Starting College, Quitting Foreign Language: The Case of Learners of Chinese Language during Secondary-Postsecondary Transition

Focusing on five initially committed learners of Chinese who decide to quit the language during their college freshman year, this study is a critique of the institutional structure that disengages foreign language education in American postsecondary schools. The findings reveal three structural issues that may contribute to the declining enrollments in foreign language classes in American universities, including (a) the ideological separation of foreign language learning from the STEM curricula, (b) the treatment of foreign language learning as a general education requirement that should be fulfilled quickly, and (c) the frequent unavailability of online foreign language classes. As these students agentively choose to stop learning Chinese as a way to comply with institutional norms and adopt their new academic identities, our findings urge researchers to further investigate the university culture that fails to promote high levels of foreign language proficiency and thus multilingualism—particularly in the STEM fields.