Brown University’s Student Language Exchange Explores Other Cultures Through Languages

The Student Language Exchange (SLE) organization at Brown University is now offering unique opportunities for students to explore other cultures from the comfort of Rhode Island. This is being achieved by the hosting of classes in Tagalog, Macedonian, and Bengali, taught by student teachers (fellows) who are native speakers.

Student Language Exchange

According to the SLE website, the organization is an exploratory initiative to acquaint students with cultures and languages that they cannot otherwise access through the regular curriculum at Brown. The program provides opportunities for undergraduates who are native speakers of less commonly represented languages to offer weekly language lessons.

The SLE program began three years ago at Brown, and it is now being modeled at Columbia University, Brandeis University, and Tufts University. To ensure the quality of the course experience, prospective student teachers must pass a selection and training process, and their required online training course includes the creation of lesson plans and syllabi drafts. Once selected, the teachers must attend training sessions for classroom techniques, support structures, and basic communication skills.

The new language sessions

This fall, five undergraduate students at Brown University will be offering SLE courses. Each class can accommodate up to 16 students, and the weekly sessions last for 80 minutes.

According to Amelia Friedman, a native Uruguayan and the Executive Director and Founder of SLE, she established the organization because she was frustrated with the almost non-existent access to lesser-known Spanish dialects. Lizzie Pollock of the Swearer Center for Public Service noted that some widely spoken languages are not commonly available in the curriculum of even the most prominent of colleges. This is unfortunate, since language diversity is one major way to help students become truly global citizens. Brown’s SLE seeks to increase cultural awareness by creating new types of intersections between individuals from different cultures. However, as Friedman has assured, the SLE’s goal is not to agitate for changes to Brown’s curriculum or to compete with the university’s current programs.

Focus on different cultures

At Brown, the SLE focuses on international cultures, specifically the ones of the students involved in the organization. Filip Simieski, a Macedonian student at Brown and SLE fellow, commented that sharing his culture and language with people who are unfamiliar with it made him appreciate his own culture all the more. He also learned that India and Croatia share some of the same idioms as Macedonia, such as “The bear gets married when the rain falls.”

Meanwhile, Tuft’s SLE organization has also set up a language program this fall to teach non-traditional languages. Turkish will be offered on Tuesdays and Vietnamese on Wednesdays. This will increase the number of languages the university currently offers in its curriculum, which includes Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Swahili, German, Russian, and the Romance languages.

Image credit: Brown University gates taken by Girona7 under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.