National Endowment for the Humanities Grant funds Accelerated Italian Acquisition for Spanish Speakers at CSU Long Beach

Clorinda Donato, The George L. Graziadio Chair of Italian Studies at California State University, Long Beach, celebrated the news of having received a $100,000 National Endowment for the Humanities with Project Director and Professor of Spanish Claire Martin and Language Program Coordinator and Project Content Specialist Markus Muller.

The grant process is highly competitive and represents the culmination of a six years’ work. The program began with a grant from the French government to offer French to the new audiences of Spanish speakers six years ago at CSU Long Beach.

The program was so successful, that Italian was added last year. Having presented the program at conferences such as ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) the project co-directors thought it was time to apply for national funding since so many teaching professionals had expressed interest in offering similar programs.

The NEH grant provides funding to expand the program locally. “French and Italian for Spanish Speakers” brings language-teaching faculty together from four Southern California institutions to explore the philosophy, methods and application of intercomprehension and pluri-lingualism to teach French and Italian to Spanish speakers through humanities content.

Nine faculty members from high schools and community colleges located near California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) will meet over the three-year grant period (2012- 2014) with CSULB faculty who currently teach French and Italian to Spanish Speakers. They will study intercomprehension, a method of multiple language learning that fosters humanities acquisition.

Content and method specialists will offer insight from the theory and practice of intercomprehension in France, Italy, Mexico and Spain during the grant cycle.
Early access to humanities content among language learners is the primary goal of intercomprehension. Content and language are taught in tandem, enabling students to read cultural texts of all kinds -- literature, art history, music, etc.-- from the onset of language study. Intercomprehension utilizes the learner’s knowledge of one Romance language, (in our case Spanish) to accelerate acquisition of a second or third Romance language, (French and/or Italian).

Housed at California State University, Long Beach, a designated Hispanic Serving Institution, the project allows Spanish- speaking faculty members who teach French or Italian at their respective institutions to work in teams to develop similar programs.

All participant institutions enroll high percentages of Hispanic students and seek ways to harness their language aptitude for advanced work in humanities content. Our collaboration will foster similar initiatives and may become a model for Hispanic serving institutions throughout the nation. The project transcends the traditional barriers separating the study of language from content courses in other disciplines by offering a method that allows Spanish-speaking students to study a Romance language in multilingual, content-rich courses that value and utilize their linguistic and cultural backgrounds. San Pedro High School, Wilson High School, Long Beach City College, and Rio Hondo College are the participating institutions in the three- year NEH project.

Increasing percentages of students in both French and Italian classes have Hispanic first and/or last names, notes Donato. A very high percentage of these students are heritage speakers of Spanish, while nearly all the rest have studied Spanish in high school.

Even the non-Latino students come with a background in high school Spanish, which, in many cases, puts them at a similar linguistic advantage with respect to heritage speakers. Spanish increasingly provides for our students a bridge to the acquisition of both French and Italian. We have had the good fortune of collaborating with Professor Pierre Escudé, a linguist from the University of Toulouse, who is an expert in the intercomprehension of the Neolatin languages. Professor Escudé has spearheaded a number of projects funded by the European Union whose goals are to make Europe multilingual, especially when it comes to having speakers of one Neolatin language learn others.

Donato will join Escudé at the University of Venice, Ca’ Foscari, in March 2012 to present the Long Beach program during a weeklong seminar on the intercomprehension of the Romance languages.
For further information about the program see the December 31, 2011 article in the Los Angeles Times, “Spanish unlocks doors to other languages in Cal State program.”
The article can be found at the following link: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-french-spanish-20111231,0,3944823.story