LCTL Programs at Community Colleges Brief

By Jillian Seitz (AELRC) & Jamie Morgan (Center for Applied Linguistics)

Which less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) are taught at U.S. community colleges?

This brief presents the results of a web search about LCTL courses offered at two-year public institutions of higher education in the United States.

This research brief can also be viewed and downloaded as a PDF here.

What is a Less Commonly Taught Language?

• Less commonly taught language (LCTL): The National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages (n.d.) defines LCTLs as all languages other than English, Spanish, French, and German. For this study, we focused on modern languages (excluding classical languages), and following Lusin et al. (2023), we included American Sign Language (ASL) and Indigenous languages as LCTLs.    

What is a Community College?

• Community college: This study defines a community college as any two-year publicly-funded institution that primarily confers associate degrees. Many of the community colleges included in this review may refer to themselves as “technical college” or “junior college” in addition to “community college.”

Findings

• Of the 1,018 community colleges identified, 604 (60%) currently offer at least one credit-bearing course in a LCTL, and a total of 95 LCTLs are being offered at community colleges across the country.
  • The state with the most community colleges is California (n=116), and other states with a large number of community colleges (>40) include Texas, North Carolina, and Illinois. 
• Of the LCTLs offered at U.S. community colleges, only five languages were offered at over 100 institutions: ASL (n=467), Japanese (n=209), Chinese (n=204), Italian (n=169), and Arabic (n=137).
  • An additional nine languages were offered at between 10 and 100 community colleges, including Russian (n=92), Portuguese (n=45), Korean (n=32), Hebrew (n=15), Vietnamese (n=13), Ojibwe (n=12), Navajo (n=11), Polish (n=11), and Tagalog (n=11).
  • The other 82 languages cataloged in this search are offered at fewer than 10 community colleges, and 52 are only offered at one community college nationwide.

What does it mean?

• The number of community colleges in each U.S. state varies widely, and the proportion of U.S. community colleges with LCTL courses also varies. However, in most states, more than half offer at least one for-credit LCTL course.
• Although a large number of LCTLs are taught at the community college level, 52 of the 95 LCTLs identified are only offered at one U.S. community college, and another 30 are only offered at 10 or fewer of these institutions.
• Community colleges have the potential to be well-connected to their local communities and provide locally relevant language education, including courses in endangered languages and Indigenous languages.

Next steps

• The full dataset collected for this analysis will become publicly available on the AELRC website for educators, policymakers, and language learners to access.