The University of Wyoming will host World Languages Day (WLD) today and tomorrow to celebrate language education for 6-12 grade students.
The day will expose Wyoming students to experts in their language from around the world as well as UW’s campus, and will allow students an opportunity to meet peers with similar interests.
“It’s a way for secondary students in the state to experience different languages and cultures that they would otherwise not be exposed to,” Mollie Hand, academic advisor for UW’s department of Modern and Classical Languages, and organizer of the event, said.
The events included in the competition portion of the event consist of a range of slam poetry, songs, and storytelling, all according to this year’s theme of “Festivals.”.
“The main event is a competition wherein students will compete against other students of the same skill level in tasks involving their respective languages,” Hand said.
Some students already enrolled at UW said that had they known about WLD before they had chosen to attend, it would have provided more incentive.
“If I would have heard about it when I was in high school I think it would have made me consider Wyoming even more,” Victoria Ramos, UW multicultural recource center student, said. “I speak multiple languages, and speaking native Spanish, I think it would have felt more accepting here.”
Hand said she believes the event will allow students to see the how much UW has to offer culturally, as well as the number of languages spoken on campus.
“I feel as though it will be a positive recruitment effort for the university and it will allow those students to branch out from the two or three languages that they were exposed to in school,” Hand said.
Not understanding the level of accommodation that the university can provide could be intimidating for some of the students from around the state, Ramos said.
Other students at the university said knowing about UW’s recognition and accommodation of foreign language would have been beneficial in deciding where to go to school, and that it could impact perception of the university in the minds of current high school and middle school students.
“I feel like they would feel more included at UW, so knowing that the university values other languages may make them want to come to school here,” Darlene Carreto, a multicultural student on campus, said.
Carreto said language has a larger importance than just communication.
“I definitely think that language is a really important part of a student’s identity, not everybody speaks English, and for the university to acknowledge that shows that they accept other cultures,“ Carreto said.
UW may benefit from programs like this, as students who participate in the WLD will be exposed to new perspectives pertaining to language and the cultures that accompany them.
“You have to always respect the cultures that the language you are speaking came from,” Ramos said. “You should know the right things to say in the right situations, and that is good to keep in mind when dealing with other languages,” Ramos said.
