SLUH hosted the first Modern Language Summit last Saturday, which worked to connect SLUH students with other students from various Jesuit institutions all around the world. The summit was connected to a past event called the Jesuit Global Activism Leadership Summit, but this event put additional emphasis on the issue of language both as a barrier and a connection between students.

“We wanted to find a way to make a more collaborative environment where we make the same effort that all our partner schools have made to speak in their language,” said Robert Chura, Russian teacher and coordinator for the Modern Language Summit. 

Predominantly focused on general conversation between students all over the world, the Modern Language Summit is underway and has completed one of the three sections it includes. 

Taking place over Zoom, students from SLUH are able to converse with people from the native speaking region of the language they are taking to use their language study in a real world situation. 

This year, partner schools of SLUH from Taiwan, Russia, Spain, and the United States were able to meet. 

“As teachers, we all know that communicative competence is key for global competence,” stated Spanish teacher and Modern Language Summit coordinator Maria-Paz Campos. “One of the main goals of the summit was to create a certain amount of competence for the school community. As a collective school system that works together, SLUH and its partners are building competence between the students to in turn create a competent world that can deal with 21st century problems despite the language barrier.”

As opposed to students from foreign countries participating in bilingual education from extremely young ages, SLUH students are held to the same expectation of knowledge and conversation with almost four years of intense language education—highlighting the academic excellence of SLUH students and their teachers. 

“Wow! You guys have really good teachers and a really good program, as well as very smart and motivated students,” said Campos, quoting a student from another country on their feelings on SLUH education and excellence. “They were amazed by the fact that our students were able to communicate effectively in Russian, Chinese, and Spanish,” said Campos. 

“It’s important to us and it’s a skill that is becoming more and more essential as the world becomes more globally inclined,” stated Chura. “

conveying the message that although foreign language is a class at SLUH, we can use the lessons we learn in the class to become more valuable people and even Catholics in our lives and touch the lives of others with this newfound skill we improve every day.

Additionally, the Summit allowed for some friendly dialogue between students from opposite sides of the globe. The event helped to show its participants how interconnected and similar our worlds are even given the extreme difference in surroundings.

“Yeah, so I really enjoyed the second part where we are supposed to be discussing an article in English, but a lot of the time we were just kind of hanging out,” said senior Jack Feise. “So it was really nice to just hang out with those people and the group was super cool so we just talked about random stuff. Like, for example, one of the kids was named Otani, so we were just talking about baseball with him.”

The SLUH students were enthusiastic about the experience.

“My main takeaway from the summit was how unifying it is,” said senior Luke Pierson, who takes Arabic. “Talking to fellow teens from around the world about things that we have all experienced is extremely unifying.”

“I think overall, there's obviously the language component, which was the first part but the real fun part for me was just meeting people from other cultures because they had a lot of the same experiences,” said Feise, who takes Russian. “As cliche as it sounds it was really easy to connect with all of them because they spoke really, really great English. It was easy to talk about stuff Americans like because a lot of the stuff that we like kind of translated to their cultures.”