Spring 2002
back to One World, Many Tongues
If you build it...
Photo by Diana Watters
A conversation with Jenise Rowekamp, director, Minnesota Language Center
What's so great about the Language Center?
The Language Center is the only place on campus where students, faculty and staff have access to word processing, e-mail, Websites and satellite TV programming in the more than 40 languages taught at the U, including Chinese, Korean, and Hebrew. Almost every CLA student uses the Language Center facilities and services to practice language skills.
Why is technology important in teaching languages?
Many students are unable to do study abroad, but technology can fill in, providing guided virtual access to the sites, sights, and sounds of the language and culture and real exchanges with people who speak the language via e-mail or the Web. Students can visit coffee houses and art museums, listen to music or newscasts, plan a subway route or what they'll order for lunch-all in the target language via the Web. And the Language Center's tutors are always available in the flesh as teachers and tour guides.
Why do you need the new Nicholson Hall facilities?
We now have two to four people sharing one-person offices. We are currently split between two floors and refer to ourselves as the upstairs/downstairs teams. The good news is that we get lots of exercise running up and down stairs.
Photo by Sara DeWaay
Students wait for computers, and when they do get them, they are almost sitting in each other's laps. Although we have headphones on every computer for language listening and speaking practice, it's uncomfortable to be so close to your neighbor and talking out loud, especially in the summer when our window air conditioner can't keep up with the computer heat output.
And there's the building itself. Although the marble in Folwell Hall is gorgeous, setting up our portable wireless laptop lab (25 computers on a moveable cart) has sometimes challenged our appreciation of Folwell architecture: the radio waves couldn't initially permeate it.
You bring many skills and great passion and commitment to your work in the Language Center. What's your story?
My passions have always been languages, teaching, and working with my hands. I started learning French when I was in first grade in a Catholic school run by a French order of nuns in Valley City, ND. My grandmother was a teacher, and I used to go with her to her one-room schoolhouse to watch her teach before I started school myself. My father was disabled with arthritis, yet he knew how to fix everything. I became his hands, wiring a lamp or working on the car, with him telling me what to do.
The Language Center has allowed me to pull this all together. I am around languages and the people who are speaking, learning and teaching them all day. The technology is just another tool I enjoy putzing with, something to figure out, to help me do what I love to do. I'm not a technophile, but I do appreciate what the technology can do to enliven and extend the language classroom.
So how did you get from that one-room schoolhouse to the Language Center?
With my B.A. in English and French, I started out as a secondary teacher. With my M.A. in English as a Second Language (ESL), I began working with ESL programs for refugees/immigrants in the 70s. By 1980 or so, I was coordinating the International Institute of Minnesota's ESL Program in Minneapolis. We had over 300 students, most from Southeast Asia and with very little prior education. As those students became more employable I worked in Employment ESL, starting ESL programs in companies and doing training for American employees who were dealing with foreign-speaking co-workers for the first time.
I has hired by a refugee camp in the Philippines to create a work orientation curriculum to help refugees get ready for work in the U.S. In the 80s I cowrote a book, published by Oxford University Press, called Speaking Up at Work. More recently, I cowrote another called Connected! Using Audio, Video, and Computer Materials in the Communicative Classroom.
In my 10 years at Center, I have watched (and perhaps helped) it grow from three employees to thirty employees. It suited me perfectly since I love to build programs, create teams, and help teachers get students excited about learning languages.