Vai ragazzi, coraggio!
Professor Simone Dubrovic urges the students in his introductory intensive Italian course to have courage. He asks them to share an activity they do in the winter, and what they wear while doing it.
Noi sciamo, ci mettiamo le giacche, they answer. We ski, we wear jackets.
It’s early November, and the level of grammar and vocabulary the students have attained in two short months is astonishing. They spend time speaking in pairs and then sharing for the whole class, with a stream of constant encouragement and praise — Ottimo! Bravo! — flowing from their professor.
For these students of Italian and the nearly 200 others taking introductory intensive language courses this fall, the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures offers an immersive model of teaching and learning distinctive to Kenyon.
Students meet four or five times a week with their professor who teaches in the target language from day one. They attend another three sessions a week led by more advanced, specially-trained peers, reinforcing what they’ve learned through drills, games, practice, and lots and lots of conversation.
All of this dedicated time spent speaking, listening, reading and writing in the target language means that Kenyon students acquire three to four semesters worth of learning in just the first year. Both faculty and students emphasize the astonishing amount of progress students make during the first year.
Ethan Manske ’26, a second-year Japanese TA, was amazed by “how quickly I went from knowing nothing to being able to confidently speak mid-conversational level stuff by the end of the first year.”
Kenyon’s model of employing undergrads — an integral part of the immersive model known as the Kenyon Language Program — as teaching assistants (TAs) responsible for leading three class sessions a week is virtually unique among Kenyon’s peer institutions. Prior to becoming a TA, students are required to take a course on second language acquisition and teaching with Mary Kathryn Malone, the coordinator of Kenyon’s language program and assistant professor of French.
Lauren Blakemore ’26, a teaching assistant in Arabic, said her sessions with TAs when she was just starting out were part of the reason she fell in love with the language and ultimately became a major. “Something I really appreciated about my TA (was) that she always found ways to make it engaging, make it fun. It was something to look forward to rather than to dread.”
While the Kenyon Language Program has undergone many changes over the years, the key element of peer-to-peer teaching has endured since its inception in the 1980-81 academic year. By teaching the target language to their peers, TAs improve their own understanding and facility with the language and gain invaluable experience in the art of teaching.
So the Kenyon approach offers two ways for students to uniquely improve their language skills. As Professor of Spanish Kate Hedeen explained, “I used to think the benefit of the KLP was for first-year students — they are getting so much input, getting so much exposure to the language. They grow so quickly, by leaps and bounds. But now it’s my sense that the students who benefit the most from the KLP are actually the TAs. They get vital classroom experience as teachers, plus the best way to learn a language is having to teach it to somebody else.”
Olivia Lott ’15, a Spanish major who is now assistant professor in the department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University, agrees: “Being a (TA) deepened my Spanish proficiency, giving me the chance to revisit grammar and vocabulary I had studied years earlier. Most importantly, it made me a strong candidate for a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Colombia. In that role, I drew heavily on my (TA) training while teaching English to college students at the Universidad Boyacá in Tunja.”
As Jamie McGavran ’02, the current chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and associate professor of Russian, said, TAs “get a level of teaching experience that is rare for undergraduates anywhere … and Fulbright committees and graduate programs recognize the value of the experience that they get.”
Language students from Kenyon have gone on to win placements with other prestigious postgrad programs as well, including the Teaching Assistant Program in France (TAPIF) and the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program.
Learning a new language isn’t the only benefit of Kenyon’s immersion model, of course. “Students are getting a window into other cultural norms … getting a new perspective on their own culture and realizing, ‘Oh, the way that we do things here is just a way and not the only way of interacting or living and arranging for society,’” said Assistant Professor of Arabic Phoebe Carter ’17.
This is incredibly helpful for those who decide to live and work abroad, like Bella Creel ’22, a Japanese studies major who stayed in Japan after completing the JET program. Her professors’ instruction, she said, “not only gave me the appropriate language skills to live and work in Japan, but also the cultural knowledge that I needed to thrive in an environment very different from the one in which I was raised.”
In Their Own Words
How studying languages equipped four alumni for career success.
Ann Allen ’06
Senior Program Officer, Supply Chain at the Gates Foundation
Major: International Studies, Sociology
“The ability to continue learning French at Kenyon unlocked this cascade of career and life opportunities.”
Studying abroad in Cameroon piqued Allen’s interest in international development, specifically in Africa. Having worked with Médecins Sans Frontières in francophone countries and now with francophone African supply chain leaders at the Gates Foundation, “(French) doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as well, but I understand and can be understood, and it’s a powerful way of demonstrating respect for other countries and cultures.”
Michael Raney ’86
Head of International Insurance, Uber Technologies
Major: Spanish
“My experience at Kenyon set me on a track to really learn a language which opened doors to an international career.”
As a first-year student, Raney was drawn to the innovative intensive language model used by the MLL department. He recalls, “On our first day, Professor (Linda) Metzler entered the classroom with an explosion of energy and Spanish. The experience was captivating.” His career has taken him overseas to Argentina, Chile and Brazil for multi-year postings.
Audrey Dotson ’01
Vice President, Lead UX Content Designer, JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Major: German
“A senior leader at a major bank told me she feels language majors are even more skilled than English majors, with language ‘systems thinking,’ which is really important for how (UX design) is evolving.”
After a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship in Berlin, Dotson later taught English in Tokyo. Following an early career in the translation industry, she is now a UX content designer and finds that her language studies continue to benefit her. UX content is “concerned with clarity of language, usability” she says, “and now, with AI entering the field, we are being asked more and more to think of language for websites and apps in a ‘componentized’ or ‘systems’ way.”
Hillary Child ’13
Principal, Boston Consulting Group
Major: Physics, Russian Area Studies
“I’d emphasize the value in learning how to learn a language and how to operate in a language you only partially understand.”
Child credits her Kenyon classes for more than preparing her for a fully immersive study abroad program in Irkutsk, Russia, where she took a physics course entirely in Russian. Language learning at Kenyon gave her valuable “experience working across cultures and backgrounds” and helped her get comfortable moving forward through “uncertainty, ambiguity, and mistakes.”