Building a Foreign Language Program at a Small Campus: Some Observations

Abstract

The 1984 MLA Directory lists well over a thousand two-year colleges in the United States.' Many are technical, business, sectarian, military or fine arts schools, often rural; others are huge, comprehensive institutions located in heavily populated urban or suburban areas with student bodies numbering in the tens of thousands. Although large two-year colleges obviously have their own problems, such as offering courses in the commonly taught languages other than the elementary and intermediate levels, introducing and continuing basic courses in such languages as Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Latin and Russian,3 etc., one problem they rarely face is not having at least a half-time instructor in each of the major modern languages currently being taught in this country (French, German and Spanish). In fact, two-year colleges with over 10,000 students normally have at least several instructors in Spanish as well as French, plus a number of part-time instructors. These large colleges will often offer ten or more sections each of elementary French and Spanish in the fall semester or quarter. In my remarks here I want to concentrate on colleges or campuses, outlining the difficulties they face in their efforts to include FL among the courses taught each year and offering some suggestions for strengthening the FL program based on my experiences at a campus of Northern Virginia Community College, the second largest two-year college in the country.4 Northern Virginia Community College is a five-campus institution located in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Two of the campuses, Alexandria and Annandale, have over 10,000 students each; the three smaller Campuses (Loudoun, Manassas and Woodbridge) have approximately 3,000-3,500 students each. When I use the term small in reference to a two-year college, I mean one with approximately 3,000 students or less, which seems to me to be the minimum number needed to support a full-time faculty member who teaches only one foreign language, although peculiar demographic and financial differences may alter individual situations. However, schools with far less than 3,000 students can usually support an instructor who is able to teach two major FL. But we must be realistic. While many foreign language teachers can do a fairly adequate job of teaching the elementary level of two or more FL, relatively few possess the expertise required to teach beyond this level in both languages. Of the 1136 two-year college sites in the U.S. (i.e., the 1033 two-year colleges and their 103 branches or campuses) over half have less than 3,000 students. Of these 230 have less than 1,000 students. As one might suspect, these schools are the very ones where foreign language instruction is most apt to be lacking, although there are some exceptions.6 The state of North Carolina is a good example. With 70 two-year colleges it ranks second in the country after California, which has 113. Yet 60 of the 70 two-year colleges in the Tarheel State have less than 3,000 students, and 45 offer no FL at all. Of this state's two-year colleges 35 are classified as technical institutes, several of which have 4,000-5,000 students. Their very nature as technical institutes might justify in the view of many the absence of FL in the curriculum. Nevertheless, three of these technical institutes (Blue Ridge Technical College in Flat Rock, Pamlico Technical Institute in Grantsboro and Stanly Technical Institute in Albemarle) include French and Spanish in the curriculum, with German also offered at Blue Ridge and Stanly. However, they are not the largest technical colleges in the state by any means. In fact, with 1127, 168 and 1015 students, respectively, they are among the smallest.7 I have no further information on these three colleges. If FL are indeed taught routinely, it would be interesting to determine why these institutes are different from the rest, many of which are three or four times as large.