Mellon Grant Funds Expanded Language Offerings

The global economy needs people with foreign language skills. So does the United States government. And the languages that are now in greatest demand tend to fall outside the traditional college canon, which stresses Western European literature. So the Mellon Foundation’s $50,000 planning grant to QC is especially timely. The funds will help professors design broader offerings in Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, and Middle Eastern studies, and new courses in South Asian languages and Korean.

“We were already doing this,” says William McClure (Classical, Middle Eastern, and Asian Languages), who wrote the grant application after President James Muyskens, Vice President Sue Henderson, Assistant Provost June Bobb, and Eva Fernández (Linguistics & Communications Disorders) met with Mellon executives. “The grant allows us to think bigger. We’ll use it to invite experts in to critique us, to show us where we should expand, and how we should develop.”

Paradoxically, QC’s linguistically diverse population could use some academic support. In a recent Institutional Research survey, the student body reported over 75 native languages, including many that are Middle Eastern or Asian. But our students are not necessarily literate in their native tongue, Fernández explains. Meanwhile, those from English-only households may study a foreign language for years without achieving verbal fluency.

“The bigger objective is to transform language instruction Queenswide,” says Fernández. “We need to set reasonable expectations and think about teaching languages in a more effective way. Everybody is good at languages—it’s part of what makes us human.”