesters of a foreign language or two semesters of history of art or a literature course or a philosophy course or a religious studies course or a history course, there's absolutely no question in our mind what is the educationally sound thing for them to do in terms of the breadth of education, in terms of general educational requirements," Stokes said. Political Science Professor John Ambler also voiced the concern that the motion was attempting to usurp the role of the deans of the schools. "I think it's very inappropriate for the faculty to intervene case by case, set by set, to try to change that," Ambler said, "What you're doing is challenging the right of divisions across the board to determine what courses are on that list." Speaker of the Faculty and English Professor Bob Patten said the faculty could be making a mistake by attempting, in place of deans, to make the decision of what classes would count for distribution. "What I'm hearing the faculty try to do if they pass this motion is to override a particular set of disciplines, the faculty in which believe that this first year course does not meet the general faculty's statement," Patten said. "I don't like going down that road."
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