Student honored with rare scholarship

A University of Tennessee student recently received a major foreign language scholarship.

Kimberly Bartholomew, a sophomore in French and psychology, has been granted one of the four prestigious 2007 Joseph Yedlicka Scholarships by Pi Delta Phi, the National French Honor Society.

The scholarship enables the society’s student members to study French in a French-speaking country by paying the school’s full tuition. This summer, Bartholomew will spend six weeks in Avignon, France, studying the language, literature and civilization at the Institute for American Universities.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and studying abroad has been something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, so I am so excited to have the chance to do it,” she said.

Bartholomew has been studying French since she was in the seventh grade. She saw the enthusiasm and accomplishments of her high school teacher and realized the importance of studying a foreign language. Thus, she decided to major in French in college and advanced so fast that she started taking upper-level French courses during her freshman year.

Even though she currently maintains an impressive grade point average, Bartholomew said she was amazed when she heard that she would receive the award.

“The only word to describe how I felt initially to be awarded this scholarship is ‘shocked.’ It isn’t offered to many students, and it is available to all Pi Delta Phi members across the country, so it was a very unexpected honor to receive it. But after I got over my initial shock, I was ecstatic,” Bartholomew said.

Her speaking skills have already landed her a spot in Pi Delta Phi and another French organization, Alpha Gamma.

Pi Delta Phi was based out of the University of California-Berkeley in the early 1900s, and every year, it grants the scholarship to four students from different schools around the country.

Learning a second language in the United States has recently come under attack. Some states do not consider teaching a second language a necessity. Thirty states do not require students to take a foreign language class to graduate high school. Georgia is currently debating the requirement.

“Those years of foreign language in high school do a lot of good,” Doris Kadish, a University of Georgia professor of French, said in a press release. “Students come to college so much better prepared to study and to express themselves. You learn a lot about your own language by studying other languages.”

Bartholomew agrees that learning a second language, even if it’s not to the level of fluency, is important.

“I think learning another language and studying abroad are great ways to learn about a culture that is very different from my own. It makes me see things from a different perspective, and I think it’s important to be able to experience firsthand that not everyone has the same way of life as I do. I also think learning a second language is a lot of fun, and it’s great sometimes to know that I can say things that most other people wouldn’t understand at all.”

Bartholomew, who wants to teach French at the high school level, plans to enter the master’s program for education at UT after earning her bachelor’s degree.

She was nominated for the Joseph Yedlicka award by Modern Foreign Languages professor Christine Holmlund, who is also the moderator of the UT chapter of Alpha Gamma.

“Kim immediately stood out as one of the very best of 15 quite strong students I taught in a conversation and composition class (French 334). Her writing and command of grammar were impressive,” Holmlund said in an e-mail interview. “(Receiving) a 95 on the midterm and a 97 on the final — the highest grades in the class — says a good deal. I am not an easy grader.”