Lingua Franca

Communications Majors and Foreign Language Study

By Diana Sadek, SSU student

In today’s media-driven world, it’s extremely important to raise awareness of the advantages of learning foreign languages during college years. First-year students should start to consider taking more foreign language classes through their educational years at college, because being bilingual and speaking more than one language will increase their opportunities in life and open up more options for their career right after graduating. It gives them the priority for being hired since they have the ability to communicate with people from different backgrounds. Being bilingual or trilingual is what opens new career opportunities for graduates, especially those majoring in Communications who opt for the journalism concentration.

Bilingual and trilingual students majoring in Communications stand out in a world of opportunities and are golden when it comes to finding a career, particularly in international business affairs or working for newspapers.  Bilingual graduates have wider career opportunities in different fields but mostly in Journalism. Being a bilingual graduate will raise the students’ self-esteem when communicating with people from different backgrounds and give them the ability to create relationships with people in the same field, but in different countries, which adds a lot to his or her work experience.

According to Andrew Leckey, from Businessjournalism.com: “In today’s coverage, fluency in languages other than English and confidence in reporting with a variety of mediums makes a journalism graduate attractive to global business journalism organizations, expanding their reach country by country.”

Although study of a foreign language is not required for Communications students at SSU, Assistant Professor Peggy Dillon of the Communication Department believes that knowing another language besides English is of great benefit to students. “In this era of global media, it’s always good for students to be able to communicate in a language other than their own,” Dillon said.