Students must demonstrate reading and comprehension skills in at least one language other than English. The students’ language proficiency must be at a level sufficient to allow them to read, comprehend, and translate relevant primary and secondary sources in African American Studies. Such sources could include whole documents such as the following: literary texts, journal articles, and other documents located during the course of doctoral research. Languages relevant to graduate research in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies could include but are not limited to Sub-Saharan African Languages (e.g., isiZulu, Ibo, Yoruba, Kiswahili, Xhosa), non-African languages (e.g. French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German, Chinese, Arabic), as well as Afro-Creole languages that are written (e.g., Haitian Kreyol). Students can fulfill the language requirement in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies in the following ways:
- Course work: One year of undergraduate language instruction beyond first-year introductory courses in at least one relevant language:
- Course work must have been completed no more than five (5) years before Fall admission to the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies.
- Students must receive a grade of B or better in each course.
- Courses must be on undergraduate transcripts or on graduate transcripts if courses were taken during prior graduate study.
- If a student’s language study was not completed at UMass (Gen Ed courses and conversation courses at UMass do not apply here) and the level of instruction is uncertain from the transcript, the student must demonstrate (via syllabi, graded assignments, or other documentation) to the Graduate Program Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies that the level of instruction would prepare the student to read, comprehend, and translate relevant primary and secondary sources in African-American Studies.
- Undergraduate or graduate degree in a language relevant to African-American Studies.
- Native speaker of a language relevant to African-American Studies.
- Pass language assessment test administered by an examiner approved by the Graduate Program Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies:
- Typical examiners could include faculty in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, faculty in the Languages, Literature, and Cultures Department at UMass or others with the appropriate language skills as approved by the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies’ Graduate Program Director.
- The language assessment test must be written and must occur during one testing session. The language assessment test must require students to translate from the relevant foreign language a whole document (the length of the chosen document must not exceed five (5) pages), of suitable difficulty, into English. The student must demonstrate their ability to read, comprehend, and translate primary and secondary sources in African-American Studies from a relevant foreign language into English. Oral examinations do not fulfill the language requirement. The examiner must provide the date of the examination, the title and author of the translated document (in the original language and in English), the length of the translated document, and a brief description of the document.