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1. Introduction — Establishing a Portuguese Language Program at
a Liberal Arts College: Problems and Strategies
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. In addition to the firm commitment on the part of the administration for funds and academic support, the establishment of a self-instructional language component requires the participation of faculty specialized in this form of instruction and a constant flow of native speakers to serve as drill masters. As a result, 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 chosen and it is the one that I would like to discuss here. The purpose of this paper is to relate my experience as a consultant in proposing and 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 this program was established 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 more like many other small liberal arts colleges throughout the country. It has a small student body, it has a tenuous 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 students as opposed to trying to be everything for everybody. This school is, therefore, representative of many other liberal arts colleges throughout the United States, and I hope this experience can be useful to 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 brought before its central 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 the Department of Foreign Languages and Wofford College to expand their foreign language program by including Portuguese as opposed to another language not related to any of the ones already being taught; and
3.3. How these considerations would apply to Wofford’s particular needs, goals, and available resources. I specifically aimed to demonstrate what relevance Portuguese would have in the professional lives of their 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 the central administration at Wofford College 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 Romance 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 offering it. However, on the other hand, because of its historical and linguistic proximity to Spanish — which is by far the most commonly taught foreign language in the U.S. — 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 fewer resources on hand than larger institutions. For those schools that 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 than another language not related to Spanish such as Chinese, 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 working 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 sixth 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 and protectorates in Africa and Asia.
In the case of Brazil, this country represents more than half of South America, in territory as well as in population, and it is an important market for the United States.
Portuguese is currently present as a native language in five continents (Europe, North America, South America, Africa, and Asia), and it is spoken by over 1.5 million people in the United States and Canada.
5. The genesis of the program —
The idea behind the establishment of a Portuguese program at Wofford College stemmed from my personal experience teaching Portuguese to students of Spanish at my alma mater, the State University of New York at Buffalo. From my experience with these students, I was convinced of the viability of having students of Spanish and other Romance languages as a very successful starter group for a Portuguese program. After conferring with the foreign language faculty at Wofford College and obtaining pertinent information from colleagues at other schools, I felt the college had the required critical mass in terms of qualified instructors, number of students, and their background to establish and successfully maintain a Portuguese language program.
6. The first steps —
Once the green light was given by the college administration, 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. I suggested that the foreign language faculty at Wooford College involved in this initiative should concentrate on these students because their knowledge of a Romance language would greatly facilitate their learning and mastery of Portuguese. These students' performance, which was markedly better than average, in Wofford College's 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, ads and posters were placed throughout the campus. The objective was to make sure that everyone involved had done their very best to reach any prospective student they may have missed in the 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 gathered thus far. The foreign language faculty brought the proposal for the establishment of a Portuguese language program before the appropriate committees and presented them with information pertaining to the following:
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 they planned to go about establishing and maintaining the Portuguese language program.
On the advice of the curriculum committee, whose members reacted favorably to the proposal, the administration gave the professors involved in this initiative the go-ahead, and with my assistance they began to charter the program.
7. A program is born —
As a foundation for the 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 Wofford College's first Portuguese language class had a strong background in Spanish, the initial modus operandi of the program consisted of intensive and accelerated instruction drawing whenever possible on their knowledge of this language. The instructor managed to do this often, especially when the structures being taught were similar in both languages. For instance, very little was spent time going over the verbs 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 the prepositions por and para because these structures have a great deal in common in both languages. Because the instructors' time was never taken up with lengthy grammatical explanations, the students 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 the 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 or her students. In the future, the college may, for instance, have a class made up mostly of students of French. In this case, the instructor will benefit not so much because of his or her 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. Needless to say, in the future flexibility and creativity on the part of instructor and students alike will go a long way in maximizing the resources available to this program and in making sure it is successful.
The teaching method used was the proficiency-based audio-lingual approach. The emphasis was on active and predominant use of Portuguese in the classroom to maximize the development of student proficiency. The first group of Portuguese students at Wofford College was a lively ensemble of interested and hard-working individuals who were always eager to put their Portuguese to practice. To afford these students a chance to use their Portuguese language skills with someone other than the instructor, visitors and native-speaking guest lecturers were brought to class on a regular basis. Most of these guests expressed surprise and were delighted to see how much the 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, unfortunately, for the distance it has maintained from foreign languages and cultures.
8. Final words —
In conclusion, I would like to say that proposing and establishing a Portuguese language program at Wofford College was a sometimes difficult although undeniably rewarding experience, one that I would undertake again were I given the chance and the proper resources to do so. There are certain basic points 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 and the order in which they could be taken 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 an effective recruiting campaign. It should be relatively easy to attract 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 these areas. You should contact especially students who have taken upper-level courses in Spanish, French, Italian, or other Romance languages.
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 College, the professors involved in this initiative organized several functions such as slide and music presentations, brought guest speakers to their departmental round tables to talk about the Portuguese-speaking world, and organized luncheons and dinners featuring typical dishes of Brazil. These functions usually included 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, organic part of a very real, tangible culture.
8.5. Enlist the support of other groups both within and outside the academic community. In the college itself, you should seek the backing of other language programs, especially Romance Languages, of departments in the Humanities and Social Sciences, area studies, and study-abroad programs. 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 the above steps have been taken, you are ready to take this information and your proposal to the administration of your school.
While the Portuguese language program at Wofford College is not as big as the Spanish or French programs, it is nevertheless strong and thriving. Because of the positive response on the part of the students and faculty involved with the first Portuguese course offered, the college administration has demonstrated foresight in its decision to hire a Portuguese instructor to offer Portuguese courses on a regular basis. 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. Portuguese-speaking countries like Brazil have created for themselves some very important geopolitical and economic niches 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. Therefore, 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.
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