New language institute prepares students for the global marketplace

UW–Madison, which has more world languages courses than any other college or university in the United States, has created the Language Institute to help prepare graduates to compete for job opportunities in the global marketplace.

Directed by Sally Sieloff Magnan, professor of French, the Language Institute’s mission is to promote the study of world languages, literatures and cultures, and to facilitate collaboration in offering academic programs, conducting research and engaging in community-outreach initiatives.

“Employees entering the work force must be able to understand and be understood by a diverse population of colleagues and customers for whom English is not a native language,” Magnan says. “To meet those needs, the most attractive job candidates are those who have gained a high level of proficiency in other languages.”

While in high school, students’ options might have been limited to “commonly taught” languages such as Spanish, French or German. At UW–Madison, students can choose from more than 60 world languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Ojibwe, Persian, Quichua, Portuguese, Russian, Swahili, Swedish, Telugu, Tibetan, Vietnamese and Yoruba, among many others. New this fall is Yucatec Maya, a Mayan language spoken by nearly 1 million people in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, Guatemala and Belize.

“Yucatec Maya is offered by only a handful of U.S. universities and is an excellent addition to our curriculum,” says Guido Podesta, director of Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies and professor of Spanish. “It strengthens our Mesoamerican program and helps students understand modern Maya peoples, as well as their rich cultural and historic traditions recorded in hieroglyphic script.”

But such a diverse selection of languages can be daunting to many students. The Language Institute will help students navigate this large number of choices.

“Educational needs of college graduates have changed dramatically,” says Magdalena Hauner, associate dean of the arts and humanities in the College of Letters and Science and professor of African languages and literature. “We recognize this in the areas of science and technology, but we need to catch up, and fast, in the area of foreign languages.”

Home to the interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Second Language Acquisition and learning materials development projects in Russian and Swahili, the Language Institute also sponsors lectures and workshops for students and faculty and coordinates large outreach initiatives to schools and the business community.

Several special activities are planned for 2004-05 academic year, in celebration of the nationally declared “2005: The Year of Languages.” These include conferences and panel discussions called “Language for Life” by UW–Madison alumni on how foreign-language study has furthered their careers; a year-long lecture series on campus, “Voices of America: Language, Power and Community”; public conversations planned for the Madison Public libraries on linguistic and cultural diversity in Wisconsin, “The Voices of Wisconsin; “World Languages Day,” an all-day event in the spring for more than 700 high school students; and “World Cinema Day,” a cross-cultural cinematic event for high school students and the campus community.

The Language Institute is an initiative of the College of Letters and Science, with substantial support from the Division of International Studies and the Schoenleber Foundation.

For more information, visit http://languageinstitute.wisc.edu or contact Magnan at ssmagnan@wisc.edu.