By SHANNON O. WELLS
This summer, dozens of students will immerse themselves in the language and culture of no fewer than 10 countries, many of them choosing to study abroad.
All will receive intensive daily language training in both spoken and written modes in an ambitious quest to rapidly acquire language proficiency while deepening their understanding of foreign cultures.
As impressive as it all sounds, Pitt’s venerable Summer Language Institute (SLI), now a 30-year tradition, was inspired by a rather pedestrian motivation.
“My original aim was to give faculty and graduate students an opportunity to supplement income with summer work, instead of seeing them seek summer employment elsewhere,” said Oscar Swan, founder of the SLI program. “But we outgrew that model very quickly, as we soon needed more instructors in more languages than we ourselves could supply.”
It started when Swan, hired at Pitt in 1974 as a specialist in Polish language and literature, spotted an opportunity on the Pitt-Johnstown campus once he became chairman of the department.
“I attended a summer chairman's retreat held at the Johnstown campus, and I recognized Johnstown's potential as a rural campus — that was largely empty in the summer — for a summer language retreat, along the lines of similar summer institutes I had observed at Middlebury and Bryn Mawr,” he said of the colleges in, respectively, Vermont and Pennsylvania.
Focused initially only on Russian, the program remained at Johnstown for two years, followed by another two on the Chatham College campus in Pittsburgh before ultimately moving to Oakland in 1990. The program is now headquartered in room 1228 of the Cathedral of Learning.
A two-year seed grant from the American Council of Learned Societies helped the SLI expand offerings to include most major languages of the Slavic and East European area.
With a focus on learning and immersion in less commonly taught languages, the program has since grown to include Arabic, Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian, Bulgarian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Turkish and Ukrainian.
Students can expect to cover approximately one academic year’s worth of course work during a single summer. Small class sizes accommodate constant interaction.
Experienced instructors work with what’s described as a “richly varied curriculum of lectures, films, music, cooking, picnics, and excursions,” allowing students to explore the cultures they’re studying while socializing in their target languages.
Swan conceded that the program, at least at first, wasn't particularly unique, but through the years has become much more so because of the sheer variety of languages offered from increasingly expanded geographical areas.
“Our boutique study-abroad programs, which are able to accommodate numbers both large and small, depending on yearly demand, also contribute to our attractiveness and uniqueness,” he said.
While the study-abroad aspect is a valuable and attractive asset, Kathleen Manukyan, the Summer Language Institute’s managing director, said the “heart and soul of the program” is the in-person Pittsburgh campus experience.
“Most of our languages we teach in six weeks, and we cover one year's worth of curriculum in that condensed format,” she said, adding that though it's condensed according to the monthly calendar, as far as the instructional time, it’s not. “Because we actually have twice as many instructional hours as a typical two-semester sequence of language courses,” she said, based on students studying daily from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Curricula for some of the institute's language offerings, including Russian, Arabic and Turkish are based on eight-week courses. “Those are the so-called critical languages which have national security significance, and some of the funding that we receive, and the kinds of scholarships that send students to our programs sometimes have higher standards for the amount of instruction as well as the final proficiency level,” Manukyan said.
Manukyan, a teaching associate professor in Pitt’s Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures, has been with the SLI since 2011, serving in the executive director role since spring 2018. She recalls starting at Pitt as an SLI instructor of Russian soon after getting her doctoral degree in Slavic languages and literatures.
“And then I was with SLI every summer, just with different sorts of instructor jobs,” she said. “And in 2014, I was asked to be the academic coordinator of the Russian program.”
High-performing institute
The Summer Language Institute is structured with two people coordinating the academic curriculum, one for Russian and one for everything else. “Not because we favor Russian, but because half of our enrollment is Russian students,” Manukyan said. “It takes a lot of logistics to oversee proficiency testing, just running interference if there's any class-management issues, if students are falling behind, if instructors need advice on something.”
Manukyan, who graduated from Northwestern University and earned her master’s and doctoral degrees at Ohio State University, moved to Pittsburgh when her husband found a job in the city.
“I had my eye out for a job in Pittsburgh, and it just sort of magically worked out that I ended up here without ever having to do a very rigorous period on the academic job market,” she admitted. “SLI helped me put my foot in the door at the University.”
Calling the program “really one of the most prestigious and high-performing institutes of its kind,” she noted the closest corollaries to Pitt’s program are the Middlebury Institute, “where they have a summer immersion program,” and Indiana University's Language Workshop. “They also have numerous programs in different formats there.”
All foreign language programs she’s aware of share qualities including an emphasis on proficiency and on building community with the language. “Also the fact that we all teach so-called less commonly taught languages, so none of us are just like institutes that teach Spanish, German, French, or the same things you might meet in the high school curriculum.
“We all do languages that typically you can only find in like a college context,” she added, noting that many college and university programs based on less-common language programs are being eliminated.
This includes nearby West Virginia University, which decided in September 2023 to eliminate most of its world language instruction offerings as part of significant university-wide cost-cutting measures. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported on the final days of Russian-language instruction at WVU on April 26.
Summer boot camp
Among the factors that Manukyan finds unique about Pitt’s SLI is its conscious goal to maintain focus on one geographical region.
“We started out in 1988 as a Russian school, and then we branched out through the Slavic department to different Slavic languages (see related story),” she said. “We started a Polish program and the Slovak program. We added Bosnian, Croatian and Montenegran — all these languages that we still teach today.”
The program expanded beyond what she called the “Slavic language family” to include other East European languages such as Hungarian. “At one point we had the Baltic languages, Latvia and Lithuania (and) Estonian, but not right now.”
The program also embraced Near East languages like Arabic and Turkish, “but generally speaking, we aren't going to add Chinese and we're not going to add, you know, Irish or something like this,” Manukyan said.
Maintaining what she calls a “smaller scale” helps build a community during the summer program and create “like this family atmosphere.”
“When I'm talking to students about the program I would always describe Pitt’s SLI as being a combination between boot camp and summer camp, because it's one of the most rigorous academic programs that they'll ever do,” she said, “but we also very consciously cultivate a supportive atmosphere.”
Interactive culturalization
Rather than requiring students to take a pledge to only speak the language they’re studying all summer, as some other language institutes do, the SLI doesn’t “do anything like that.”
“We, on the contrary, encourage lots of interaction between the different language groups, because we feel that the students can learn a lot from being exposed to neighboring languages from the one they're studying and ultimately for the students that stick with it and get degrees in it,” she said, adding that many students end up studying a second or third language of the region. “Or even if they don't study it, they might have a job where they're dealing with multiple countries from that region.
“And it helps with their overall cultural competency if they know something more than just the one language or the one country that they concentrated on when they were studying,” she added. “So I think that makes us a little bit unique compared to some of the other programs.”
Admirable leadership
SLI founder Oscar Swan offered high praise for Manukyan and the way the program has blossomed under her tutelage.
“Kathleen brings everything to the table, and much more than I could ever offer,” he said, lauding her as an “ideal interfacer” with students, the University administration, SLI instructors, funding organizations, other language institutes and study-abroad contacts in different countries. “It is almost as though she has an advanced degree in Summer Language Institute management. It helps a lot that she is herself a popular and innovative language instructor.”
Although his admittedly laissez-faire leadership approach contrasts with Manukyan’s style, Swan said he admires her leadership and the results simply speak for themselves.
“I was always a more hands-off kind of manager, and she is the opposite,” Swan said. “And she gets along diplomatically with all variety of people, which I would not say is a strong point of mine. She puts out such a successful SLI publicity campaign that I can only stand back and watch it with admiration.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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