Marie Erikson is a fourth-year student in the philosophy honours program and author of the column Living the Institutions. In her work, she aims to mix theory, experience, policy and norms through clear and nuanced writing. She enjoys an engaging conversation about cats, coffee or whatever event or philosophical conception is deeply bothering her at the moment.
Editor's Note: This is the first article of a column called Living the Institutions about the institutions and norms that impact undergraduate students at UBC.
Students who began their BA at UBC this fall are subject to different degree requirements than their predecessors. Like the new system, the pre-2024 requirements encouraged breadth of study by mandating completion of courses in literature, science and a foreign language. By contrast, the new degree requirements allow students to study those same areas while also allowing students to determine how much of each area they want to study.
Of course, giving students more room to follow their interests can be valuable. This change fails, however, by allowing incoming and future BA students to choose to take as little as one 3-credit language course, with a few courses fully in English counting toward the requirement.
According to the Faculty of Arts’ website, language learning serves “to strengthen intercultural awareness in personal and professional contexts.” Even one language course can work toward this goal, hinting that the understanding of how a language operates and some facets of culture(s) in which it is spoken. Language education opens the doors to interacting with many more people and cultural material than otherwise possible, showing a student ways to develop such knowledge. Asking students to master another language over the course of their degree is certainly excessive, yet a single term, three-credit course may not provide the complete benefit that the requirement aims to provide.
If the goal, however, is to develop “intercultural awareness,” how effective can the teachings of a single course be in achieving those ends? After one course, can you understand a text for a general audience of native speakers? Can you follow a presentation, lecture or speech? Can you have a conversation with someone and discuss your opinions and ideas? After only one 3-credit introductory course, probably not.
A lot of culture is also held in values, opinions and hopes that are difficult to express or understand at the beginning of one’s language learning journey. Culture can be found in tiny details, like the way a slight shift in intonation changes the intent of the English phrase “how are you?” from a polite formality based in social etiquette to an intimate, personal inquiry.
And even when computer translation is easier than ever to access, the context and norms don’t always carry the crucial weight they do in the original material. In English, for example, we can say a conversation feels “awkward” with the expectation that our listener will immediately understand the sort of strange and uncomfortable feeling and situation. But a French translation of that sentence could not succinctly and completely capture the mixture of embarrassment, pain, stiltedness, annoyance and cringe in the way that “awkward” can.
This is also commonly the case with jokes. Translating what is perhaps the most classic anglophone dad joke of “I’m hungry” and its response “Hi, Hungry. I’m Dad,” is impossible. The structures of many languages, including some languages relatively close to English, limit this joke from making any sense not only as humour but as a coherent exchange.
You may question what relevance these details have for a student who came to UBC not to learn languages but for studying political science, English, math or any other subject. A student’s major may have been their motivation for studying at UBC, or any university for that matter, but a major’s 42-credit minimum will be a minority of the 120-credit BA (even a standard honours takes only half of the degree’s total credits, with 60 out of 120 credits counting toward an honours degree). General requirements and electives round out a degree by providing the necessary skills and background to best benefit from deeper study in a student’s specialization.
As part of their general requirements, every BA student has to complete an approved writing course to be able to express their ideas through academic writing, a necessary skill for succeeding in an arts degree that will include papers. Like a second language, writing an academic paper should have been fully taught by the end of secondary school, yet the failure of many school systems is unfairly passed onto UBC. The language requirement fills this need to provide a multicultural context, a requirement for better understanding the world through the lenses of the humanities, social sciences or arts.
The new language requirement’s saving grace is that all students, regardless of previous language experience, must take a language course. And a single language course may make more sense for a student already fluent in multiple languages, as they will already possess the sort of intercultural knowledge the requirement aims to cultivate. Such students could nonetheless strengthen their skills in a non-native language they are already learning or learn the basics needed to use a language related to one they speak. Keeping the language requirement universal encourages these students to continue their learning and expand the breadth of knowledge, as the name “breadth requirement” implies.
UBC students, however, are largely from Canada and likely to be anglophones, meaning they do not have to use a foreign means of communication at home, online and abroad. English may now be a sort of lingua franca, yet knowing only English limits students’ perspectives found in anglophone communities and places an unfair obligation on others to learn the English speaker’s language when they never return the courtesy.
No one is expected to learn all the languages, but why is it fair that native anglophones like me can learn nothing while everyone else studies so hard to grasp a language we know is full of quirks and exceptions? And yes, non-native English speakers who are UBC students chose to accept the English Language Admission Standard, but the domination of English extends globally, beyond Vancouver, to become a necessity for participation in our globalized world.
A world dominated by English can hurt us too. After studying another language, you may indeed continue to think in ways that mirror how you were raised. But language study allows you to explore first-hand accounts that both reaffirm your perspective and make you less ignorant. A second language also gives you access to innumerable more information sources for your academic and personal benefit. The larger part of UBC students, fluent in only English, thus have the greatest potential to benefit intellectually from studying another language.
I was one of those students, and my study helped me immensely. Both of my parents speak English and only English, and I grew up in the US in an area where other languages were only spoken in the homes of native speakers. As a BA student who began before 2024, I was exempt from the earlier language requirement for having taken AP French (which UBC considers to have met the BC grade 12 level). Though I was able to maintain most of what I learned through self-motivated, independent practice, I wish that I would have been forced to include a language course into my schedule, to either further develop my French skills or begin learning a new language. Francophone media has exposed me to so many new ideas that have changed, reinforced, and expanded my knowledge and perspectives.
When someone asks me what anxiety feels like, I tell them to listen to and watch the video for the song “anxiété” by Pomme, as I have never encountered a more faithful portrayal. The fantastic prose of Leïla Slimani’s Chanson Douce showed me how cleanly and engagingly a well-crafted variety of sentence structures reads — I now try to apply these insights in English. In conversation with native speakers, I have been lucky enough to hear everything from how their language was used to discriminate against their ancestors to a stranger saying “you did a little waterfall” to me after she saw me trip down a few stairs.
Engagement with francophone media has also amended my understanding of societal norms. I have learned how French classical literature portrays romantic love as a great suffering, as opposed to the rom-com meet cute and happy endings of marriage I came to expect as someone raised in the US. In a series of learning that left me without a solid opinion, I have been forced to reconsider what benefit small political parties and directly-elected heads of state bring, or whether the American tendency to never change the Constitution has its benefits when viewed against recent developments and debates in French politics.
Yes, the new language requirement succeeds by expecting all students to improve their language skills. Learning a bit of a new language out of interest should certainly be encouraged, yet this may not provide the skills that the Faculty of Arts correctly aims to teach its BA students. So first-year students, particularly those who only speak English, take more than 3 credits of courses on a language and culture that interests you. UBC may not force you (it took years to switch to the current requirements anyway), but you will appreciate it when you get to experience that which can’t be lived in English.
This is an opinion article. It reflects the author's views and does not reflect the views of The Ubyssey as a whole. Contribute to the conversation by visiting ubyssey.ca/pages/submit-an-opinion.
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