A World of Learning: Modern Languages and Cultures at Baylor

While countries and cultures grow more interdependent with each passing day, the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures in the Baylor University College of Arts & Sciences is playing an ever more important role in helping Baylor students understand the world.

Leadership and service

Making sure that Baylor students understand the world around them is such an integral part of the University’s mission that the phrase Pro Mundo was recently added to Baylor’s 173-year-old motto –– joining Pro Ecclesia and Pro Texana.

Pro Ecclesia, Pro Texana, Pro Mundo: For the Church, For Texas, and now…For the World.

Helping to fulfill that motto, the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures (MLC) has a critical role in educating “men and women for worldwide leadership and service,” as stated in Baylor’s mission statement. 

“I think language teaches us more about ourselves and about the world around us than just about any other thing we could study,” said Dr. Jill Cornish, senior lecturer in French. “It’s one thing to study the culture of a different place kind of from the outside looking in, but when you’re studying that language, you’re putting yourself inside of that culture, and there’s just nothing like it. Language is just so important.”

"I think language teaches us more about ourselves and about the world around us than just about any other thing we could study."

--Dr. Jill Cornish

So important, in fact, that Baylor was the first university in Texas to offer Spanish courses, dating back to its days in Independence, according to a 1971 oral history interview with the late Andres Sendon, who taught Spanish at Baylor for more than 50 years after joining the University in 1919. 

Varied offerings

Today, the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures -- which has the most faculty of any department in the College of Arts & Sciences -- offers courses in 11 languages.

The Asian and African division of the department offers courses in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Swahili, and is overseen by division director Dr. Xin Wang. Meanwhile, Dr. Cristian Bratu, the associate chair of modern languages and cultures, directs the division of French and Italian, while Dr. Jennifer Good is division director of German and Russian and Dr. Gabrielle Miller is the interim division director for Spanish and Portuguese.

Courses in three additional languages are offered within the College of Arts & Sciences, but in other departments. Courses in Latin and Greek are part of the curriculum of the Department of Classics, while Hebrew courses are offered by the Department of Religion.

Dr. Michael Long, chair of modern languages and cultures since 2019 and a professor of Russian, said MLC also offers programs in Asian Studies, Latin American Studies, Middle East Studies and Slavic and Eastern European Studies. About 70 faculty members teach in the department –– the largest faculty group of any department in Arts & Sciences –– and approximately 460 students are current majors or minors in MLC programs. 

For the past half century or so, most students in the College of Arts & Sciences were required to complete 12 hours of language classes to earn a bachelor’s degree, but the required number of hours of language classes was reduced to nine during a revision of the Arts & Sciences core curriculum in 2019.

“We want those students to have nine hours in one language,” Long said. “They have to complete one course in the intermediate level in one language.”

Interactive and immersive

Students and faculty in every MLC language program can make use of the Interactive Media & Language Center on the third floor of the Draper Academic Building. At the center, designed to be a model of technology-assisted language teaching and learning, students can receive tutoring, take part in “conversation hours” with other students and native speakers, view films in various languages and travel the world via virtual reality headsets. 

“It’s like you’re walking through the Louvre in Paris and seeing what’s on the walls, or a museum in Moscow,” Long said. 

Jim Kumahata is the director of the center and is also a senior lecturer in Japanese. 

Using the technology and interactive opportunities available in the Center is important because, as the MLC website states, the goal of the department is to foster both “linguistic proficiency and intercultural awareness” in its students.” Toward that end, even beginning language classes go beyond simply teaching students how to read, write and converse.

“There’s cultural information embedded in all the levels of language classes,” Long said. “From the beginning, we start introducing students to prominent persons in various fields within each language group. We talk about traditions and customs. When you look at vocabulary, when you look at how language is used pragmatically, very often culture, even religion, will feed into that. At some point, the two merge.”

Wang, the director of Asian and African languages and an associate professor of Chinese, said MLC wants its students “to have the firsthand knowledge and insights into the society, not only just the language, but also the culture and society in East Asia.”

East Asian opportunities

In October 2023, Baylor received its first-ever Fulbright-Hays grant from the U.S. Department of Education to strengthen its East Asian language programs in the MLC department –– Chinese, Japanese and Korean –– as well as its Asian Studies program. Part of the $294,000 grant will be used to develop courses that will focus on the cultural aspect of the curriculum. Wang said one course will focus on Japanese music, while others will concentrate on theater and films in East Asia, transpacific migration of culture and population, and Korean pop culture. 

Wang said the grant will also be used to develop open educational resources (OERs) for students, which are teaching, learning and research materials designed to be created and licensed to be free for users to own, share and even modify.

“We are the first group of faculty in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures to develop OERs,” Wang said. 

The Fulbright-Hays grant will also assist Baylor in hiring a full-time lecturer in Korean, as well as enhancing a study abroad program in East Asia. Several faculty members took “kind of a field trip to East Asia” during the summer of 2024, said Wang, the principal investigator for the grant, which also included the work of associated investigator Yoshiko Gaines, senior lecturer in Japanese.  

“We made the trip because we wanted to see some relevant areas that our students need to study about East Asia,” Wang said. “We feel it’s quite important for our students to understand urbanization and urban development, as well as industrialization technology advancement and technology development, in East Asia.”

“The trip was really trying to help our faculty develop a study abroad program concentrated on East Asia,” he said. 

Study abroad

MLC faculty believe that study abroad programs are valuable to upper-level language students.

“We think that if you really want to gain the highest level of proficiency that you can, you need to spend time in the country where you’re immersed in that environment every day –– using the language every day, both written forms and spoken forms, listening to the news, watching television and film, going to cultural performances and just experiencing day-to-day life,” Long said.

And it’s upper-level students who tend to benefit the most from study abroad, according to more than 50 years of research conducted by the American Council of Teachers of Russian. 

“Their awareness of how the language functions and operates is much broader and deeper, and therefore, they can accept more inputs,” Long said. “And they’re going to retain that knowledge longer after they return.”

"We think that if you really want to gain the highest level of (language) proficiency that you can, you need to spend time in the country where you’re immersed in that environment every day."

--Dr. Michael Long

MLC currently offers study abroad programs in Spain, France, Germany, Japan, China and Morocco, and hopes to establish a program in Africa to enhance the Swahili curriculum. The department also has exchange agreements with universities in France, Spain and Germany that have been in place for “many, many, many years,” Long said. An exchange program in Voronezh, Russia, is on hold due to that country’s war with Ukraine, but Baylor students can study the language in Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Latvia and Armenia. 

“It’s not exactly the same experiences they would have if they were studying in Russia,” Long said. “But they are getting instruction from native Russian speakers, and it’s on the same par and level with what they would get if they went to Russia.”

Community outreach

Baylor students are also able to enhance their classroom language lessons by working with local schools. For a few semesters now, students in German classes have been visiting Tennyson Middle School in Waco as part of the SPARK for German program, which stands for Structured Program for the Acquistion of German in the U.S. - Resources and Know-how. It’s a joint project by the American Association of Teachers of German and the Goethe Institut to “support German teachers and learners…in all 50 states,” according to its website. Goethe is the “globally active cultural institution of the Federal Republic of Germany.”

At Tennyson, Baylor students are “teaching brief weekly vocabulary units for approximately eight weeks. It might be numbers or colors or body parts,” said Dr. Sharon Weiner, senior lecturer in German, who helps oversee the outreach. “They’re also providing a view into German culture. For example, the students did a unit on traditional Christmas foods, which was a popular one because the middle schoolers got to sample treats. Other topics might include soccer or sports or castles and fairy tales. They’re trying to make the culture interesting and accessible. And we’ve had a number of repeat participants here at Baylor because they’ve had very positive experiences. They enjoy working with the kids.” 

Weiner said she has mentored several student volunteers in the SPARK program as they apply for German or Austrian Fulbright scholarships.

“They all mention their volunteering work as a meaningful and formative experience,” she said. “So, it seems fair to say the program is not only fostering students’ growth, but also supporting their applications for prestigious competitive opportunities.”

Career skills

Another upcoming opportunity for Baylor language students is a professionalization workshop currently in the planning stages and which will be presented by members of the French faculty, designed to help students “move amongst the professional job spheres, in French,” Cornish said. 

“We'll be teaching them CV writing, lettre de motivation, and cover letter writing –– teaching them how and where to look for potential job opportunities or internships or even grad school in French-speaking countries,” she said. 

There are plenty of opportunities for students and graduates to use their knowledge in French, as numerous companies with headquarters in France or other French-speaking countries operate locations in Texas and across the United States, Cornish said. 

One of the goals of Modern Languages and Culture is educating students in how their language classes can be a benefit in their future careers. 

“Professionally, German is relevant to students who are studying business and want to work internationally, as there’s a great amount of transatlantic trade and cooperation between the U.S. and Germany,” Weiner said. “Germany remains an economic powerhouse within Europe and a cultural center of gravity in terms of its influence on European politics. If you’re studying business or politics, it’s a useful language to have.” 

Wang said that East Asia is “important strategically and geopolitically and economically, because when you look at East Asia, there are several important economies that are very critical to United States. We’re talking about China, Japan, and South Korea and Taiwan being the center of semiconductor production.”

Long said that he’s seen many students of Russian attend law school after Baylor, with one student becoming the leading American expert on Russian oil and gas law. She worked for the Moscow office of an American law firm until the firm closed that office after the breakout of the war with Ukraine. Other graduates have worked for the State Department and in government diplomatic roles, with some pursuing graduate degrees in conflict resolution and terrorism studies. 

“We do have a fair number of ROTC cadets studying Russian,” Long said. “They very often go into military intelligence right after leaving our program.”

Long-term benefits

There are “so, so many reasons” for Baylor students to study another language, Cornish said. 

“It’s not just the ability to communicate in another language, which is really important as we become a more and more global society every day and we connect with different people,” she said, “but the empathy, I think, and the ability to get comfortable with the discomfort of not always knowing what’s happening in another context. I think you really build a sense of what it means to be a community.”

In addition to learning the vocabulary and culture of another language, students are “also gaining experience in presentation and speaking,” Long said. “There is a performance aspect to studying a language, because we don’t expect students to sit at a desk and just to listen to us talk to them. We expect them to be engaged with us and to talk with us.”

Johann von Goethe, considered the greatest German literary figure of the modern era, once said, “Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen,” which roughly translates to “he who is ignorant of foreign languages, knows not his own,” Weiner said. And in an era where smartphones allow users to translate from language to language, “what gets lost when you communicate through a handheld device is the human aspect that comes not only through direct eye contact and interaction without a technological mediator, but also the subtle, not often consciously registered meaning to another person that you are trying to communicate with them in their language of origin or of choice,” she said.

So, why should Baylor students study another language?

“I don’t have a crystal ball and I can’t tell you why learning another language might be important for any one individual student other than to say it opens up otherwise impossible connections and paths that you figure out only in retrospect,” Weiner said. “There’s a lot of talk now about intercultural learning and cross-cultural understanding, and it’s hard to get a complete or fully meaningful picture of someone else’s culture if you don’t also try to put yourself in the mindset of that language and the sounds it makes and the ways that it describes the world.”

"Learning another language...opens up otherwise impossible connections and paths that you figure out only in retrospect."

--Dr. Sharon Weiner

Long said that for students with experience in multiple languages, the possibilities are endless.

“You can do anything you want to,” he said. “If you have proficiency in any language and you also have skills in another field, whether it's engineering or medicine or politics or environmental sciences, if you have that interest and you have the proficiency in language, you can combine them easily in many, many different ways.”

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of Baylor Arts & Sciences magazine.

ABOUT THE COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES AT BAYLOR UNIVERSITY 

The College of Arts & Sciences is Baylor University’s largest academic division, consisting of 25 academic departments in the sciences, humanities, fine arts and social sciences, as well as 11 academic centers and institutes. The more than 5,000 courses taught in the College span topics from art and theatre to religion, philosophy, sociology and the natural sciences. The College’s undergraduate Unified Core Curriculum, which routinely receives top grades in national assessments, emphasizes a liberal education characterized by critical thinking, communication, civic engagement and Christian commitment. Arts & Sciences faculty conduct research around the world, and research on the undergraduate and graduate level is prevalent throughout all disciplines. Visit the College of Arts & Sciences website.