With over 45 people packed into a small seminar room in St. George Tucker Hall, the new Korean language classes look every bit like your average Modern Language course at the College of William and Mary. But there is one key difference between these classes and those taught by the modern language department:

The professor is a student.

This Korean class is one of many courses organized by Hello WM, a student group formed earlier this year that aims to introduce and teach underrepresented languages. All Hello WM classes are taught by College students.

Hello WM founders, Mark Johnson ’09 and Daniela Schiano di Cola ’09, got the idea for creating an instructional heritage language group after completing a project in a linguistics course.

“Obviously, if anyone wanted to learn a language, they could be like, ‘Oh you know this language, teach me,’ but how many times do people actually do it?” Johnson said. “One of the points in making the organization was that it somewhat formalizes it. People actually sit down in classrooms together, and there’s some structure.”

Schiano di Cola said she helped start the group with the goals of teaching students languages as well as trying to better represent those dialects at the College.

“We want to teach languages to students, and while doing that, show the school the kind of demand there are for these languages,” she said. “At the same time, we don’t want it to be completely replaced by the university. Particularly, having an informal [class] gives it a lot more variety to the languages that can be taught.”

Alex Bellah ’11, a 24-year-old international relations major who spent three years after high school training to become a Korean interpreter for the United States Air Force, is one of the instructors of the Korean course.

“The variety of interests and backgrounds was pretty astounding,” Bellah said. “There were a lot of people who had some experience learning Asian languages before and there were others that had no experience. There were some people who were part of the Asian Student Council community, but at the same time, there were others who were from various other organizations.”

Each session, taught by six student instructors, consists of two hour-long segments. The first hour is reserved for beginners while the second hour is reserved for more intermediate to advanced speakers. For each class, instructors try to keep the ratio of students to instructors fairly low.

“Many studies have shown that it is difficult to learn a language if there are too many people in the class. From my personal experience, I found that the ideal number is right about ten,” Bellah said. “If we have fewer than that, you don’t have the opportunity to vary up your speaking partners and learn different aspects of the language, and too many more than that and you spend a lot of time not really using the language in class.”

Even with a successful first class, Bellah acknowledged that there are bound to be obstacles that Hello WM will need to surmount in order to become successful.

The Korean program has to battle with other weekday commitments of College students and must find sufficient funding for the program from the school.

“We try to offer one class per week, but in large part, we’re guides for people who want to continue studies,” he said. “The biggest obstacle will be funding. The one big thing is that it’s going to step on the toes of both the Chinese and Japanese department, which are largely funded by grants geared toward East Asian studies. It would be very difficult to make the case for not sharing funding with that program.”

Kang Yang ’11, a Taiwanese international student who speaks Japanese and Mandarin Chinese, was among those who came to learn Korean. Yang said that since the class had just begun, it could definitely be more structured.

“What they can do is less repeating [concepts], teach more, and have people take notes,” he said. “After that, people will go home and study themselves, and they can improve faster and learn more stuff in one day.”

Johnson said that part of the goal of the language program was not only to educate College students in new languages but also to help instructors develop their teaching skills.

“One of the issues I’m interested in is teaching structure [to our instructors],” he said. “Our organization will eventually be a springboard for people who are interested in language teaching.”

In addition to Korean, Hello WM also teaches Farsi, Portuguese and American Sign Language. Johnson and Schiano di Cola also plan to bring Cantonese, Tagalog, Hebrew and African Creole to the College through the program by the end of the semester.

“The ultimate goal would be to help create a multilingual America,” Johnson said. “We’re working towards helping to legitimize multilingualism because there’s still a lot of resistance to it, surprisingly.”