By Krista Larson, Associated Press, 7/2/2003 13:48
MIDDLEBURY, Vt. (AP) Alex Bortolot plans to do research in Mozambique but before heading to the former Portuguese colony in southeastern Africa next year he's spending the summer mastering his language skills in central Vermont.
A graduate student in art history at Columbia University, Bortolot is one of the first to participate in Middlebury College's Portuguese School, the first new summer language program offered on campus in more than two decades.
For Bortolot, 25, who had previously spent a summer picking up the language in Lisbon, Portugal, the school's latest offering comes just in time.
''All of us who need to learn languages for field work or something like that come to Middlebury because it's legendary among graduate students as being the best,'' he said.
The Portuguese school has 27 students for its inaugural summer as Middlebury's ninth language, comparable to enrollments when the Arabic school was added in 1982, said Michael Katz, dean of the language schools and schools abroad.
Portuguese has more than 200 million native speakers living on four continents, school officials said. In addition to Portugal, it's also the official language of seven of the country's former colonies including Brazil, South America's largest economy.
And the Modern Language Association has estimated there were nearly 6,500 students enrolled in Portuguese at either undergraduate or graduate schools in the United States during its 1998 survey.
Those factors contributed to Middlebury's choice, said Katz, who noted that school officials also looked into offering Hebrew, Hindi or Korean. Portuguese was first offered during the preceding academic year and will continue this fall, he said.
Portuguese School Director Carmen Chaves Tesser said she was excited to see the language added to Middlebury's summer language program.
''One of the things I think that is great about Middlebury giving its stamp of approval is it shows people this is an important language, there are a lot of people that speak it,'' said Tesser, a professor at the University of Georgia.
While Spanish is a more popular choice among Americans studying foreign languages, graduate student Patricia Soler says there's a growing awareness about the importance of knowing Portuguese.
''With a country of millions of Hispanic immigrants and there's not that many Brazilians respectively, I think people just kind of overlooked it,'' said Soler, 22, who studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University. ''And now recently Brazil is a pretty strong economy, they have a changing political situation, and it's become more of an issue with the United States.''
Like students in the other eight language schools, Soler and her classmates have signed a pledge to speak only Portuguese during their seven weeks on campus.
They are living together in a residence hall where even the instructions on their recycling bins are written in Portuguese, and their television only gets channels from Brazil.
In addition to spending up to five hours a day in the classroom studying grammar and culture, the students also are practicing their Portuguese on the soccer field, in the kitchen and on the dance floor.
While participants agree that the summer program is no substitute for studying abroad, many say that kind of consistent practice makes Middlebury's school unique.
''The pull here is you have to speak Portuguese no matter how much you may or may not know, whereas abroad in general it's very easy to slip into what you do know,'' Soler said.