Y TAILOR IS RICH: Those were the first words I learned in my foreign language class in high school. I didn’t have a tailor, and I didn’t care if he was rich or not,” says Rachida Primov, director of the University of Miami’s Foreign Language Laboratory in the College of Arts and Sciences. “I knew I had to learn the sentence, but it didn’t mean anything to me.” Until recently, learning a foreign language was primarily a passive experience—the teacher speaks a phrase, and students listen and repeat. A new reality, however, has impelled dramatic changes in teaching foreign languages, and nowhere is this more true than at the University of Miami. “Just look around. We live in one of the most multicultural communities in the nation, if not the world,” says David R. Ellison, professor and chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures in the College of Arts and Sciences. “If we have 25 students in a class, it is most likely that they represent a dozen countries. It also means that we are in the crucible, and the world will look to us as an example. Our teaching methods must evolve to meet both the multicultural needs of our students as well as the multicultural reality of our community.”

Since Ellison began leading the department in 1994, he has introduced sweeping changes in curriculum development and teaching techniques, hired dozens of new faculty, acquired advanced electronic learning technologies, digitized audio and multimedia lessons to allow distance learning over the Internet, and brought in specialists in language pedagogy and acquisition.

“We’ve come down from the Ivory Tower,” he says. “The old model of teaching was that the professor provided the linguistic information and the students’ job was to absorb that information. But research proves that the best way to learn a language is through dialogue, participation, and interaction. So the teacher’s role has changed from ‘classical professor’ to ‘facilitator,’ and the classroom experience has become a total immersion experience.”
 

“Today we have real conversations about real-life situations, such as airport security in Paraguay or other topical subjects, to create an integrated learning experience,” says Rebecca Biron, associate professor of Spanish and a member of the curriculum revision team.

“Students are a little shocked at first because everything, even the teaching, is done in the target language,” says Michelle Warren, associate professor of French and another member of the curriculum revision team. “They tend to pick it up very quickly and feel a sense of achievement more quickly too.”

Another dramatic aspect of this language revolution is the broadening consciousness of diversity within each language. Students learning French will not only study French from France, but also the French spoken in Haiti, North Africa, Québec, Belgium, Switzerland, Martinique, and Togo.

“Language is embedded in its culture, and you can’t study the language without studying the culture of the places in which that language is spoken, read, or written,” Ellison explains.

Students in one of the University’s Spanish classes learn that to ride a bus in Mexico, you ask for a camión. In Spain, an autobús. In South America, a bus. And in the Caribbean, a gua-gua.

“My first French teacher was from Vietnam, and when I visited France for the first time, people there commented on my Vietnamese accent!” recalls Marc Brudzinski, one of the University’s newest language faculty and a specialist in socio-linguistics. “That made me realize how much of an effect a teacher has, especially in the beginning levels of a language, and it made me conscious of the responsibility implied in being the student’s first conduit into another culture.”

While no one person can be an expert on all cultures throughout the world, the University’s faculty make an effort to at least open the doors of awareness, then let the students’ inclinations lead them forward. A recent experience from one of Biron’s Spanish literature classes illustrates the challenge, and the satisfaction, of finding common ground in a multicultural environment.

“We were reading Versos Sensillos by José Martí,” she recalls, “and at one point the poet says, ‘I am putting away all the trappings of being a poet.’ I asked my students if they understood what that meant, and as a group, they all nodded ‘yes.’ But then I asked them one by one, and they all had different associations of the word that translated as ‘trappings.’ For one it meant pompousness, for another it meant a plunger, and yet another, clothing.

“Yet while they each had different interpretations, they all understood the overall meaning of the poem,” she explains. “It was an amazing experience. Everybody came to the same point from a different background, a different level of understanding of the language, yet together we came to a beautiful understanding.”

Brudzinski adds, “When you get to know people from other parts of the world through their language, you’re learning to understand others, not from your own perspective but on their own terms, and that is one of the best ways to lessen prejudice and ethnocentricity.”
 

nother way is to send students from Miami out into the world to experience other cultures firsthand. The University’s International Education and Exchange Program has one of the most comprehensive study-abroad programs in the country. Through either one-week trips or months-long or yearlong immersion in their host country, more than 350 full-time students participate in these programs annually.

“We encourage students to participate in these programs because it helps broaden their horizon and gives them a wider world view,” says Carol Lazzeri (M.S.Ed. ’86), director of the program and associate dean of the School of Continuing Studies. “That’s important, not only for their own personal enrichment, but also in a practical sense, because they learn skills that will be advantageous to them in their career.”

In fact, it is no longer unusual to see students learning their third or even fourth language at the University.

“Most businesses are global now, and the importance of global communication is increasing,” says Rafael Robles, director of the accelerated language programs in the School of Continuing Studies’ Intensive Language Institute. Today, the institute offers students instruction in more than a dozen languages. “If a company has an employee who not only speaks Japanese, but who also has been to Japan and understands the Japanese culture, then that employee is more likely to succeed over someone who has not.”

Ellison relates an anecdote about a Japanese executive who was asked to identify the most important language in the world, and the executive replied, “The language of my client.”

“The reality is that we live in a global environment in every aspect of our lives,” Ellison says. “More and more, companies today prefer employees who are trilingual, because it increases their marketability.”

But many people still learn new languages just for the pure love of it. The University of Miami language faculty, who each speak up to a half-dozen languages or more, share a common passion. Warren began learning languages because of her fascination with puzzles and mysteries. Brudzinski began learning to better understand his relatives, who spoke Polish and French. Ellison spent a year living with a French family during high school.

“That’s when I fell in love with the language and understood the importance of cultural context,” he explains.

“It’s an enormous challenge to change the way you teach and the way you think about teaching,” he admits, “but the University of Miami is increasingly becoming a microcosm of the way the world is changing. Perhaps the most important result is that by learning a language, we learn to understand a culture, and that can lead to a greater understanding among all peoples.”