July 13, 2009
Students will be even better prepared for engagement and
success in a 21st Century global environment as a result of several
language program enhancements at St. John’s University.
One of the most innovative will be a new, state-of-the art Global
Language and Culture Center that is being designed for the Queens
Campus. The new Center, as currently conceived, will be located in
Council Hall, and will be sectioned into individual language areas
where students can experience a particular language and culture
through conversation, television broadcasts and other
presentations—in essence, become totally immersed in that language
and culture.
“It will be place where student-student and student-faculty
engagement takes place, enhancing the language-learning process,”
explains Herbert Pierson, Ed.D., Professor and Chair of the
Languages and Literature Department in St. John’s College of
Liberal Arts and Sciences. Dr. Pierson says the 21st Century
language center will “address student linguistic and cultural needs
driven by the rise of globalization.”
That’s intensely important at St. John’s University, where one of
three institutional priorities in the Strategic Plan 2009-13 is to
further global education initiatives through study abroad programs
as well as campus-based courses and programs. In the past few
years, St. John’s students have participated in global education
initiatives at the University’s Rome and
Paris campuses; in Salamanca, Spain; Dublin, Ireland; India;
China; the Dominican Republic; the Galapagos Islands; and Bermuda,
to name just a few.
On-Campus Courses Are Going
Global
At the same time, University faculty are being urged to include
global aspects in the courses they teach on campus. St. John’s
Provost Julia A. Upton, RSM, Ph.D., recently asked faculty members
to complete a survey in order to identify how many were already
doing so.
“I asked them to help us identify the extent to which the global
perspective is being included in the courses they teach,” Dr. Upton
explains. “‘Global perspective’ includes courses with an explicit
global orientation, as well as courses in which they included
global topics, such as using a case study on malaria in a health
course or teaching a unit on Asian economic development in a
management course. The survey will provide us with baseline data
from which we can determine where that global component is still
needed.”
The Center for Language and Culture will do much more than
facilitate students’ language learning for an enriched study abroad
experience however. Obviously, it will enhance the University’s
major and minor and core curriculum language instruction. But it is
also intended to facilitate the study abroad experience for
students needing intensive language training before they depart; to
complement the ESL (English as a Second Language) courses offered
to the nearly 1,500 international students studying at St. John’s;
and to provide members of the St. John’s community with the
opportunity to study a foreign language as part of their
professional or personal development.
As envisioned by Dr. Pierson and Millard Yoder, Senior Language
Coordinator in the Language and Literature Department, in their
joint proposal to St. John’s Administration, this “omnibus
multimedia language center” will be staffed by administrators,
faculty language counselors, tutors/“conversational partners” and
support staff. Tell Me More®, a state-of-the-art language-learning
software being introduced this fall to students (including those
enrolled in online learning), faculty, staff and administrators,
will also enhance language instruction by, Dr. Pierson points out,
serving as “a virtual language lab on demand, available 24 hours a
day, seven days a week once a student is on a learning trajectory
with an instructional plan worked out.”
Language Skills to Communicate and
Serve
St. John’s Vincentian mission of providing an excellent education
to those who are physically, economically or socially
disadvantaged, and its recently created
Vincentian Institute for Social Action (VISA)—which provides an
academic platform for students and faculty to address global
poverty and social injustice issues through teaching, research and
service—virtually demand that students have the language skills
needed to communicate with and serve those in need around the
world.
“We want to ensure that our graduates are linguistically and
culturally equipped for the global challenges ahead,” Dr. Pierson
notes. “English proficiency is no longer enough; the well-trained
21st Century professional must acquire a minimum fluency in a
second language to go out into the world to contribute socially and
compete economically.”