By training, I am teacher of German and Russian. Starting in 1986 as a student teacher, I have taught German. First, to kids with German as their first language. Since 1991, to university students as their second language. When I started, I thought German would always be a university subject. It had not occured to me this could ever change. That worry came a few years later …
SDSU College of Arts & Letters | Languages
Classes were never big and recruiting was never a self-starter. We would go to schools and their fairs and language events. We would talk to and support the local German teachers. We had a nice website. Added social media. And if I remember right, we did videos – at least twice. I am sure everything helped … until …
Over the last two years, we closed the majors in European Studies, French, German, and Russian in my Department. We kept them s minors. And we have a new program in the Department: Comparative International Studies. A new major. New for us; we have it in the Department now.
Fewer and fewer high schools and community colleges offer German and other languages. Fewer and fewer students are prepared for and interested in university study of a language. Fewer and fewer students work their way from a novice learner in year 1 to graduating with Bachelor’s in this language. Fewer and fewer have the opportunity.
Where have all the languages gone?
What I am really wondering about now is how will – what many quickly call – AI impact the landscape of language education? Of course, GenAI tools rooted in large language models are strggling with same tasks in some areas. But, machine translation, speech to text transcription, and simple conversation practice — these are areas the chatbots are very good at in many, many languages. Certainly in the languages that used to be taught at universities.
Footnote
Predictions are difficult. Especially about the future. (So they say.) I believe I know where this has been going in the last thirty, forty years. And it makes me worried: fewer young adults did get and might get the chance to dive deep into a language – and culture – of their choice. Maybe they don’t want to, maybe they do. And what are we doing with AI? The one thing, the AI hype seems to be doing is acting as an accelerator for some processes. Are we really hearing: move over Language Learning, the Language Model needs space!??
