With the inauguration of President Katherine Bergeron ushering in a new era of Connecticut College’s history, the campus community is now reevaluating the way we interact with the city of New London and ways in which our relationship can be strengthened. As the General Education reforms begin, students and faculty alike have expressed an interest in doing more work off campus. Second Language Acquisition, taught by Lecturer in Slavic Studies Petko Ivanov, allows students the opportunity to work directly with elementary-aged students at the Regional Multicultural Magnet School (RMMS) in an after school program developed by Associate Professor of Slavic Studies Andrea Lanoux.
Professor Lanoux explained that the program began when a group of Conn students in 2008 went to RMMS to teach Russian during the school day. Eventually more languages, such as Japanese, Chinese, French and German were added, and the program changed to be held after school. Sue Goldstein, one of the directors of the program, said that the program has become so popular with the students that a lottery needed to be created to ensure that students have an equal opportunity to study with the visiting Conn students. RMMS tries to keep the total number of students per semester to around 80, but last semester there were almost 100 students participating.
For this semester, the course appealed to both students studying foreign languages and students working towards the College’s education certificate. Some students, such as Sara Maclean ’15 and Brian Damacio ’16, who both teach Spanish, hope to be teachers one day, and are using this course and program as a valuable learning experience. Other students use Second Language Acquisition as a way to improve their skills as language learners. Just as Conn students gain valuable skills from this program, RMMS students gain skills, as well. Though the students are clearly not going to become fluent in Arabic from two hours of practice twice a week, Kate Serio, another one of the program directors, and Goldstein explained that students are gaining more cultural awareness and sensitivity, and a general love of learning languages.
This semester, one of the first assignments students in the class worked on was an essay examining themselves and their personal histories as language learners. Some students, such as Kamal Kariem ’16, have studied languages in a formal educational setting for many years, while others, such as Nadiya Hafizova ’15, learned a second language at home. Some students learned English as a second language, and for other students, the languages they’re learning at Conn are their third or even fourth languages. Professor Ivanov had the essays printed in a book and eventually published through the College, and it now serves as a tangible reminder to the hard work of his students.
At RMMS, two Conn students, representing almost every language offered at the College, take groups of around nine elementary students into different classrooms for their lessons. On the day that I went with the group, the Arabic students learned how to describe their family members, Japanese students asked each other their ages, French students pointed out different parts of the body and Russian students went over the Cyrillic alphabet. Spanish students did jumping jacks while repeating numbers, and Professor Ivanov explained that doing physical movements while learning can help students better remember what they’re being taught, something that the class learned and was now implementing with the RMMS students.
The final project for each student was to create a full lesson plan, after having shadowed classes at RMMS and more advanced language classes at Conn, and film themselves going through it to the students. But for many of the students taking the Second Language Acquisition class, the true memories come from just interacting with the RMMS students. Lizz Ocampo ’16, one of the Russian students who has been teaching at the RMMS after school language program for three semesters, said that the highlight for her was seeing all the “little things that [the students] remember,” and that even after weekends and vacations, the RMMS students could count to ten and say hi to her in the language she had worked so hard to teach them. •
