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THIS Bulletin issue is the last of the millennium and the last of ADFL's thirtieth year. In the fall editor's column I attempted to bring out the obstacles and accomplishments in the field of foreign language teaching in higher education, from the beginning of our association to the present. In the Winter Bulletin I outlined current concerns of chairs: enrollment patterns that affect staffing, curriculum, and departmental standing on campus; the pragmatic versus liberal arts views of language teaching; and the image of foreign language education on the college campus and in the public eye. So I think it appropriate now to get beyond "the ADFL so far" by taking up an even broader view of foreign language education, a view that incorporates student progress up the educational ladder from kindergarten though college.
Leading public figures, such as Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley, have begun to put pressure on higher education to pay attention to the school reform movement and to take greater responsibility for elementary and secondary education. The school reform movement has gone through several stages over the last ten years, focusing on quantitative changes (more tests, more time in school), qualitative improvements (subject-matter standards), and different school organization (decentralization). Strengthening teacher education is now seen as a crucial factor in school reform and will be increasingly urgent as states prepare themselves for the rising number of school-age children. As a recent survey from the Joint National Committee on Languages (JNCL) shows, there are already shortages of foreign language teachers that are being filled by distance learning, recruiting abroad, emergency certification, and the hiring of native speakers and uncertified teachers. The preparation of undergraduates for teaching may become the new goad with which the public prods and criticizes higher education.
Because of the ADFL's own sense of urgency about the state of foreign language education, this office began to focus on the continuum of student progress from elementary school through college. Enrollment issues have made this linkage of particular concern to higher education. According to the JNCL survey, enrollments in elementary and secondary schools are up. Since we know that small classes and departments that teach few students are attractive prey for downsizers, it is incumbent on colleagues in colleges and universities to keep the foreign language momentum going and not to lose those students whose high school studies might encourage them to keep taking languages.
The most visible sign of the MLA's commitment to encourage language learning is the new brochure Why Learn Another Language?, issued under the auspices of the MLA's Advisory Committee on Foreign Languages and Literatures. It is being widely distributed among college and high school teachers and advisers and among foreign language supervisors of districts and states. We hope that recipients of the brochure will give it to others; use it to persuade the recalcitrant learner or parent about the importance of language learning; or use it to bolster arguments in support of language learning to colleagues, student advisers, or administrators. The brochure is available on our Web site <www.adfl.org> and may be ordered at no cost by e-mail at <flbrochure@mla.org>.
Less visible but no less important is the MLA's High School to College in Foreign Language Programs, administered by the Office of Foreign Language Programs. Eight teams of high school and college teachers and administrators are working with mentors to build connections between high schools and college-level foreign language programs. The teams met last year in Albuquerque in February with representatives of the Coalition of Foreign Language Associations and other experts in the field to begin their work with a broad overview of the issues, directions, and difficulties that are characteristic of articulation projects. The collaboratives, who pursued their own plans locally throughout the year, met again with their mentors at a very different, much smaller conference at the end of January 1999 in San Diego. The focus this time was on the teams themselves: they reported on their progress; discussed their experiences with the team members from other schools and colleges; and began the planning of a publication that would represent their discoveries, reaffirm the advice of others, and offer guidance, both theoretical and practical, to future foreign language articulators.
So why all the fuss about articulation? The advantages of a coherent curriculum are self-evident. Students move from one level to the next with minimum stress. For those who drop out temporarily, the points of reentry are well defined. High school and college teachers agree and understand what tests and grades mean. All the right hands know what all the left hands are doing, and every stakeholder benefits. Students are encouraged by the well planned curriculum and by their accomplishments marked at various stages to go on to higher levels of language mastery. College teachers understand better what high school teachers have accomplished and what high school students have achieved. In the university there will eventually be a larger pool of advanced learners for majors, minors, and those notoriously small upper-level courses. Once enrollment problems are solved, a more secure department may turn its attention to the task of educating students.
So what's the problem? A gap exists between the cultures of secondary and postsecondary education, and it is alive with stereotypes of what one side thinks about the other or what one side thinks the other thinks about it. Often the gap exists because the two sides don't know each other. In one instance, teachers from a high school that sent many of its students to a nearby university had no information how those students were placed or how they did after high school; so the teachers decided to find out. Realizing they didn't know anyone in the university's language departments, they invited themselves over for a visit. Once the ice was broken, both high school and university teachers shared the pleasure of discovering new colleagues with many of the same professional interests and frustrations; almost immediately they began a series of meetings about placement, testing, and methodology.
Often it is not so easy. For example, college and university faculty members usually have greater resources and time at their disposal than their counterparts in high schools do; thus much of the responsibility for supporting and maintaining an articulation project goes to them. Care must be taken to ensure a balance among all participants. Several of the longest-running and most comprehensive articulation efforts reported at our two conferences that they had had to change course in midstream because the higher-education faculty members hadn't listened to the very people they set out to hear, namely, the high school teachers and administrators. Forming a working relationship means that each side acknowledges and validates the accomplishments and differences of the other; above all, it means that both sides deal with the language education enterprise as equal partners.
Many high school advocates argue that college expectations should not drive the high school curriculum; by the same token, high school emphases should not be the sole directive of the college program. The excitement and creativity of the new foreign language curriculum exemplified by The Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Preparing for the Twenty-First Century are expanded in the college curriculum and lead students toward reading, analyzing, conversing, and writing on a variety of cultural and literary topics. After trust is established between the two cultures, goals must be agreed on, testing measures must be investigated, and institutions and constituencies must be convinced of the importance and urgency of the joint enterprise. Both parties need to be flexible; to try new arrangements, ideas, and methods; to look beyond their self-interests; and, above all, to invite change, though change is often unsettling.
From the eight collaboratives, certain activities and benefits are emerging that form a common core. Many participants said that simply getting to know one another was a revelation. Others, who had already experienced this first step, went on to develop tests and standards; sponsor language fairs; and conduct workshops on methodology, proficiency, and standards. These workshops were attended and taught by both college and high school professionals. Another area of need is information about the student body. Some groups conducted surveys: one found out where and for how many years students had been taking a language; another asked university students who were from the participating high school about their attitudes toward their foreign language studies. Some collaborating universities considered diversifying course content to match the subject matter of interest to students and thus induce them to study language at higher levels. All the teams mentioned the need for additional funding. Some groups were successful at securing support through Eisenhower grants, their state department of education, or their institutions.
Since articulation is most typically local, taking advantage of the proximity of the university and high school involved, each institutional context is different and plays a significant role in how the undertaking develops. Some states have already adopted standards and have requirements for student proficiency as an entrance requirement to publicly funded higher education; thus a structure is already in place to support articulation. In some high schools, all the students study a language or maybe two; some have requirements; in others, a foreign language is still optional. In urban areas there tends to be a large bureaucracy that can stall efforts for improvement, even just a change in textbooks. One teacher in a city high school cited lack of technology in the classroom, overcrowding, shortages of materials and equipment (i.e., copiers, paper, and books), and the poor attendance of students as part of everyday circumstances. In a more rural area, it was reported that the local populace regarded language learning as inconsequential, and the team's work was stymied by lack of oversight by language supervisors and by lack of interest among university faculty members.
On the final day of the conference, participants turned toward the future. What, they asked, will happen to these projects when the people working on them are no longer there? They urged one another to write guidelines, including the rationale and goals for articulation; to keep notes on what they had done and why; and to make accessible whatever information would be useful to their successors. They identified the need to have academic and administrative structures in place, so that someone would be in charge to ensure the continuation of these projects. It was generally conceded that articulation takes time; that it is ongoing; that it requires patience, persistence, optimism, and goodwill on the part of everyone.
Articles in this issue of the Bulletin continue the discussion of the themes touched on in the above outline of our articulation project, namely, coherence and linkages. Kyoko Saegusa, a member of the collaborative team from Colorado, gives an example of the difficulties and accomplishments for her group in Japanese. She points out that the study of Japanese is a new field that took early advantage of the electronic media, produced frameworks for introductory levels, and was the first less-commonly-taught language to develop proficiency guidelines. These accomplishments are offset by the instability of programs that are usually very small and staffed by a single teacher or part-time teachers; by the lack of training of the teachers; and by the isolation of the teachers from one another. An important function of the MLA project has been to bring together for the first time all those teaching at secondary and postsecondary levels in Colorado to work on common goals, curriculum, and training for teachers. Phyllis Larson, from a small liberal arts college in Minnesota, describes a different sort of program for Japanese that is making connections, this time with the general studies of the college. Four cultural studies courses, Asian Conversations, are intended to demonstrate to students the symbiosis between language and culture and to provide a context for the students' study in Japan. While study abroad gives students immediacy and exposure, it does not automatically lead to fluency. With this caveat in mind, the program gives students a carefully designed orientation to help them take charge of their language learning--which they particularly need to do in a language as difficult as Japanese--so that they can prepare for various situations, profit from their mistakes, and reflect on and learn from their experiences.
Four of the authors writing for this issue emphasize the importance of connecting language learning with other disciplines, with all levels of teaching within the departments, and with the lives of the students in order that they have the opportunity to experience language as a usable tool for self-expression, discovery, and access to knowledge. Janet Swaffar calls on the profession to identify the field of study that she describes as a "discipline with four subfields (language, literature, linguistics, and culture) that asks the question, How do individuals and groups use words and other sign systems in context, to intend, negotiate and create meanings." She urges that language be taught not just as language but also as a structure reflecting the verbal and nonverbal expression of the culture, through curricular outreach programs to other disciplines or the community, stressing "visible and consistent connections between doing things with words and engaging in humanist projects."
Matthew Santirocco speaks as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at New York University, an institution that is promoting an international agenda. He believes that the moment is right for language departments to seize the opportunity created by the interest in globalization and to carve out a central place for themselves in three areas; international studies, professional education, and study abroad. In describing these programs, he comments that concern about the integrity of the cultural and intellectual content of the language curriculum, while valid, should not stand in the way of the need of curricular integration with other entities. Perhaps the most original of the university's innovations is the noncredit language program NYU Speaking Freely, which fosters study abroad. Students meet in informal but structured settings with a coach, not a teacher, to build their communication skills and cultural awareness, see the connections between languages and their lives, gain self-confidence, and begin to imagine themselves studying abroad. That this program is one of the most popular extracurricular programs on the NYU campus shows that given the right ethos and imaginative teaching, American students are eager and capable language learners.
At Rice University the awareness of globalization has created just the sort of opportunity for languages that Santirocco refers to. As part of the plan to transform its campus into an international and cosmopolitan site over the next decade, the university has created a new Center for the Study of Languages. Maria-Regina Kecht, the center's first director, is carrying out the mandate to advance the education of a globally competent citizenry through the study of language and culture. To that end, the center has conducted a series of faculty seminars on new approaches to language teaching that will help create a coherent learner-ýentered series of courses. To give the students a broader cultural background in which to place their language learning, Kecht has also initiated the integration of communicative and cross-cultural competence into the language sequences, created one-credit modules in English on the foreign cultures, and forged language connections with other disciplines (language across the curriculum [LAC]) that particularly demonstrate how language can make knowledge accessible. She uses as an example the programs she initiated in LAC elsewhere, and she provides useful models, guides, and caveats for the introduction of LAC into campus programs.
Another LAC program, the international and engineering program at the University of Rhode Island, is the focus of Doris Kirchner's article. Set against the background of the revision of German studies that has been taking place over the last several years, the international and engineering program provides an example of a successful alliance of language with a scientific program, an alliance that combines richness, rigor, interdisciplinarity, and work and study abroad within the goals of a liberal arts education. Students who graduate from this five-year program are highly desirable candidates in the job market, not just because they know German, Kirchner says, but because their "linguistic and cultural knowledge allows graduates to operate in a global professional context."
Three essays address, in different ways, questions about language learning and questions about research in the context of the profession. Concerned about the inexact terminology used in job descriptions and in documents connected with promotion and tenure, Bill VanPatten defines second language acquisition (SLA) as a subfield of applied linguistics that attempts "to understand just how second language learners wind up with the competence and abilities they do" and compares it to other fields with which it is often confused, that is, teaching, which is also a research field; pedagogy, which requires no scholarship in SLA or language teaching; teacher education, which is usually not concerned with SLA; and applied linguistics, which is the use of linguistic theory for other domains, such as cross-cultural communication, gender in language, or SLA itself. He finds that many departments will advertise for a specialist in SLA, even though what they want is a language program director, which tends to be mainly an administrative job, and when it comes time for tenure and promotion, misunderstandings of what SLA is do not allow SLA the credit it deserves as a research endeavor, in comparison with more traditional literary scholarship.
Leona LeBlanc, who is a language program director, finds that her position offers her a distinct advantage in carrying out research in teaching and SLA because she is in control of the language curriculum, teaching assistants, and their class assignments. Without dwelling on the theoretical aspects of SLA, she provides an example of one of her projects to point out study techniques and to caution about ethical practices. LeBlanc recommends that other language program directors undertake such projects because the shift in the perception about the value of SLA research and teaching will lead to their greater institutional recognition as a part of the academic reward system.
Richard Sparks and James Javorsky investigate the timely topic of students classified as learning-disabled in regard to language requirements, since institutions are now obligated by the Americans with Disabilities Act to teach these students. The authors investigate the criteria on which students are classified learning-disabled for foreign language study and are granted waivers or course substitution to fulfill the language requirement. Sparks and Javorsky's research shows that among students with difficulties in the foreign language classroom, those described as learning-disabled have the same cognitive, academic, and foreign language aptitude profiles as other students and that there is no reliable way to test who will pass and who will fail a foreign language course. The authors recommend that at-risk students be encouraged to take the courses with whatever accommodations are available for those students in test taking and tutoring before they are permitted to waive or substitute a course for the language requirement, since it is quite possible they will pass.
Dale Koike and Judith Liskin-Gasparro have done research to answer a question that has important implications for students entering the job market: What constitutes near-native language skill for students looking for positions and for those doing the hiring, in this case in Spanish? The term near-native speaker originally entered job-market vocabulary as a result of affirmative-action regulations that made it illegal to advertise for anyone belonging to a specific national group; the term has been a touchstone in arguments about perception of good and bad, correct and incorrect, prestige and nonprestige language varieties. Koike and Liskin-Gasparro found that there was little consensus among either search committees or students about the definition of near-native ability. The authors suggest that the job interview, a situation laden with anxiety on both sides, may not be the best place to judge oral language competence, especially since it is unlikely that any attention has been paid in graduate school to this aspect of a student's professional preparation.
In the last year, positions advertised in the foreign language edition of the MLA Job Information List that requested expertise in technology rose from twenty to twenty-four percent. Noting this trend, Susan Rava and Brigitte Rossbacher instituted a graduate course at Washington University in teaching with technology. While some of their students were skeptical in the beginning and others may have been insecure about their skills, by the end of the course most believed that the integration of technology was useful both for bolstering language acquisition and for introducing students to authentic documents of the culture. Designed as a series of projects that involve theory, assessment, and reflection and that evaluate how multimedia can enhance language instruction, Rava and Rossbacher's course is a blueprint for the construction of similar offerings at other institutions.
A document prepared by the MLA Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Rights and Responsibilities offers advice to graduate departments on how to inform graduate students about their programs (one report) and advice to those considering graduate school about what to expect from their education and about career prospects (another report). These have been two of the most requested pamphlets from our office; you may send for them at our e-mail or street address and, by fall, on our Web site.
This issue spans the progression of foreign language education from secondary schools through graduate school, tests the bridges between disciplines and schools, envisions and builds ladders among hierarchies of study, and expands study to virtual space on the World Wide Web. The structures of the future--departmental, institutional, and national--will surely occupy future issues; we can be sure that our field will continue to pose provocative questions and imaginative solutions.
Joint National Committee on Languages. Professional Development for Language Teachers: Preparing Teachers for the Twenty-First Century. Comp. Malinda Rae Lucke. Washington: JNCL and Natl. Council for Langs. and Internatl. Studies, 1998.
© 1999 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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