Resolution for Parity across the Campuses for Language Course Hours

RESOLUTION FOR PARITY ACROSS THE CAMPUSES FOR LANGUAGE COURSE HOURS

October 3, 2008

WHEREAS we, The California State University Foreign Language Council, believe that contact hours correlate with language acquisition and the amount of material one can cover in a semester, and

WHEREAS articulation agreements between California Community Colleges and the CSU system (Lower Division Transfer Pattern (LDTP)) require that transfer language classes meet minimum requirements of 4 semester units per course, and

WHEREAS the CSU Academic Senate has passed a resolution to assist with articulation between CSU campuses that utilizes LDTP course descriptors for CSU to CSU transfers and these protocols call for second-year Spanish courses to be a minimum of 4 units each, (www.calstate.edu/AcadAff/ldtp/docs/SPAN_130_Intermediate_Spanish_I.pdf)

WHEREAS we believe intra-CSU transfer students should not have to repeat a lower division language course taken at another CSU before advancing to upper division courses at a different campus, and

WHEREAS we believe that study abroad in universities and colleges is an extremely valuable experience for our students and generally assumes a certain number of units of coursework in the target language, and

WHEREAS most commercially published textbooks assume 4 or 5 hours a week of contact time for a full year to complete a course,

Therefore, be it

RESOLVED that The California State University Foreign Language Council recommend that first-year language courses meet a minimum of four hours per week. This recommendation will not necessarily apply to heritage speaker classes and conversation classes.