Monolingualism

The Fulbright guidelines for lecturing awards in Slovakia stipulate that all lecturing will be in English. (Whew!) I gather from many Slovak web sites for tourists that the younger generations are especially eager to learn and improve their English. Judging from my correspondence with Slovak University faculty, they also are very fluent in English.

Even so, in preparing for my teaching this fall, I am assuming widely varying fluency in English, and I have been thinking about ways to ensure that no students are disadvantaged. At my home campus in southern California, I understand that as many as a third of our students are not native English speakers, and I have adapted in my teaching here. E.g., I routinely paraphrase myself so students don't have to ask me to explain unusual language. I like PowerPoint (or old-fashioned overhead transparencies) as the visual language helps underscore key points I am discussing orally. Americans enunciate much more clearly than the English (a practice reportedly encouraged by Daniel Webster centuries ago to help a nation of immigrants understand each other), and I hope that also will help my students understand me.

Last spring, I looked without success for an introductory course in Slovak at an area college. Heavily advertised programs to learn foreign languages (like Rosetta Stone) do not offer Slovak. I have two Slovak-English pocketsize dictionaries and phrasebooks which I expect to carry at all times. And I understand that our three-day orientation in September at the Fulbright Commission in Bratislava will include a crash course in essential conversational Slovak. It is fairly easy to decipher maps and Slovak web pages with a little common sense, but the pronunciations escape me.

Americans are notoriously monolingual. Rick Steeves almost brags in his travel guides to Europe that he only speaks English, as he can always find people there who understand him. I wonder if Europeans consider that arrogant -- or perhaps I should say, just how arrogant do that find that attitude. Yet I discovered years ago when visiting Paris that I almost never used the college French I had worked hard to dust off -- as soon as a waiter or clerk realized that I was American, they said they would love to practice their English with me. It's easy to become very lazy in learning other languages, although that's not a good excuse.

The dust has gathered again on my college French -- never mind my high school Spanish -- but I understand those languages don't help much in Slovakia anyway. German reportedly can help with older generations, but I possess only rudimentary reading ability (enough for the Ph.D. many years ago). I read that the Soviets required everybody to learn Russian, but their domination ended in 1989 and now few will admit to even knowing Russian, if the Slovak web sites are to be believed (as I assume they are).

I am hopeful that my students in Bratislava will help me out with their language. I would love to come home to the U.S. with some basic conversational Slovak. And if anyone wants to polish and refine their English, I will be only too happy to help.