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Photo by Reed Hutchinson
UCLA Photographic Services
Timothy Tangherlini devised a way that students at other
UC campuses can attend via video-conferencing UCLA classes
in less commonly taught languages, such as Swedish. |
So You Want to learn czech?
Language partners
BY MEG SULLIVAN
UCLA Today
Growing up in a household with a Swedish-speaking mother and brother,
Orange County native Kris Fricke hoped to pick up the language in
college. But he ended up an international relations major at UC
Davis, which doesn’t offer Swedish.
“I assumed it was a lost cause,” he said with a pang
of regret.
So imagine Fricke’s excitement when he learned in his senior
year of a new program that beams students from other UC campus into
classrooms at UCLA for instruction in Scandinavian languages.
Thanks to distance learning, Fricke reported four days a week this
fall to a beginning Swedish class being given in the basement of
Haines Hall by UCLA graduate student Cora Lacatus.
“She’s treated me like any other student,” Fricke
said.
Since 2002-03, a UCLA initiative, Distance Learning in Less Commonly
Taught Languages, has been tackling a critical and growing problem:
how to continue teaching such languages on campuses where the demand
for them is very low. The budget ax may loom even when proficiency
in some of these languages is considered vital to the national interest.
Timothy Tangherlini devised the initiative as head of the Scandinavian
Section in the UCLA College, with the goal of pooling enrollments
so that Nordic language instruction, for example, becomes economically
viable for UC partner campuses.
Besides video-conferencing beginning Swedish to UC Davis this year,
UCLA has since 2002-03 been on the receiving end for beginning Danish
and Finnish from UC Berkeley. This fall, successful administrative
collaboration and pilot sessions of beginning Czech from UCLA to
UC Santa Barbara have established a Czech partnership for next year
and beyond. In all, since 2002-03, five campuses — UCLA, Berkeley,
San Diego, Davis and Santa Barbara — have so far partnered
in at least one of these languages. Future courses may include Tagalog,
Swahili and Vietnamese, with Irvine and Riverside joining the campus
mix. Through its Language Resource Center, the International Institute’s
African Studies Center, Center for European and Eurasian Studies,
and Center for Southeast Asian Studies are hoping to support distance
learning in these languages, plus Uzbek, Azeri, Bulgarian, Georgian,
Romanian and Ukrainian.
Professor Tangherlini envisions a time when UC will be able to
offer upper-division Nordic literature courses in the languages
in which they were written. Students would be able to savor such
gems as Kierkegaard’s 19th-century proto-existentialist masterpiece,
“Fear and Trembling” in Danish, Ibsen’s “A
Doll’s House” in Norwegian, or Ingmar Bergman’s
dark, classic film, “Seventh Seal,” in its original
Swedish.
Teaching a language through distance learning does require some
adjustment since there needs to be real-time give and take between
the student and instructor, said Tangherlini. “The instructor
needs to correct grammar and listen for mistakes in pronunciation
and other subtleties,” he explained.
When the class first meets, interactions initially are stilted,
Tangherlini conceded, but after a couple of meetings, the undergraduates
forget the hundreds of miles that separate them.
“I saw UCLA students engaging in debates with a UC Riverside
student in an upper-division Scandinavian literature course that
I offered last year,” Tangherlini said. “I was really
surprised by just how fully students adapted to the technology.”
Nevertheless, there remain activities to which video-conferencing
still can’t do justice. When his class threw a holiday party
earlier this month, Fricke decided to fly down from Davis.
“I was very curious to meet all these people I’ve kind
of been interacting with,” Fricke said. |
