At UC Language Institutes, It’s Live and Learn

Fluent in Spanish, French, Russian and English, Luz Forero understands a thing or two about learning foreign tongues.

But Forero’s savoir-faire fell short when it came to finding a way to pursue her studies on the graduate level. As a busy mother of two young children and as the assistant director of the language laboratory at Occidental College, how could she squeeze a master’s degree program into her schedule?

The answer for Forero, as well as for dozens of others pinched for time, has been one of the specialized summer language and culture institutes at UC Santa Barbara. The school, with its Spanish and French institutes, is one of only a handful of universities offering master’s degree language programs for summer-only students.

Its students--mainly high school teachers and other educators--do their studies without leaving American soil. The programs consist of six-week sessions taken over three summers.

Though shorter than conventional master’s degree programs, the institutes try to make up for it with round-the-clock language immersion.

All students are expected to abide by a written pledge (sometimes called la promesa in Spanish or declaration sur l’honneur in French) to speak only Spanish or French whenever possible. Students must be capable Spanish or French speakers to be admitted, but their fluency is sharpened over the three summers.

The students and their professors live as neighbors throughout the summer in a university-owned apartment complex, and they have lunch together every weekday in the faculty club.

Jean-Jacques Thomas, a professor from Duke University who has directed the UC Santa Barbara French institute every summer since 1990, says the main benefit for students is the contact they have with faculty. “They see me doing my laundry and can come ask me a question,” Thomas said.

Arturo Giraldez, director of the Spanish institute and a professor at University of the Pacific, recalls a time when he stepped outside his apartment at 4 a.m. and bumped into a student. He wound up answering questions about the Spanish subjunctive in the predawn hours.

Students “try to squeeze you for all you’re worth,” Giraldez said with a soft laugh. “That’s the point. Without that, what’s the point of living together?”

Aside from the barbecues and cultural events scheduled by the institutes, there isn’t a lot of time for socializing.

“Every minute I can, I need to be writing as much as I can,” said Forero, 41, now in her last year at the Spanish institute and busy writing her thesis.

The institutes, though well-respected, aren’t the biggest names in their corner of academia. The school that for years has dominated graduate and undergraduate summer language study is Vermont’s Middlebury College, which this summer is providing about 1,250 students with instruction in eight languages.

Michael Katz, Middlebury’s dean of language schools and schools abroad, said the language immersion on his campus is even more tightly maintained than at UC Santa Barbara.

His faculty and students eat together a full three times a day. Also, Middlebury students, unlike their counterparts at Santa Barbara, aren’t allowed to bring their families--to remove the temptation to speak English.

Ronald W. Tobin, who as chairman of the French department helped launch the first summer language institute at UC Santa Barbara in 1977, countered that his campus’ institutes maintain higher standards than Middlebury by focusing exclusively on graduate studies.

He said some of the first professors at the Santa Barbara French institute had left Middlebury because of concerns the undergraduate program there would “dilute the quality” of graduate studies.

“We have never been tempted to include undergraduates here, for precisely that reason,” said Tobin, now an associate vice chancellor.

‘Artificial Immersion’

At both schools, however, administrators agree that their “artificial immersion” approaches to language learning can offer advantages over the “authentic immersion” of living in a foreign country.

Living abroad “has all sorts of diversions,” Katz said. “You can get the International Herald Tribune and you can tune in CNN, and you can go to English bars and speak English as much as you want and hang out with other Americans.”

The institutes’ enrollments ebb and flow with the popularity of the languages they offer.

As interest in Spanish has surged at colleges around the country, UC Santa Barbara’s Spanish institute--formally known as the Summer Institute in Hispanic Languages and Culture--is enjoying a record enrollment of 44 this summer. But the French program, the Summer Institute of French and Francophone Studies, has only 22 students. That is down from its peak enrollment of about 35 during the 1990s. A German program was scrapped in the late 1990s for lack of interest.

For the high school teachers at the institute, who normally pay their own way to attend, earning a master’s degree can have a quick payoff. Typically, they will receive automatic raises of $2,000 or more and will increase their chances of winning promotions.

Yet many say they are attending mostly because they want to reconnect with the intellectual discipline that brought them into education. And some don’t have other convenient options for graduate work.

Jayne Abrate, the Carbondale, Ill.,-based executive director of the American Assn. of Teachers of French, said the lack of part-time master’s programs “has often been a concern among French teachers who aren’t near large metropolitan areas. They would love to get a master’s in French, but they can’t.”

Gary Hayman, a San Bernardino high school teacher with a master’s in German, came to Santa Barbara to strengthen his French. Hayman’s school phased out German a year ago and now is relying on him to teach French, a language he doesn’t know as well.

Hayman, 48, said he was “blown away” by the sophistication of the French discussion in class when he started at the institute last week.

The students’ enthusiasm for Spanish and French studies is evident in the classroom. Antonio Cortijo, a UC Santa Barbara professor who has taught in the summer Spanish institute for four years, said his summer classes sometimes run beyond the scheduled time. No one interrupts to let him know.

During the regular school year, “people would have been packing up,” he said. “With this class, they would stay here as long as I talk.”

That sort of dedication, along with the pleasures of spending summer in Santa Barbara, helps attract the visiting professors who make up the majority of the summer faculty.

“This is like being in paradise. I can’t believe they pay me to be here,” said Mercedes F. Duran-Cogan, a researcher from Simon Fraser University near Vancouver, Canada, who is teaching at the Spanish institute.