Foreign Language
Foreign Language for majors
There is no University foreign language requirement that applies to all students. However, individual majors may require foreign language -- for example, the majors in International Studies, Advertising, Journalism, CCPA, Music Performance (Voice), Anthropology, Latin-American Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Art History. Foreign language is strongly recommended by many departments.
Some foreign language proficiency is also required for most of the SMU Study-Abroad Programs (click for details). Plan your language study early, in your first year, and be sure to discuss preparing for study abroad with your academic adviser so that it will fit well into your four-year plan.
Students with documented language-based learning disability that prevents learning a foreign language can petition for approval to take specific culture courses in lieu of the language course. (This does not apply to the language requirement for admission to SMU).
Testing for placement and credit in Foreign Languages
Click here for information on AP scores needed and credit awarded. The University also grants placement and potential credit through departmental exams in foreign language. The FL placement exams are used to place students into a course at the appropriate level. After placement and after the student completes that course with a C (not C-) or above, the student will also retroactively earn 4-14 credits for the preceding courses in that language sequence. If a student takes exams for more than one language, maximum aggregate credit allowable by exam is 16 credits.
Students who have completed at least two years of a language in high school, including one in the junior or senior year (or who have acquired proficiency in some other way), must take the departmental exam in order to continue study of that language. Departmental foreign language exams are offered in Chinese, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Latin, Russian, and Spanish.
Click here for information on placement exam testing.
A message from Bill Beauchamp, Associate Professor of French:
"Monolingual people, even in the U.S., will soon go the way of the dinosaur. Bilingual and multilingual men and women are the wave of the new century. No one in our planetary society who knows only one language can be called well-educated. Monolingualism, like illiteracy, is a disability--a deprivation of mind and experience.
Our native language--and the culture which it expresses--molds reality for us in ways very particular to one society. Other languages--and the cultures they express--mold reality differently. Until people have experienced the world through a language and a culture that is not their own, they tend to believe that their own culture's version of reality is the only one. Or at least the only good or normal one. They live in a kind of cultural trance.
Achieving proficiency in a second language and culture--living the experience, day-by-day, month-by-month--is one of the most radically liberating experiences of a good education. It is comparable in its impact to learning how to read all over again.
There are many other rewards to foreign language study as well--preparation for careers in international business, or law, or journalism, or education, for example--but the most compelling reward of all is still the excitement of breaking out of one's cultural blinders and seeing the world all over again, as if for the first time."
