|
 |
Clique aqui para ver a versão deste artigo em português: ptguese2.htm |
a Liberal-Arts College: Problems and Strategies
1. Introduction –
After nearly two decades of dwindling enrollments, the trend in the field of foreign languages is finally going the other way. As a result, many colleges and universities throughout the United States are facing the sometimes difficult although invariably welcome task of having to accommodate an increasing number of students who are seeking to take courses in foreign languages. Many of these schools consider it to be a sound educational and administrative move at this time to broaden their offerings in foreign languages, and have started looking into ways of expanding their programs. Expansion of an existing foreign language program may take many forms, such as the addition of a self-instructional component, or the inclusion of languages linguistically related to others already being taught. Since the establishment of a self-instructional language component requires, besides the firm commitment on the part of a cooperative administration for funds and support, the participation of faculty specialized in this form of instruction, and a constant flow of native speakers to serve as drill masters, the second alternative may prove more suitable in most instances. Because it did not involve the mobilization of as many resources as other forms of expansion, the addition of a language linguistically related to others already being taught was the option we chose at our school, and it is the one which I would like to talk about today. The purpose of this paper is to relate to you my experience in establishing a Portuguese language program at a small liberal-arts college, and share information with those of you who may someday find yourselves in the same position.
2. Where it all started: A liberal-arts college like many others –
The school where I taught is a small liberal-arts college of approximately one thousand students located in Spartanburg, South Carolina. While there are certain features that set Wofford College apart as a unique institution, there are others that make it like many other small liberal-arts colleges throughout the country. It has a small student body, it has a loose although visible religious affiliation (with the Methodist Church), and it aims to give its students a well rounded liberal-arts education with emphasis on the humanities. While it has strong programs in biology and business, the college does not actively seek to provide technical training. As the present administration puts it, Wofford College endeavors to do a few things well for a selected number of people as opposed to trying to be everything for everybody. This school is, therefore, representative of many a small liberal-arts college throughout the United States, and I hope the experience I gained there can be used and applied by teachers of Portuguese at other institutions.
3. In the beginning: Why Portuguese? –
The argument for the establishment of a Portuguese language program at Wofford College which I brought before the school administration consisted of several parts:
3.1. Relevant facts about the Portuguese language, where it is spoken, and information about the role played by Portuguese-speaking countries in the economic and geopolitical world arena today;
3.2. Why it would be easier and in the best interest of our department and the college to expand our foreign language program by including Portuguese as opposed to another language not related to any of the ones which we were already teaching; and
3.3. How these considerations would apply to Wofford’s particular needs, goals, and available resources. We specifically aimed to demonstrate what relevance Portuguese would have in the professional lives of our students, and how its teaching would draw upon and add to other programs such as business, political science, geography, area studies, history, etc.
The last thing I want to do is to preach to the “conversos” – which I hope you all are – but it may be useful to go over the basic line of argument I used with my school administration so as to give you an idea of what can be used or improved upon in the future elsewhere.
4. The argument –
As one of the least known members of the Romance family of languages in the United States, Portuguese occupies on the one hand a very difficult position when it comes to persuading students and administration to support the idea of establishing a Portuguese language program. On the other hand, however, because of its historical and linguistic proximity to Spanish – which is by far the most commonly taught foreign language in American schools – Portuguese occupies the enviable position of being an ideal, if not the ideal, candidate when expansion of a foreign language curriculum is contemplated. This is especially true if one is planning to add to an existing foreign language program languages linguistically related to others already being taught. This form of expansion should prove particularly attractive to small liberal-arts colleges with less resources than larger institutions. For those schools which already offer Spanish and are considering expansion of their program, Portuguese is an ideal candidate for the following reasons:
4.1. It requires less of an investment of effort and resources than another language not related to Spanish such as Japanese or Arabic; and
4.2. There is already a ready pool of students from which one can draw, i.e., students who have taken or possess a knowledge of Spanish, French, or Italian. These students have shown and pursued their interest in learning a Romance language and consequently will, one would expect, have a higher than average predisposition to take another language of the same linguistic family. Because of their familiarity with the process of learning a Romance language, their learning of Portuguese could be intensified or modified in many different and creative ways so as to maximize and accelerate the development of student proficiency.
Moreover, the study of Portuguese ought to be viewed as being of great importance politically and economically to the United States because of the position Portuguese occupies in the world today. With close to two hundred million speakers, Portuguese is the second most widely spoken Romance language – ahead of French, Italian, and Romanian – and the fifth world language with the largest number of speakers. It is the mother tongue of over half of all South Americans, and it is the national language of Brazil, Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, and several other nations in Africa and Asia.
5. The genesis of the program –
The seed for the Portuguese program at Wofford College came from personal experience of tutoring Portuguese to students of Spanish. From my experience with these students, I was convinced of the appropriateness of having students of Spanish and other Romance languages as a very successful starter group for a Portuguese program. After having conferred with my colleagues at Wofford and having obtained pertinent information, material, and advice from colleagues at other schools, I felt we had the required critical mass in terms of qualified instructors (i.e., myself), number of students and their background to expand my tutorial sessions to a broader base, thus making it available to more students.
6. The first steps –
Once this decision was made, the first step was to identify and contact the students who would make up the mainstay of the program. All Wofford students who had taken upper-level courses in Spanish and French were contacted by campus mail. We decided to concentrate on these students because we believed their knowledge of a Romance language would greatly facilitate their learning and mastery of Portuguese. Their performance, which was markedly better than average, in our first Portuguese language class corroborated this belief. In order to reach as wide a number of students as possible and to make these students aware of the advantages of studying Portuguese, we placed ads and posters throughout the entire campus. We wanted to make sure we had done our very best to reach any possible candidate we may have missed in our mailing campaign.
The response was very encouraging. Eleven students who had taken Spanish and one who had taken French showed interest in studying Portuguese, and expressed the desire to enroll in a beginning Portuguese class if the language was offered the following semester.
The next step was to approach the administration with the data we had gathered. We brought our proposal for the establishment of a Portuguese language program before the appropriate committee, and presented them with information pertaining to:
6.1. How many students had shown interest in taking Portuguese;
6.2. The background of these students;
6.3. Who the instructor or instructors would be;
6.4. The instructor’s qualifications and training in the field;
6.5. What impact the creation of a Portuguese program would have on the department as a whole, and specifically how this would affect the other language programs (Spanish and French); and finally
6.6. How we planned to go about establishing and maintaining the Portuguese language program.
On the advice of the curriculum committee, which reacted favorably to our proposal, the administration gave us the go-ahead, and we began to charter the program.
7. A program is born –
As a foundation for our program, the following objectives were established:
7.1. To develop proficiency in Portuguese by emphasizing the predominant use of the target language in the classroom;
7.2. To develop a positive attitude and appreciation for the language and culture of the Luso-Brazilian world; and
7.3. To provide for those students with a Spanish or French background a learning environment that would facilitate their intensive and accelerated transition from one of these languages to Portuguese.
Because most of the students in our first Portuguese language class had a strong background in Spanish, our modus operandi consisted basically of intensive and accelerated instruction drawing whenever possible on their knowledge of Spanish. We managed to do this often, especially when the structures being taught were similar in both languages. For instance, we spent very little time going over ser and estar, the subjunctive (with the exception of the future tense, which is still used in Portuguese but is no longer in Spanish), the preterit and imperfect, or por and para because these structures have a great deal in common in both languages. Because our time was never taken up with lengthy grammatical explanations, we were able to concentrate on what I believe should be the real objective of any language class, namely, the development of student proficiency.
Since it is unlikely that the following beginning Portuguese classes at Wofford will have the same make-up as our first one, the instructor in charge will have to adapt the pace and approach to be used in each individual class according to the background of his students. In the future he may, for instance, have a class made up mostly of students of French. In this case he will benefit not so much because of his students’ familiarity with the syntax of another Romance language, which would be the case with Spanish, but rather because of their familiarity with a foreign language whose phonology has a great deal in common with that of Portuguese, which is the case with French.
The teaching method we used was the proficiency-based audio-lingual. The emphasis was on active and predominant use of Portuguese in the classroom to maximize the development of student proficiency. We had a very lively group of interested and hard-working individuals who were always eager to put their Portuguese to practice. To afford my students a chance to use their language skills with someone other than myself, I tried to bring as often as I could visitors and native guest speakers to class. Most of these expressed surprise and were delighted to see how much my students had progressed in such a short period of time, especially given the fact that Wofford College lies secluded in a distant corner of the Piedmont in South Carolina, a region historically known for its ethnic and linguistic homogeneity and for the distance it has chosen to keep from foreign languages and cultures.
8. Final words –
In conclusion, I would like to say that establishing a Portuguese language program at Wofford College has been a sometimes difficult although invariably and undeniably rewarding experience, one which I would undertake again were I given the chance and the proper resources to do so. There are certain basic points which one should keep in mind before devising a plan to establish a Portuguese language program at a liberal-arts college. A suggested list of steps to be taken and the order in which they could be done is presented here:
8.1. Establish a philosophy for your program, state objectives, policies, methods, and guiding curriculum.
8.2. The instructors constitute a major component of any language program. It is imperative that you have committed, dynamic, and enthusiastic teachers who are willing to devote the required time and effort to undertake the task at hand.
8.3. After the hiring of good instructors, the second most important task is to attract interested, dedicated, and hard-working students. In order to attract individuals of this caliber and subsequently persuade prospective students to study Portuguese, one needs to devise a careful recruiting campaign. It should be relatively easy to attract those individuals whose main area of interest is either the Iberian Peninsula or Latin America, seeing that knowledge of Portuguese is an essential requirement of anyone working with or in those parts of the world. Contact especially students who have taken upper-level courses in Spanish, French, Italian, or other Romance language.
8.4. One way to accomplish step three above is to arrange for public announcements – going personally to Spanish, French, and Italian upper-level classes, talking to students, and fielding questions – and produce informative brochures and leaflets for campus or city-wide distribution. At Wofford, I organized several functions such as slide and music presentations, brought guest speakers to our departmental round tables to talk about the Portuguese-speaking world, and organized luncheons and dinners featuring typical dishes of Brazil and either a movie, some music, or a guest speaker. It is important that the students perceive Portuguese – or any modern foreign language for that matter – as being a living part of a very real culture, not as some linguistic abstraction which language teachers have concocted only to make their students’ lives miserable.
8.5. Enlist the support of other groups both in and outside the academic community. In the college or school itself you should seek the backing of other language programs, especially Romance Languages, of departments in the Humanities and Social Sciences, area studies, and programs abroad. Outside the college community, you should contact civic groups, bi-national centers and associations, and any learned, professional, or cultural society involved in the study or teaching of Portuguese.
8.6. Once all of the above steps have been accomplished, you are ready to take all this information and your proposal to the administration of your school.
The Portuguese language program at Wofford College is now in its 3rd year (as of 1987) and, while it is not as big as the Spanish or French programs, it is nevertheless strong and thriving. I have since left the school, but because of the positive response on the part of students and faculty who were involved with the program, the college administration has demonstrated foresight and wisdom in its decision to hire a Portuguese instructor to replace me. Whereas it may have seemed a luxury to proceed this way just a few years ago, it now appears to be a sound administrative and academic move. The oft-quoted phrase “the world is increasingly becoming a global village” rings truer now than ever before, and the United States has correctly recognized that it cannot remain ignorant of other languages and cultures without seriously jeopardizing the leadership position it has enjoyed for nearly half a century. Because of the geopolitical and economic niches that Portuguese-speaking countries like Brazil have created for themselves in the world market and in the political arena – Brazil has the fifth largest GNP in the world, and holds the dubious distinction of being the world’s sixth largest producer of arms – the need to make Portuguese available to more people in the United States has taken an added dimension, one whose importance will only be manifested properly as this language is added to foreign language curricula in increasingly more schools in this country.
 |
Return to top of page |
 |
Return to main page |
 |