Soledad Chango shares her experience as an instructor teaching Quechua, which was brought back to Cornell as a language course after a 15-year hiatus. Quechua was initially offered from the 1950s to 2006. There were no faculty at the university who spoke or would be able to teach Quechua until Soledad Chango, a graduate student and native Kichwa speaker (a branch of Quechua), from Ecuador, joined the language faculty in August of 2021^[1]. In the 2021-2022 academic year, one section of Elementary Quechua I and one section of Elementary Quechua II were offered in the fall and spring, consecutively^[2][3]. It is interesting to note that American Sign Language, the Cayuga (Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ’) language, and Quechua began to be offered because of students expressing their cultural and inclusivity-related needs for them.

Question 2: What motivated you to teach Quechua at Cornell?

Teaching in general is something that I think is part of my personality. I always liked to share things, and I think since the beginning of my academic studies I always shared things to my friends. I have always been working on that society, just sharing content in general, so I really like that thing. And when it comes to teaching in a professional life, in general, I think I wanted to become a teacher because I had a very good English teacher in my elementary school. So, the first time I got my English class, I was ten years old, so I really liked that class and liked English itself. I was like, “Oh this is so nice,” and I love how the professor speaks, and the way he was teaching me was very cool, so this was the first option for my professional life. And then when I graduated from high school, I knew that something I really liked was teaching, and it kept being English at the first time. I studied languages in the university, and I became a teacher in my career at some point. I’ve been teaching traditional dancing, to embroider, to play the violin, so I have different sites of teaching, but here at Cornell is the first time teaching my native language. So, it’s been challenging but it’s been really cool. 

Soledad Chango presents at Onondaga Community College
Credit: Kathi Coleen Peck

Question 4: What are some of the challenges about teaching Quechua?

Actually, Quechua, and the varieties of Quechua, has been considered an endangered language. This is a language of minority in which it is hard to find resources on the internet, physical materials or easy access to where you can study it. A huge challenge that was very hard for me to work on was materials that I can provide to my students in the class. You can’t find a song that is in basic Quechua that is in 100% of Quechua words, you cannot find textbook in which you are going to find very good work for English native speakers. So, I had to work on that very hard, and as you know it’s just me here teaching my native language. I don’t have another Quechua native speaker who can help me with that. That sense of creating the material for my students was very challenging. What I did to solve that issue was make my family help me with conversations. I wrote about my mom, my sister, my brother, and I brought some tools, like native traditional clothing and ornaments we have so we can make class more authentic for students to understand. I try to be authentic and create my materials at the speed my students were getting the language itself. 

Question 6: How do you foresee the future of Quechua instruction at Cornell and other educational institutions? What steps could be taken to promote foreign language education in general?

I consider that Quechua class has to be permanent for Cornell because Cornell has a lot of Hispanic students. As I said in the very beginning, my students are not just heritage students. There are also students who care about the language, not just because of their heritage, but in the sense of being inclusive and covering the diversity that Cornell has, I think this course must be permanent. It’s not just the sense of being permanent as a course, but making the language survive because this language is an endangered language. This is support for the language, for the people, for the culture, and you know that the language is not just isolated, it contains a lot of tools outside of it. So, this is just saving the interest of an entire culture and entire identity itself, so I really encourage Cornell to make this course permanent.

I’m really sad to say this but the future of my native language is dark in the sense of even UNESCO has considered it an endangered language. I have recently been looking at the numbers of speakers of the linguistic branch of the different varieties of Quechua, so just two languages—Quechua from Bolivia and Cuzco, Peru—have one million speakers. The other varieties, including my own Kichwa variety, has just 8000 speakers and the number goes down. So, it’s really hard to say that a lot of varieties of Quechua are going to die in close future. But I know that it’s just a matter of being conscious of who you are and where you come from. We have been working on that in my culture, too, to say our language represents us, our roots, our cultural identity, and who you are as a person itself. It’s something that I know a lot of people in my country are working on it, too. So even though the future seems to be kind of dark for this language, I know people are trying to make this strong. 

What Cornell is doing right now with language is something I have to give big applauses. It’s been 15 years of absence of this language and fortunately a student asked to bring Quechua back. It’s not just the institution, but also the students, because in this case it was students who brought it. And fortunately Cornell supported them, and it must be done. It’s hard to say they must do it, but they at least have to try. If they have a lot of students enrolled in this course, they have to support them, to have a lot of students, advertise them, and have a big community in each university, and we can work on different materials as professors for students so we can have a lot of resources, and with resources motivate our students to keep on learning the language. This can be a chain for all the universities and professors, and just making a big community for Quechua being taught in a foreign space.  

Ideas for the Future

Especially for endangered languages, Cornell should work on creating a database that contains enough resources to preserve the language and culture, and it should be sufficient enough for someone to use to learn the language without an instructor. One way this can be done is to recruit a team of students, professors, and native speakers from around the world to contribute to the database and perform outreach internationally to collect documentation. Documents can include a dictionary that is created by native speakers, cultural artifacts, writing/poems/songs, and more. These documents should be preserved in both a physical and digital format so it can be accessible across the world.

Just like Professor Chango was invited to Cornell to teach Quechua, Cornell can invite native speakers of other languages to teach students and practice their own English. This can mimic a dual immersion program, where students and teachers will be both learning and practicing each other’s languages. This can also help international students or students who are not as proficient in English to master two languages at once.

Since social media is so prominent in today’s time, it can also be used to teach and promote foreign languages. Students and professors from the language department can pair up with those from other disciplines such as computer science, business, marketing, and others to create websites and apps to promote foreign language instruction and distribute resources for people to learn a new language altogether. Cornell has the advantage of being a large, reputed university with many resources at its disposal to effectively promote this cause on both a national and global scale.