Ever heard of the language Nahuatl? Probably not. Because let alone common students, even among those U.S. students studying foreign languages, 90 percent will choose the Big Four- French, German, Italian and Spanish-though many of the languages like Nahuatl are spoken by millions of people in another part of the world.
To help interested students learn such rare languages, three Ivy League universities-Columbia, Cornell and Yale- are joining forces to make less-commonly taught languages more accessible.
Initially started as a pilot project, it has now attracted a two-year $1.2 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop an expanded framework for teaching important yet marginalized languages through videoconferencing and other distance learning technologies. The three universities are pooling in all their technologies for successful implementation of the project.
The funding will allow the three universities to build on an existing partnership, which has already succeeded in presenting classes in Romanian, elementary Dutch and elementary Nahuatl, the Aztec language.
The courses rely on live, two-way videoconferencing, during which, for example, students at two of the schools might participate remotely in a class at the third university. No more than 12 students altogether can enroll in each class because the effectiveness of computer-mediated learning drops off after that point.
"We are trying to recreate as closely as possible a face-to-face experience for the student through synchronous meetings with classes," said Stéphane Charitos, the director of Columbia's Language Resource Center and one of the central organizers of the project.
"None of the material is recorded or canned. We want this to be an interactive experience in which the students are active participants in the language learning process. To accomplish this, we are exploring how technology can enhance the teaching and learning paradigm for language study by becoming a bridge that allows us to overcome physical distances."
The three universities are home to a wealth of language expertise, tradition and breadth, with annual course offerings in more than 100 languages. This fall, the schools added courses in Bengali, Indonesian, Modern Greek, Tamil, Yoruba, and Zulu using this shared course format. In the fall of 2013, they plan to add courses in Khmer, Sinhala, Polish, and Vietnamese.
The leaders of the project are confident that in addition to helping students gain a global perspective, the less commonly taught languages allow these world-renowned universities with increasingly diverse student body to connect to their cultural heritage or become familiar with it for the first time.
