Foreign Language Across Curriculum, a program formally founded within the past year, seeks to expand foreign language competence across various disciplines within Cornell. Currently, an FLAC section aims to prepare students from the Wind Ensemble for a trip to Costa Rica that integrates language, music and service.

Foreign language across disciplines has had a long history at Cornell, although it has functioned “ad hoc for the past 15 years,” said Cecilia Lawless, director of FLAC. The program attained its formalized status last year when Prof. Elvira Sanchez-Blake, romance studies, used grant funding for graduate student training by implementing a Spanish section for the base course “Experience Latin America.”

“With the grant, she was able to bring in a couple of other professors, courses and T.A.s,” Lawless said.

Currently, the program spans four courses and seeks to expand to eight courses for the spring semester.

The Music, Leadership and Service Learning course is taught by Pablo Garcia Pinar grad. The course exists as an eight-student section that aims to familiarize students in the Wind Ensemble with the Spanish language in preparation for the ensemble’s yearly trip to Costa Rica next month. Specifically, the class intends to help students successfully interact within the foreign country. “Many [students] initially worried because they could not picture themselves buying stuff in a shop, or ordering food in a restaurant,” Pinar said. However, Pinar believes that FLAC has helped the students make significant progress: “I’ve taught [Spanish] for four years and this is the first time I’ve seen language development so quickly, especially because the class is only 50 minutes a week.”

The class serves students of varying background experience with the language. “Some come from families that are native Spanish speakers, but they seek to practice Spanish, and others have never spoken Spanish, though some have experience in Italian or French. It’s a good opportunity for them to start learning a new language,” Pinar said. “Basically it’s like a conversation class and it’s right after [the student’s] rehearsal. You have to make it an entertaining experience.” The trip involves roughly 40 students from the Wind Ensemble, including the students within the Music, Leadership and Service Learning section.

However, this range of language background within Pinar’s section differs from other courses integrated within FLAC, where, “Normally, students would have an intermediate level course, or about a minimum of three semesters of Spanish,” Lawless said. In these other courses, FLAC aims to equip students with vocabulary relevant to the topic as “tutelage in Spanish, relevant to the designated field,” Lawless said. In general, the classes exist as small, optional sections that are offered to students from the larger, main class body.

The program is hoping to to expand, boasting eight courses for the next semester from the current four, where “22 graduate students applied for those eight positions,” Lawless noted. Among that number includes the addition of a class taught in Portuguese: “Brazil: Many Countries, One Nation.” Furthermore, there are considerations for the inclusion of French and Asian Studies, though such ideas have always, “been talked about … the concern is how to get it organized,” Lawless said.

Despite growing interest and ideas for the program, its future for next year is uncertain. “We have no idea if there will be enough money to do FLAC next year,” Lawless said.