About the study
The Language Institute, with partners at UW–Madison and at other institutions, is researching the reasons that U.S. undergraduate students are and aren’t enrolling in language courses at the university level. The research is based on a survey instrument, developed with the University of Wisconsin Survey Center (UWSC) and initially administered by the UWSC as a census survey of the full UW–Madison undergraduate population.
The survey asks students to indicate the importance to them of proficiency in languages other than English in terms of their personal interests, current or intended major(s), and career plans. Then, it asks students about their formal language learning experiences at the university, their reasons for enrolling–or not enrolling–in language courses as undergraduates, and considerations that would make them more likely to study a language at the university in the future.
The survey was initially administered at UW–Madison in Fall 2019; quantitative findings were published in a 2022 article in the journal Second Language Research and Practice and a book chapter in the 2023 volume, Language Program Vitality in the United States: From Surviving to Thriving in Higher Education.
A partial replication study using the same instrument (modified slightly to customize the instrument to another institutional context), research questions, and general data collection procedures, was conducted in Spring 2020 at Michigan State University. Findings from the MSU study are published in this 2024 Foreign Language Annals article, awarded the 2025 Stephen A. Freeman Award for Best Published Article by the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.
A second partial replication study based on the same instrument was conducted in Fall 2024 at Cornell University and Yale University. The analysis of those data is currently in process.
To investigate possible changes in student perspectives between 2019 and the present, the UW–Madison Language Institute, with the UWSC, is planning to replicate the survey with UW–Madison students in Fall 2025.
Contact: Dianna Murphy, UW–Madison principal investigator
Publications and contacts
UW–Madison study
Murphy, D., & Martin, J. (2023). Amplifying student voices: U.S. undergraduate student perspectives on expanding access and increasing the relevance of courses in languages other than English. In E. H. Uebel, F. Kronenberg, & S. Sterling, (Eds.), Language program vitality in the United States: From surviving to thriving in higher education (pp. 59-75). Springer.
Murphy, D., Sarac, M. & Sedivy, S. (2022). Why U.S. undergraduate students are (not) studying languages other than English. Second Language Research and Practice, 3(1), 1-33.
Contact: Dianna Murphy
Michigan State University study
Van Gorp, K., Uebel, E., Kronenberg, F., & Murphy, D. (2024). How important is studying languages for undergraduate students, and why (not) study languages? Foreign Language Annals 57(4), 900-920.
Contacts: Koen Van Gorp, Emily Heidrich Uebel, or Felix Kronenberg
Cornell University and Yale University study
Contact: Angelika Kramer