Thirty years ago, French Professor John Rassias decided to revolutionize the way language was taught in colleges by bringing the Peace Corps' language training program to the academic world.
His program, like the Peace Corps, calls for five hours a week to be spent with a master teacher and five hours a week to be spent with an apprentice teacher in drill. Rassias added an additional component, language instruction in a laboratory, where students hear the language spoken on cassette tapes, television and videos.
Rassias said students have to learn to speak a language in order to learn it. To provide additional opportunities to speak the language, he created the Language Study Abroad Program, a program which allows students to live and study a language for a term in a country where the language is spoken daily.
"My idea was to give students the basics of the language, let them go overseas, and live with a family," Rassias said. "I wanted to cap off their world by bringing the world to them, to begin the process of internationalization."
"I wanted to make language classes creative and meaningful," he continued. "I wanted the student to connect with the language, to make it real for them."
As the LSA program marks its 30th anniversary, it is also seeing a decrease in the number of participants.
"I believe the numbers are down because students don't know enough about their opportunities and don't understand the very essence of them," Rassias said. "I wish every student would call me and ask about the LSA."
Rassias also said he thought faculty and administrators had begun to take the program for granted and were not really making as much of an effort to get the information out.
"When the program first began, we had waiting lists of people who wanted to study abroad. It was something new and unique," he said. "We need to communicate to the students today that this is still a unique program, and is the only one of its kind in the world."
Rassias said 600 other colleges have modeled their language programs after the College's, but they have not taken the next step and gone overseas with those programs.
"It is really an unbeatable combination of being able to fulfill your language requirement after two terms of studying the language and then by going overseas," Rassias said.
Rassias, members of the faculty, and the Off-Campus Programs Office have already begun the process of better informing the student body.
Rassias said they are currently working to make a better brochure and pamphlet describing off campus opportunities and the application process.
Open houses will be held later in the term to allow students to obtain more information about the programs in which they are interested and language professors will be encouraged to utilize students who have participated in the off-campus programs in their classes.
Their efforts kicked off last month when language faculty, along with Dartmouth students and alumni, presented a 30-year celebration program to the Class of 2000.
"We wanted to make certain that the first-year students were well aware of their opportunities to study abroad," Director of Off-Campus Programs Peter Armstrong said. "In particular we wanted to stress the LSAs in German and in French."
Approximately 600 students attended the celebration, which involved several short skits, the reading of letters from alumni who participated in off-campus study programs, and commentary from Rassias. Also included was a comical list of the top 10 reasons to study abroad.
The skits were designed by current students who participated in programs abroad, and they demonstrated the application process as well as the enjoyment that can come from off-campus programs.
Rassias said the outpouring of letters from alumni from around the world and from all walks of life really stressed the point that he wanted to make.
"A lot of alumni say their best term at Dartmouth was spent away from the Hanover plain," he said. "Dartmouth is wherever there is a teacher and a student, it is not just a set of buildings."
Rassias said another key point brought out by the alumni letters is that study abroad improves quality of life.
"You come to know yourself better, connect with other human beings and develop a way of presenting yourself to the world that is uniquely you," he said. "It makes you more sensitive and receptive."
Since the LSA's inception in 1966-67, more than 17,000 Dartmouth students have studied in 26 countries through the LSA in addition to the Foreign Study Programs, which were created a few years prior to the beginning of LSAs.
"To think that we've successfully completed our purpose and gone from programs in just one country to 26 countries is mind boggling," Rassias said.
In its 30 years, the LSA program has not changed much.
"We've changed locations, but the course load is still the same -- three credits, two distributives and one in the humanities," Rassias said. "When the program first began, we only required one term of a language before a student could go abroad, but we now require another to make the journey more beneficial to the student."
Rassias said when we speak of another language as 'foreign,' it "immediately creates an area and era of hostility."
"This leads to a sense of inferiority and secondary value, which ultimately result in insensitivity, intolerance and arrogance," he said.
Rassias said that intolerance developed during childhood and adolescence can be cured by exposure to culture.
"You have to do something to get rid of your prejudices, to blow them away," Rassias told the Class of 2000. "The kind of cultural experiences that will do that are not available here in Hanover, but only on one of Dartmouth's 26 other campuses abroad."
He explained that the best learning occurs when all of the senses are ablaze.
"Your senses lead you to a point where you realize that when you say Je suis, Ich bin or Yo soy, you are able to equate it to the simple, powerful I am, and then and only then are all other people relative and equal," Rassias said.
In addition to eliminating prejudices, study abroad has professional benefits.
"With the way people are changing careers an average of five to seven times, I tell students they have to have a language in their baggage Rassias said. "It will make them more competitive and provide them with more opportunities."
Phuoc Le '98 helped Rassias put together the LSA celebration performance.
"I basically had a terrific time on my off-campus experience in China, and saw this program as a good opportunity to tell new students about it.," Le said. "Being in a place where you can't speak the language and living there is a totally different experience than living at Dartmouth. Every day, no matter what you do, you're learning something new."
Le agreed with Rassias that students do not have enough information about the LSA programs. He said students do not know what an LSA is really like, and think it is for fun, not a learning experience.
"Be adventurous, do something different away from campus," Le said. "You've got four years at Dartmouth. It isn't going to hurt to spend one term away from here."
"We have opened the world up for you. The world is your classroom, and it awaits you. Make it yours," Rassias said.
