Mark Winters (center), an UMSL junior majoring in modern language and international relations, laughs as high school students play Janken Pon, during the World Languages Day celebration last Friday at the Blanche M. Touhill Performing Arts Center. The event drew more than 500 high school students from 13 schools across the St. Louis region. (Photos by Derik Holtmann)
Katie Pezold was impressed with the vibrant atmosphere in the Blanche M. Touhill Performing Arts Center Friday morning. The lobby echoed with strains of French, Spanish and Japanese as hundreds of area high school students participated in World Languages Day activities at the University of Missouri–St. Louis.
“I’m really excited to walk around and see everything that’s on offer here,” she said, surveying the scene. “It seems like there’s a lot of fun things to do.”
Pezold, a French teacher at Troy Buchanan High School, brought about 30 French and Spanish III students, many of whom are earning college credit through UMSL’s Advanced Credit Program, to the annual celebration.
It was the school’s first time attending the event, but it wasn’t the students’ first encounter with the Department of Language and Cultural Studies faculty. They visited TBHS in February when the school threw its own language festival with activities, a college fair and more than 40 student presentations.
“UMSL came to our festival and had a session for Japanese and Spanish, and the kids enjoyed it so much,” Pezold said. “Those professors had such big personalities. I could hear them down the hallway. It was a fun time, and they also came to our college fair in the middle of the day and talked about the programs here. They reached out to us afterward and said, ‘You know, we have a language festival.’ I was like, ‘Well, we should go to that.’”
Payton Baugh and Cailyn Zorilla, TBHS students studying Spanish, were eager to connect with other language students in the region.
“I love Spanish class, and I just figured it would be a good way to expand my knowledge of other cultures,” Baugh said. “It’s really important to expand your horizons and learn how to connect.”
Zorilla, a Filipino American who is already fluent in Tagalog, concurred and said she hopes to learn more languages in the future. She plans to attend UMSL next year to pursue a nursing degree and views being multilingual as an asset to her future career.
Sara Hernandez (left), an international relations major, asks trivia questions to Troy Buchanan high school students Payton Baugh, Elsie Smith, Lorelei Westhoff and Cailyn Zorilla. The students competed for a chance to take a penalty shot.
“I think it’s important to know more than one language, especially going into the medical field,” she said. “This is America, and there’s so many people speaking different languages. So, I think that would be helpful for me and my patients.”
The Department of Language and Cultural Studies held the event for the seventh year and had help from about 60 student and staff volunteers throughout the day. More than 500 high school students from 13 schools across the St. Louis region participated in the festivities.
Sandra Trapani, the chair of the department and a teaching professor of French, said World Languages Day is an opportunity to showcase the UMSL campus and encourage high school students to further their language education.
“A big part of our day is really letting them show off their language skills and intercultural competence,” Trapani said. “It’s also about interacting with students from other schools and our faculty and students. It gives them a chance to see what language learning is like in a college environment while they’re having fun.”
She added that studying a language at the collegiate level can help students stand out in an increasingly competitive global job market.
“It can often be the first thing that sets you apart from somebody else, whether it’s strictly the language skills or that intercultural competence,” Trapani said. “Having some ability to negotiate in another language for meaning, having a little bit more empathy and understanding, those are all skills that are portable for any career that you might pursue.”
The day kicked off with an opening ceremony in the Anheuser-Busch Performance Hall. UMSL students Matthew Waller, Samantha Lattimer and Macyn Kidd introduced themselves in the languages they’re studying – Spanish, French and Japanese – and spoke about their experiences in the modern languages program. They’ve each enjoyed the camaraderie of the tight-knit department.
“We’re all pretty close to each other,” Kidd said. “We have time to not only study the language but study the language together. It’s also really self-fulfilling knowing where I’ve come from. As a supplemental instructor for a class I took four years ago, I can see and feel how far I’ve come. That sense of accomplishment is really fulfilling.”
UMSL students (from left) Samantha Lattimer, Matthew Waller and Macyn Kidd discussed their experiences studying language before the day’s activities got under way.
Afterward, Trapani addressed the crowd and then turned the stage over to KHAOS, UMSL’s student K-pop dance group. Following the performance, Trapani and Tim Abeln, a teaching professor of Spanish, freed the high school students to compete in the “World Languages Cup.” Trapani said this year’s theme aimed to capitalize on the momentum of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which brought together many countries and cultures via a shared interest.
The friendly competition included a scavenger hunt in students’ target languages that took them on a journey across campus, while they also had opportunities to try their hands at games and activities inside and outside of the Touhill lobby. New additions to the lineup included a trivia challenge, with students’ knowledge earning them a chance to take a penalty kick, and pétanque, a traditional French game in which players throw balls as close as possible to a small target. Students received stamps in their passports as they checked off challenges over the course of Friday morning.
Students also practiced their speaking skills at conversation tables on the upper level of the venue. Representatives from the College of Arts and Sciences, College of Education, Hispanic and Latino Student Association, Pierre Laclede Honors College and UMSL Global were on hand, as well, to share information about academic and student programming.
Pezold began preparing her students for the competition last spring with a Family Feud-style game with trivia questions focused on soccer and the World Cup. At the beginning of this school year, her classes got to work right away on entries for the digital skit and poster competitions. That groundwork paid off when the students regrouped for the awards ceremony in the performance hall. TBHS students took first and second places in the French skit category and first place in the poster contest.
“I’m really excited that there’s so many schools here today, and so many foreign language kids in such big numbers,” Pezold said. “I think now that we’ve had some kids come out here today, it’s going to be a lot easier to get them to come next year.”
