Student Language Exchange to provide teaching of non-traditional languages

Turkish and Vietnamese language classes will make their debut at Tufts this fall through the Tufts Student Language Exchange (SLE), a new student organization dedicated to promoting underrepresented cultures on campus through informal, peer-led, non-credit classes.

SLE is a nation-wide network that began at Brown University three years ago and has now expanded to four colleges, including Tufts, Brandeis University and Columbia University, according to sophomore Rhiannon Wiley, a member of the Tufts chapter’s coordinator team.

The first Turkish class was held this Tuesday, and the first Vietnamese class this Wednesday, according to sophomore Amy Bu, another member of the coordinator team as well as a cartoonist for the Daily. Wiley, who sat in on both classes, said that they talked about the alphabets, pronunciation and greetings.

According to SLE’s website, only about 10 percent of native-born Americans speak a language other than English. The majority of undergraduate students in the country do not study a foreign language, and of those that do, most study a western language like French or Spanish. Less than one percent of undergraduates study a non-Western language, reported the website.

“[There is] this crazy disproportion between the number of speakers in the world of a language and the number of people who are studying it,” Wiley said.

Wiley hopes that in the long term, SLE will help to foster a more international attitude on campus. Its programs give American students better chances to connect with and understand their international peers, especially by introducing perspectives that are not usually found in Tufts classrooms, she added.

Tufts has two language departments, one for Romance languages and one for everything else, including Russian, German, Swahili, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew and Japanese. According to Wiley, there are not enough courses being offered for areas like South Asia, even though India is the world’s second most populous country.

Sophomore Phoebe Dinh, an international student from Vietnam, will be teaching Vietnamese this fall. Dinh first heard about SLE through friends, and although she could not commit to being a coordinator, she could identify with SLE’s goals and decided to apply as a fellow -- one of the student teachers who facilitate the language learning.

Dinh, having lived away from home for almost six years, said that through SLE, she hopes to spread knowledge of Vietnamese culture and also to reconnect with her own roots.

“It’s alarming how I came back to Vietnam and for the first week or two, wouldn’t be able to speak Vietnamese fluently,” she said. “I would have to pause and think.”

Wiley explained that the languages offered by SLE depend mostly on what potential mentors can offer. The fellows, who go through a selection and training process, are often native speakers and thus very familiar with the target language and culture, she added.

“Our philosophy is to pick the fellow, not the language,” Wiley, who serves as the fellowship coordinator, said.

According to Dinh, the fellows first completed an online training course, where they created tentative syllabi and lesson plans. They then attended training sessions at Tufts, where Wiley talked to them about basic communication skills, classroom techniques and the support structures in place to help language fellows. There was another training session at Brown, where people from SLE’s central team used their prior experience to demonstrate those skills, Dinh added.

However, because each school is different, experiences at Brown and other schools may not translate perfectly to Tufts, Dinh said.

“Our short-term goal is to spread the word and to get these programs up and running so we know how to better refine [them] and what kind of things work for our campus culture,” Bu said. “We want to begin building materials and experience to prepare us for future semesters.”

Discussions for setting up a Tufts chapter of SLE began this March, according to Wiley. Everyone was very enthusiastic about the idea, but in between meetings people would have to return to their own lives and work.

“It took a while for us to really carve out time in our schedules to really work on this, and once we did, everything worked a lot smoother,” Wiley said.

She added that the coordinators were unfamiliar with the process of setting up a new club on campus.

“We were all learning while we were doing this,” Wiley explained.

According to Bu, who is responsible for publicity and communications, the coordinators have so far advertised the club and its programs through Facebook posts and chalking outside Tisch Library, and they plan to hold a general interest meeting later this month. Wiley said that she has also reached out to other student organizations such as culture clubs and asked them to promote SLE through their Facebook pages and e-mail listings.