It is difficult to grade someone’s ability to hold a conversation when you have never heard them speak.
Yet several University of California campuses look at foreign language education the same way many students look at their least significant classes: “pass” or “no pass.”
Although the foreign language requirement is firmly rooted in UCLA’s College of Letters and Science graduation prerequisites, several other UCs allow students to waive the requirement – if there is one at all – with evidence of having passed three years of one foreign languag in high school.
But three years of foreign language education is part of the UC’s recommendation for viable applicants, making the lax requirement little more than a redundancy.
UCLA’s College of Letters and Science only allows students to waive their foreign language requirement through high scores on a placement test, passing scores on a foreign language Advanced Placement exam or community college units.
The entire UC must start ensuring the linguistic diversity of its students if it wishes to see them succeed in today’s increasingly global world and to keep the international value of a UC education. This push should start with a demonstration of proficiency through oral-inclusive exams, such as placement and Advanced Placement exams, and ultimately move onto implementing foreign language requirements across more majors.
Regardless of education standards that pervade the state, all high schools are not created equal. Letting students slide with credit measured by years in high school undermines the fundamental goal of studying language: proficiency, not a set amount of time served in a classroom.
For incoming students in the College of Letters and Science at UC Santa Barbara and UC Berkeley, as well as all incoming students at UC Irvine, the ability to waive the requirement through passing grades in a foreign language in high school may curb their intellectual growth.
Those responsible for crafting the curriculum at UC schools may worry about the lack of space in student’s schedules for extra foreign language classes.
But schools fretful about room for foreign language units seem to forget that many students already fulfill the requirement as it exists. These students are living testament to the possibility of finding a place for foreign language education within their degrees.
Studying language in college allows further development of language skills, and for UCLA students, a choice from a pool of more than 40 languages – not just the limited options that dominate high schools.
The absence of a clear, UC-wide emphasis on foreign languages may be due to an outdated perspective on students’ future job fields when requirements were first set. College curricula that predate a globalized world may not place proper emphasis on intercultural communication.
Multilingual proficiency is a vital tool for most modern careers, as much for the humanities as for the sciences. Just as a foreign language would be helpful in comparative literature curricula, it is also important in the healthcare industry, where a non-English-speaking patient deserves to communicate with his or her physician as much as an English-speaking patient.
And the languages we learn now follow us into the future: Large, successful companies have global presences, whether you work in finance, literature or software. Even without a need to communicate overseas, Los Angeles is also home to more than 200 languages, a case in point of the need for linguistic diversity even at home.
But the value of a foreign language requirement goes beyond the endgame of language mastery.
Olga Kagan, a Slavic languages and literatures professor, said language classes provide a type of learning unavailable in books, which allows you to acquire another culture’s understanding of life.
“You can start with the language, then move into history, culture, music or cooking – or the other way around. Language is part of all other subjects,” said Kagan, who is also the director of the UCLA Center for World Languages and National Heritage Language Resource Center.
Although UCLA’s requirement of a level-three proficiency in foreign language – just like three years of high school studies – does not guarantee fluency, it does at least breed some cultural competency.
The UC rightly offers individual university or even departmental autonomy in personalizing graduation requirements, but on the value of foreign language, the campuses should come together to raise the standards.
When the rest of the UC does not meet UCLA’s individual General Education standards, our degree from the overarching UC becomes diluted. As UC students, we should be represented internationally at the same level, or at least in our ability to communicate with other cultures.
“Passing out” of a foreign language requirement should be granted with a test for true demonstration of proficiency. When it comes to the ability to communicate in our future careers, higher education cannot reduce our language requirement to another checkbox to mark off, which is what many UCs do when they streamline students out of the requirement based on high school grades.
If the UC wants to preserve its global name as a top-tier university system, it has to start creating global-minded students.
We can start doing this by only giving credit where credit is due.