Spanish Language Becoming A Core Skill For All College Students
January 29, 2003
University Park, Pa. -- For college students nationwide, Spanish is no longer just another foreign language class, but is increasingly a key basic course such as English composition, math, science or humanities, says a Penn State educator.
The burgeoning enrollments of Spanish in American colleges and universities are a reflection of demographic realities, said Dr. John M. Lipski, professor and chair of the Spanish department at Penn State, in a recent issue of PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association of America.
"Spanish has become our de facto second language - and in some regions, the first language," Lipski says. "This is a unique phenomenon in the 200-year history of the United States, which has always been an aggressively and often xenophobically monolingual nation."
Now that another language is sharing America's cultural landscape, universities are the perfect forums for promoting this healthy and indeed irresistible development, he added. Most college students take Spanish for quite pragmatic reasons, using it to help anchor their curriculums in business and international studies. American students appreciate the fact that, apart from the domestic importance of Spanish, it has more than 400 million native speakers worldwide.
"This makes Spanish one of the top languages of international trade and communication, ranking from fourth place to second depending on the criteria," says Lipski. "Spanish has risen above all the junk language and demeaning pseudobabble (`el cheapo,' `no problemo') to become a high-demand course of study at American universities."
For example, Spanish sections at Penn State outnumber their closest neighbor by some three and a half to one, and represent over half of all basic language sections taught at the University, according to Lipski. The figures are similar at other Big Ten universities.
Fast disappearing is the perception that Spanish is the easiest foreign language to master. A truly encouraging sign is that a growing number of students are taking Spanish in quiet defiance of xenophobia, isolationism and intolerance on the national scene, he adds.
"To deal fully with the evolving role of Spanish language programs in U.S. colleges and universities, university administrators need to acknowledge that for many - perhaps for most - college students, Spanish is well on the way to dropping its foreign status, to take its place among the knowledge and skills required by well-rounded university graduates," Lipski said. "A university that does not give its students the opportunity to study Spanish thoroughly and critically will be shortchanging future generations of educated Americans for whom Spanish will play an important role."
**pab**