Foreign Language Requirement

I do firmly believe that the university should have a foreign language requirement. There is a reason throughout all stages of school students are encouraged to learn a new language; acquiring a second language not only increases a student's cultural awareness, but it helps them become more adept with their own language as well because they need to know the metalinguistic terms for their foreign language studies. Someone who only knows their native tongue can easily forget after high school what a direct object is in a sentence, or what it means for a verb to be transitive, but because a student must use these grammatical terms to learn how a different language's grammar works, they become more familiar with the metalinguistic terms. As their elementary vocabulary increases in their second language, their intellectual vocabulary drastically increases in their mother tongue as well.

The expansion of the student's cultural knowledge is also very important in their development into adulthood. It can be very easy to live solely in the box that is the United States and forget about the intricacies of the rest of the world, but by learning the language of a different culture a student's interest in that culture also increases, broadening their horizons and possibly changing the way they think about the world. While language may not be related to whatever specialty a student chooses in college, it is important to require foreign language classes because many students would not otherwise take a language at all, leaving them clueless to the beauty of emerging oneself into an unseen part of the world.

Discussion #1 Response

I feel that as a student of a foreign language, I'm rather biased towards the study of foreign language. In a perfect world, I would love to see every student and every adult study a foreign language. It's a great way to keep the mind sharp, learn more about your own language, learn about foreign cultures, ideas and beliefs, as well as learning a new language. I feel that the aspect of learning about a new culture is especially important in this day and age, and it is one that is practically impossible to separate from learning a FL.

On the other hand, not everyone can learn a FL easily or would even be interested in doing so. At the university level, education is no longer mandated and the students (or their parents) have to pay tuition themselves. So I don't think it is right to require students to pay to study a foreign language that they may have no interest or stake in. At UNH, it is required to take one course about foreign culture as an undergrad and I personally think that is as good a compromise as we can get at this point in time.