At one point or another, most Middlebury students will walk up the stairs in Proctor Dining Hall and sit down for lunch in the Redfield Dining Room. There, they’ll take off their coats and backpacks, sit down at one of the round tables, and immerse themselves in an experiential part of the college’s robust foreign language learning curriculum. For five days a week, Language Tables are open and bustling amid the midday lunch rush, with eight core languages and the occasional Swahili or ASL table running each week.
For most beginner and intermediate foreign language courses, attendance at Language Tables is a required part of the curriculum, and no matter the language being taught, all students are mandated to attend at least a few times a semester. For students, waitstaff, or Teaching Assistants (TAs) assisting in facilitating and shaping conversation, each Language Table has a distinct personality. This week, The Campus asked around about all things LT. Pull up a chair.
For Ronen Israel ’29, a first-year student studying Arabic, Language Tables have been a great source of additional instruction in a more informal setting.
“There are a lot of advanced speakers who come and they do a good job at trying to teach newer speakers,” Israel said.
As with most language tables, attendance increases towards the end of the semester; according to Israel, attendance is typically pretty low. Throughout the semester, most of the students who come to the Arabic table are already conversant.
In comparison, the French department typically takes up two or three tables and is filled primarily with beginner students. As a result, Sara Buckley ‘28 finds the French table to be more informal, with most conversations about where you are from, your major, and what activities you do on campus.
“As a more advanced French speaker, I don’t get as much out of going to the French table, but I do enjoy helping the beginner students,” Buckley said.
This ethos of friendly conversation and more relaxed learning agendas carries over to other languages in Redfield. At the table for Russian speakers, says Herschel Doby ’28, refining grammar comes hand-in-hand with conversations spanning a variety of topics, related or not. Doby relayed that, for him, the joy of language tables comes from the laughter and storytelling that typically don’t accompany a typical Middlebury language class meeting.
“I would describe the Russian language tables as fun and informal. We occasionally play games or do group activities, but mostly it’s just chatting about random things and working together to improve our speaking and our grammar,” Doby said.
For Dallas Enemark ’28, the German table is a space to practice vocabulary that isn’t necessarily academic.
“I’d describe the culture at the German tables, and same with the culture in classes and the German house, as kind of silly,” Enemark said. “Not that they don’t take learning seriously, but they like to joke. We like to laugh.”
Anna Armstrong ’28, a server at the Japanese Language Table, spoke to The Campus about how much she enjoys working in Redfield twice a week.
“I love the Japanese Language table community! We have a lot of regulars who come in all the time. Everyone is super excited and super eager to be there. The first-years are really cute because they’re all brand new to the language and they’re really nervous at first,” Armstrong said.
Armstrong commented on how the vividness of the Japanese and Chinese Language Tables stems in part from the additional difficulty of the languages, given that part of learning them involves gaining fluency in a new alphabet system.
“For the Japanese language table, I think that with Japanese [and Chinese] since you’re learning a completely different alphabet, if you’re going to take these classes it means you’re really dedicated to fully learning the language. Only the people who are really enthusiastic about it, not just the language but also the culture, are going to stay. “There’s a genuine commitment to learning the language that makes it conducive to such a lively environment,” Armstrong noted.
Kayden Silevicz ’28 also described the liveliness of the Chinese table, citing the wide variety of experience and grade levels invariably present around the table each day.
It's so welcoming at my table. There's people in, you know, the freshman level, like 103, there's 102, and then there're also seniors who have come back from abroad or there's native Chinese speakers who are international students. And so it's a big variety of levels, and yet we're always laughing,” Silevicz said.
For Spanish Teaching Assistant Felipe Pererya-Rozas, language tables offer a space to engage in conversation with students he would otherwise not get to speak with.
“If they come to activities, we’ll talk all in a group. But sometimes in the language table, I get to talk to each [student],” Pererya-Rozas said in an interview with The Campus.
Although Spanish speakers at all levels attend language tables, the majority are in 200-level classes, where attendance is required. According to Pererya-Rozas, attendance tends to increase towards the end of the semester, when there is more pressure to complete required attendance. At the beginning of the semester and during J-Term, when no 200-level Spanish classes are available, attendance is sporadic.
“Maybe one day we have two full tables and the next day just one person,” Pererya-Rozas said.
For language learners at Middlebury, language tables allow students to practice what they’ve learned in the classroom in a more everyday setting.
“I think the language tables are one of the most international spaces at Middlebury,” Annie Boyse ’29, a server for the Italian table, said in an interview with The Campus. “It’s a type of conversation that you don’t always get to have.”
The Italian table, like the Spanish table, primarily consists of beginner and intermediate speakers. Waitstaff are encouraged to sit down and chat with students after taking orders and delivering the food, offering yet another layer of immersion.
“I would say that Language Tables are a pretty big part of my life at Middlebury, I’ve made a lot of really good friends there [...] and you really get to branch out a lot across class years as well like seniors and freshmen.”
