<p>I've looked throughout this forum and I can't find any appropriate threads so here's my question. My daughter is a rising sophomore at Smith College and is 99% likely to major in English and continue on to a Ph.D. program. It's my understanding she will need to be proficient in two languages for grad school but she's discovered different programs require different languages. She took an advanced Spanish class last year so she's got one language nailed. It seems the common wisdom is to get both languages accomplished during undergrad. However, her advisor is giving some different advice, saying she shouldn't spend her undergrad time getting a second one under her belt. She felt that my daughter should take other courses that she really wants to take, including additional English courses, as this is the one time in her life that she can delve into anything she wants, that she can always develop a second language in grad school when she knows which language would be useful for her graduate work. For her second language, my understanding is she'd probably need to learn French or German or maybe Latin, but knowing right now which one is appropriate is a stab in the dark. Does her advisor's recommendation make sense in this competitive grad school market?</p>
<p>CarolynB,</p>
<p>I’m writing as a long-time English professor and as former chair of admissions to a highly ranked PhD program. </p>
<p>Different schools have slightly different requirements. The usual demand, though, is “reading knowledge of two languages or proficiency in one.” “Reading knowledge” is well short of fluency–basically, you need to be able to translate a passage from a literary or a critical text using a dictionary. So you have to know basic grammar and so on, but you need no oral facility whatsoever. Especially if your daughter is good at languages, she can acquire this level of expertise pretty quickly and perhaps on her own. I took French in school but passed German and Latin based on self-study the summer before I entered grad school.</p>
<p>What “proficiency” means varies–very often the foreign languages departments will decide what it means, so sometimes it can vary even at the same university. But a few advanced undergraduate classes–e.g. a Cervantes course in Spanish, or the like–would get your D to or close to what’s considered proficiency.</p>
<p>I’ve been describing the usual minimum requirement at schools like Princeton, Hopkins, Cornell, and UVA. If your D is interested in comparative literature, she would obviously need a much stronger language background. But otherwise, as your D’s advisor suggests, the language requirements are specific to the historical field. For instance, a medievalist would want to have excellent Latin and French (Old English, too, though that’s not usually classified as a foreign language). These languages are helpful for Renaissance scholars as well. For an Americanist, Spanish is probably more generally useful.</p>
<p>The language requirements need to be satisfied to get the PhD; they are not requirements for admission. Since many PhD students need to learn languages quickly and without interfering with their other coursework, it’s very common for universities to offer summer language courses geared to doctoral research requirements.</p>
<p>Of course, the better-qualified you look initially, the more likely you are to get admitted, so other things being equal, strong language preparation is a plus.
My sense is that in evaluating applicants some departments put more weight on language prep than others. Most want to see that the candidate could pass the minimum language requirement with little extra work. Yale claims to prefer candidates to have some background in French, German, and Latin, and gives preference to such candidates, but as I recall the level of expertise is self-reported, not gauged from coursework. My intuition is that language background will not be MORE attractive to English PhD programs than additional English or related humanities courses (history, religion, art history, etc.) So in other words, the advisor is correct. Many students tend to prefer recent literature and load up on 20th c. lit courses, so your D should be sure to get a solid, systematic background in all historical periods. That’ll help her GRE subject test score as well.</p>
<p>Jingle, thank you so much for such a thorough post. It’s good to know that my daughter’s advisor’s recommendation is reasonable, all things considered. And thank you for the reminder to have a broad literature exposure. My daughter’s aware she needs to have breadth and she’s got a good start with various survey courses.</p>