The Middlebury Language Schools, in celebration of the centennial anniversary of their founding, will launch the School of Korean for the summer of 2015. The school will run at Middlebury’s affiliate campus at Mills College in Oakland, California, where the Arabic and Italian Schools are already housed.
Unlike the population of people studying Romance languages, many of those who choose to learn Korean are heritage learners—people who have cultural or ancestral ties to Korea yet who have some or perhaps no experience in the language. Most of these heritage populations are concentrated on the west coast, not the east.
“As such, there seems to be a consensus among the Korean language teaching community that a school would be more successful on the west coast,” said Dean of Language Schools Stephen Snyder in an interview with The Campus.
During the 2012 Winter Term, Korean was offered to undergraduate students as a workshop given by the Korean American Student Association. Neither undergraduate nor graduate students at Middlebury’s schools, however, had access to any official academic course in Korean.
“We feel responsible for providing as many of the most important world languages as we can on a regular basis to anyone who needs them,” said Michael Geisler, vice president of the Language Schools. “And between economic and security concerns and the fact that more and more students nationally and internationally seem to be interested in studying Korean, we felt that for our centennial career Korean would be the next logical language to launch.”
Middlebury’s intensive immersion programs guarantee improvement to some degree, and often result in fluency on both a technical and human level.
“That is where somebody speaking the language can make a tremendous difference,” Geisler said. “Because with the language comes the culture, and with the culture one can interact with people in ways that people who speak only English can’t.”
Unlike a lot of programs that start with first- or second-year Korean, the Middlebury Language Schools house a complete community of learners. Each language school comprises four levels of language teaching, and all levels must be rolled out at once.
“One challenge, therefore, is attracting enough students in one summer to populate the four levels and co-curricular activities, and having enough students to create a critical enough mass that the same six people aren’t talking to each other the whole time,” Snyder said. “This was one of the reasons we identified Korean as the next language to institute: we think there’s sufficient demand for students to learn it.”
In logistically preparing for the school’s opening, director Sahie Kang has sought the help of academic colleagues and native Koreans. Kang oversaw the development of an online “hybrid” program for novice learners to use before they arrive at the eight-week intensive, teaching Korean characters and simple syntax structures. She is still in the process of recruiting teachers from a pool of applicants. Kang’s teaching staff, when selected and assigned to each of the four levels, will then devise curricula for each level.
Fittingly with the Middlebury’s initiative to solidify its identity, Mr. Geisler has begun to unify the College’s various language programs, which include the famous Bread Loaf Conference and the newly-launched Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference. Michael Collier, director of the Writers’ Conference, joined Geisler in devising the new Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference, which will be held at Middlebury’s campus in Ripton, Vermont, this June and will model the original Bread Loaf Conference.
Likewise, the Language Schools have sought and will continue to seek to expand their offerings. “Politically critical languages like Turkish, Vietnamese, Persian, and Swahili stood out in the formative phases of this process,” Geisler said. “We had a long discussion about Swahili; we would still like to start that soon, if we can.”
