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THE study of foreign languages, literatures, and linguistics is a distinct discipline with a distinct humanist mission in American education. To date, however, our disciplinary role has been largely obscured by a focus on the surface issues rather than the first principles that would allow us to rectify our mission within our institutions and to "rightsize" our programs. The ADFL seminars of recent years, exemplified by Dorothy James's article "Bypassing the Traditional Leadership: Who's Minding the Store?" and the twenty-three published responses to that article in subsequent issues of the ADFL Bulletin, indicate widespread awareness of our profession's need to articulate and implement a coherent vision of the discipline as realized in foreign language departments. That we can no longer afford to ignore this issue is testified to by the resonance occasioned by James's argument.
Simply stated, James illustrated that the emperor has no clothes, that foreign language departments lack visible academic and fiscal accountability. By privileging scholars who teach upper-division and graduate courses in foreign language, literatures, linguistics, and culture, departments may no longer reach the needs as well as the numbers of students essential for maintaining programs in the twenty-first century. To quote James:
All over the country, institutions are looking at their programs, their departments, and their budgets, and they are counting heads. They see the lower levels (large) taught by cheap labor and the upper levels (small) taught by expensive labor. In the best cases, they wait for retirements and do not rehire. In the worst cases, they declare fiscal emergency and retrench. Either way, the future closes down for our discipline, for our future undergraduates, and for our present graduate students. (49)
Pointing out that only relatively wealthy institutions can afford to create separate centers of language and departments of literature, James warns that it is the elite strand, the literature department, that will probably be rapidly downsized by administrations or reassigned to a general literature department, just as linguistics may join a language center or anthropology department. For good or ill, unless we are willing to stop thinking in terms of an elitism that insists on each language and each area of study as a separate entity, administrators will reduce tenure-track positions based on criteria unrelated to the thinking of foreign language faculty members and detrimental to the integrity of the discipline as a whole.
Elite scholarship must come to terms with pragmatics. All twenty-three responses written by chairs and professors from various colleges and universities agree that for language departments across the country business as usual is not a viable survival strategy for the twenty-first century. While some authors object to James's storekeeping metaphor because it implies that humanist accounting will be replaced by purely fiscal accountability and the corporate mentality of total quality management, most acknowledge the seminal nature of the problem and explore their departmental and institutional responses to the issue James identifies: a notable absence of principled vision about what we in foreign languages should be doing as part of a humanities division, a vision that could meld lower- and upper-division teaching and integrate foreign language instruction into the broader college curriculum and thus maintain full-time positions for language teachers of all stripes as part of an educational process, not a superfluous luxury or self-perpetuating fief.
Rarely directly addressed in these responses, as in most discussions of the profession today, is a sense of what our discipline offers, our identity as a field of study with significant intellectual boundaries rather than as a set of high-culture affectations. Most often, voices defending our excellence discuss the teaching of language, literature, culture, or interdisciplinary courses in any given college or university as though these areas of study constituted our raison d'être. Such a position is comparable to claiming that doctors treat only cancer or heart disease. Even the most specialized doctors (or lawyers or computer programmers) must share a basic set of procedures and assumptions. Doctors must know the basic functions of the human body and the first principles about medicine's relation to healing that body.
If foreign language departments want to rightsize rather than downsize in the twenty-first century, they are going to have to lay claim to status as a discipline with principles common to all its subfields (language, literature, linguistics, culture) and distinct from other humanities (especially history) and social sciences. Yet most of today's discourses try to define foreign languages as studies about language, literature, linguistics, or culture or as interdisciplinary courses, thus suggesting that foreign language study has no common core of investigatory precepts across its subfields.
I challenge that inference and define our core as follows: foreign language study is 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? With this definition, I am not talking about linguistics alone. I am suggesting that our profession must derive principles of foreign language study from the expanded social core of language in communities. The goal of our discipline is to enable students to recognize the various intentionalities behind verbal and written texts and to use language effectively to achieve their own purposes within a cultural community.
Each of our discipline's subfields attends to such acts of communication in its own way. Each department realizes its own take on the discipline by combining subfields to establish an institutional identity in language and literature or cultural studies. Unfortunately, however, even those of us with an abundance of students, notably Spanish departments, often fail to address the fundamental question of how individuals and groups use words in contexts to intend, negotiate, and create meanings. Like many English departments, most large departments awash with students find it easier to manage the subfields additively than to force them to identify as parts of the same discipline. Managing subfields, however, results in separate programs, often with graduate students and part-timers who teach how to write and speak a language and tenured professors who teach a high-culture canon or technical linguistics.
Yet that practice is, as James and her respondents have argued, perilous as a model for foreign languages as a whole. To claim anything less than a common principle for our discipline and all its subfields is analogous to claiming that sociology is about ethnographics and demographics, physics about quantum mechanics and string theory, or mathematics about geometry, calculus, and algebra. The sum of a discipline's subfields does not define a realm of knowledge. A field of study rests on shared premises about questions and objectives that apply to each of its subfields, while and nonetheless rendering these subfields an interlocking whole.
Sociologists, physicists, mathematicians, and historians know the basic questions their disciplines ask so that their students can discover principles while studying a subfield. Physics asks about matter and energy as fundamental relations that reveal how material reality is assembled, how all matter behaves--the first philosophy of science. Chemistry explores specific propositions and the composition of parts of these materials--the application of physical principles. After that, the general discipline of chemistry divides into dialects (physical, organic, materials chemistry) to argue strategies addressing these common projects. If foreign language study is a discipline, a realm of knowledge, then we need to agree about what all aspects of foreign language study investigate and what students must be able to do as a result. We must not just retreat into subfields but orient the subfields toward a shared disciplinary project.
Guideposts do exist for defining our profession as a master humanist discipline. Various scholars and teachers have mapped its disciplinary territory in a variety of formats. Unfortunately, as Heidi Byrnes points out in her answer to James, these important framework documents have been largely ignored by the profession (49). Byrnes specifies several such documents that point in this direction: the theoretical premises of an approach to cultural studies suggested by Jeffrey Peck and Russell Berman and the pedagogical premises of the Standards for Foreign Language Learning project. Such frameworks suggest ways that language learning can be reconceived as learning how to identify and apply alternative values and systems of thought expressed originally in a non-English language. In both frameworks, language is defined not as a message in itself but as a medium to study individuals in their communities.
Such premises can, if the profession is willing to apply them, take foreign language departments beyond their focus on managing subfields and move departments toward addressing foreign language as a discipline. To repeat, ours is a discipline that, in various ways, asks the question, How do individuals and groups use words and other signs in context to intend, negotiate, and create meanings? Our discipline's goal, therefore, is to enable students to do things with words and to recover what has been done with words, socially, historically, politically, and interpersonally. Each subfield does so in different ways.
Our own canon of intellectual giants confirms that it is possible to draw a big picture for language studies. If teachers of foreign languages accept Saussure's premise that the meanings of verbal and visual signs are arbitrary, then foreign language instruction cannot be conceived of as antithetical to the teaching of content per se--the red herring objection raised by some literary scholars that "we are not qualified to be historians." From Saussure's premises, it would follow that the job of foreign language instruction at all levels is to present ways in which arbitrary signs in English, Japanese, German, Spanish, or any other language function as systems that do things with words aesthetically, culturally, linguistically, and socially.
Such premises for a discipline must be the professional criteria implemented into an institution to establish the credibility of that discipline locally. That credibility will be gained, however, only if those criteria are integrated into all levels of the curriculum. The horizontal truncation implied by the language, literature, linguistics, and culture designations for individual courses at the upper-division and graduate level must be rethought in the sense of Roman Jakobson, who argued cogently throughout his lifetime that the professional disjunction between language and literary studies was not only capricious but counterproductive. The vertical bellwether for integrating the curriculum across learning levels has been expressed convincingly in Byrnes's phrase "content from the onset of instruction and language to the end" (Personal communication; for a full discussion, see "Developing"). To pursue the analogy begun earlier, each doctor still deals with disease and wellness, whether as a family doctor or as a brain surgeon. In contrast, the lower-division language teacher is too often viewed as doing something different ("purely skills") from what the upper-division or graduate teacher of language, literature, linguistics, and culture does.
Practically speaking, a shift in separatist thinking can be introduced by degrees and through collaborative work with all colleagues in a department working toward a unified view of the discipline that fits their own institutional context. Departments must pool their energies to provide impetus for altering the entrenched albeit threatened modus vivendi of what are now often separate, unequal, and uncoordinated subfields. Endemic professional attitudes about separate provinces for literature, language, linguistics, and culture need to be revised by having faculty members face the reality of downsizing versus rightsizing. Foreign language colleagues need to unify what they teach instead of dividing it.
To undertake such a shift, department chairs will have to initiate faculty forums that look at the mission and objectives of the department within its environmental context, given the human resources of the department and the mission of the institution. Are the major strengths of the home institution in science and mathematics, in the liberal arts, in business or medicine, in the fine arts, in vocational training? Where does the foreign language discipline's training intersect with these other disciplines? What outside factors, what outside business or public projects can benefit from contact with the foreign language?
If a department is to have a chance at consolidating and rightsizing rather than downsizing, faculty members must initially brainstorm as a group about ways to export what is done in a foreign language department into the resources prominent in their home institutions and environments (not only academic emphases but also external influences such as special library collections, local museums, and corporate cultures). If a campus has a major art school, foreign language departments can teach parallels between visual and verbal expression wherever possible. The program's goal will be to teach students to apply the cognitive-linguistics learning of semiotics to the visual and affective styles that characterize different locales and periods in art history--to export the linguistic model into analyses of visual texts.
Such an assessment of a whole discipline's position in an institution must then be rendered palpable in curriculum planning from the onset of language instruction to the most advanced instructional level of the foreign language department. In the expanded scope of departmental planning that includes external as well as institutional resources, curricular change should ultimately extend to those in the outside community who respond to this outreach.
We in foreign languages must export our skills to the general context of the humanities within our institutions so that we offer an environment of support for neighboring disciplines. That does not mean we stop teaching German or French or Spanish; it means we teach it as a "two for one"--teach it and teach how its structure and social claims are reflected in similar verbal and nonverbal systems from the culture. For example, a grammar lesson focusing on present and past tense can show how politicians use morphology rhetorically to create contrasts in historical consciousness and visions for the future, as Lincoln did in the Gettysburg Address or the founding fathers did in the Declaration of Independence. In both documents what was becomes what is or will be.
Formal recognition and assessment for such outreach can be built into degree requirements. Students can provide translation expertise to colleagues in other departments, teach foreign language songs to elementary students, act as the foreign language expert for a city-sponsored opera production, or research a topic using more than one language and incorporating more than one country's perspective. Such requirements must be negotiated within a department and between the department and its college administration. The one-credit practicum is a viable option in many institutions, lending structure and recognition to nontraditional applications of foreign language skills within the university and the broader community. As options that reward students for applying their language knowledge, these minimal add-ons can lead to minors or to double majors (see De Vries and Long).
Such add-ons should lead to student service that guarantees full-time equivalencies (FTEs on an institution's financial books) even as they spur our research and rethinking of well-worn problems in language, literature, linguistics, or culture. Important for rightsizing, as well, is that new degree programs stress visible and consistent connections between doing things with words and engaging in humanist projects. These connections encourage more students to continue foreign language study than does the current norm that dictates "first master the language and then, maybe, you can appreciate its literature, linguistics, or culture." In the content-led vision of a whole discipline, each student is learning more than the social skills of correct grammar. Each act of language opens a small window to a new culture, its history, and its values.
Introducing a continuous content thread across the curriculum involves recognizing some commonsense principles about language learners, principles that have been substantiated in language acquisition research. First, familiar topics, genres, and rhetorical usage will facilitate students' comprehension (see Carrell; J. Lee). Second, a precept especially necessary with beginners but true for all stages of foreign language instruction, planners of new curricula and crossovers should allow ten to fifteen minutes for in-class reading tasks with texts or with videos to introduce subject matter and treatment so that students will be alerted to the new demands placed on them (see Herron, Cole, York, and Linden; Swaffar and Vlatten). Third, rereading promotes the kind of comprehension and vocabulary retention that ties language and content learning (Cha; Chung). Consequently, curricular planning for upper-division courses does well to use texts read in earlier semesters or texts on similar topics (M. Lee).
Such key texts, in turn, should be systematically augmented with additional topical materials to move a core set of readings (and vocabulary) toward the specialized interests at the upper-division level. Common sense and research indicate that three or four texts on the same subject will prove more readable for foreign language students than texts dealing with different topics and will help expand vocabulary and syntax in the language.
The curriculum can introduce a "red thread" of content areas across levels by using key texts to return to one or several content emphases that appear and reappear from the onset of foreign language instruction. Even when the choice of emphasis is pragmatic, this kind of content coherence should not be viewed by faculty members as abandoning literature or the traditional humanist mission of foreign language learning. Instead, it shows a set of subfields working together as a discipline in an institution. If we all work with materials that interrelate and that relate to the institution's mission, our students will have an easier time moving across levels and across subfields.
As a case in point, consider a Spanish department in a college that has a strong vocational emphasis in medicine. In response to this resource, the department already has a course in place called Spanish for Health Professionals. Given this scenario, each semester the Spanish department curriculum might elect to introduce topically related authentic materials, that is, materials written or produced for native speakers that present social, historical, popular, and high-culture perspectives on folk medicine. Selected readings and video materials can be grouped to explore facets not only of the popular culture but also of the rich literary and linguistics traditions that refer to popular medical practice.
Passages from novels by authors such as Fuentes and García Marquez can complement exegeses on herbal remedies and the role of the healer (curandero) in different Central and South American countries. Novels by doctors can be compared with those by authors who have no medical training to see whether the "medical eye" varies. Courses with linguistic emphases can use these same texts to study diachronic and anthropological characteristics or to structure synchronic analyses of written versus spoken usage about folk medicine, analyses that examine word choice (register) and morphosyntax to reveal, for example, how attitudes depend on the education, social status, and intent of the writer or speaker.
Authentic oral, video, and print texts readily provide the content basis for a grammar of language that faculty members can apply to teach register and morphosyntax, just as they can use the texts to teach literature or cultural values. To sequence the choice of readings for a particular focus and forestall potential difficulties students at different language levels may confront, curriculum planners who follow the use of language as an overall disciplinary principle must attend to the rhetorical features and genre of authentic materials, not just to content or word counts. Identifying these features will be useful first steps beginners take in content reading. In most cases the genre of a text helps students grasp an authorial intent (as in most advertisements, travel brochures, popular magazine coverage of celebrities, letters).
Texts with explicitly expressed rhetorical intent (convincing, telling about an event) frequently use longer sentences than purely descriptive texts do, since authentic narratives or expository texts are often characterized by particular subordinate or coordinate conjunctions and adverbial markers. Pure descriptions, while they may use simpler morphosyntax--subject-verb-object or subject-verb-prepositional phrase--are often less interesting and less memorable in content than stories or articles with a point to make. If introduced to readings by means of tasks that aid in establishing these texts' topical focus and vocabulary, students of Western languages can read not only descriptive but also grammatically more complex persuasive or analytic texts. When various kinds of texts focus on the same topic, students can use their content knowledge to overcome deficiencies in formal syntax or morphology.
Attention to particular language use in a text connected with an evolving context (as in the difference between a room described to evoke an era versus one described as the scene of a murder) can be built into in-class reading at all levels. Along with the rhetorical markers and genre features that accompany specific kinds of text materials, many authentic texts illustrate seminal features of language use such as relative pronouns, singular-plural distinctions, subject-verb agreement, or verb morphology.
Such features should not only be taught in beginner classes. Subsequent literary or linguistic readings of texts can reinforce these morphosyntactic patterns through the repeated calling of student attention to how the patterns function to create a particular message. Special uses of the subjunctive versus the indicative, tense changes, pronoun reference, or word order patterns that appear repeatedly or strikingly in a text often serve as markers that lend force and direction to a textual message. Daily attention to language data, under the rubric of grammar review or close reading, need take no more than five or ten minutes in advanced linguistics or literature classes. Thereafter, these comprehension exercises can be followed up with written adaptations of text language in discussion forums, small-group work, note taking, or short essays, each of which systematically works through the content of interest to a subfield as well as through language problems common to the discipline as a whole (for sample pedagogies, see Kramsch; Swaffar, Arens, and Byrnes).
The uses of authentic materials suggested here have already been implemented in many classrooms. My concern is that they need to be conceived coherently and consistently across the foreign language curriculum--vertically and horizontally--as part of an evolving discipline in a department that will not be subject to dissection. These practices need not spell the death of traditional literary and linguistic pursuits or language majors; they merely show how a more systematic, content-based concept of language use relates to the concerns of a discipline in an institution. Indeed, teaching students to use substantive texts in different ways as the basis for doing things with words at all levels of language instruction seems to open the departmental major to the college at large. Such crossovers often appeal to the best students who want to major in business or law or music or pharmacy and a foreign language, because consciously planned extensions give students a skills-based rationale for, say, mastering the ability to read in a field or for developing cultural or discursive sensitivity. John Grandin and others with exportable programs report that, for example, German for engineers increases enrollments in upper-division German literature courses.
Negotiating the disciplinary principles that allow such rethinking of majors and curricula requires energy and a firm institutional will to create an overarching definition of a discipline where none now exists--tantamount to reunifying Germany or to merging North and South Korea. Nonetheless, this negotiation is the key to an accountable assessment of departmental needs and resources within an institutional context. Initiation of change to achieve rightsizing in this sense must generally come from the chair.
As departmental manager and mentor, the chair must have faculty members meet to explore what disciplinary and institutional goals can be their models for curriculum design. He or she must appoint a curriculum committee to plan and implement changes relevant to a department that wishes to maintain its status as a vital player in its institution. That committee will have to establish objectives and then apply them as answers to the "how people learn language" question. These objectives will define what the department major means for students and the institution.
Such a project involves community action and an assessment program, as outlined by Byrnes ("Faculty") or in the "Report of the ADE Ad Hoc Committee on Assessment." The early phases of reconceptualizing a major require faculty members to visit one another and to identify pedagogical practices that dovetail, to compare syllabi to reinforce and develop key tasks in stages throughout the program, and to set up departmental guidelines for text choice, testing of students, and longrange self-assessment of the program.
All of which is a lot of work. What can a foreign language department hope to accomplish through curriculum development? Why should these efforts lead to rightsizing rather than downsizing and elimination of positions and departmental status? And is departmental status worth fighting for? My answer is that it is if, and only if, the department is willing to view foreign language as a discipline that teaches students how to encode and use sign systems and is willing to implement the curricular manifestations of that insight. Any other approach sidetracks rethinking the department's role in the institution, leaving downsizing and language centers as the only options.
To help foreign language departments assume command of their destinies, I make the following suggestions for rightsizing:
1. Departments need to define the discipline of foreign language instruction with its subfields as a distinct and sequenced inquiry into the constituents and applications of meaningful communication. For the lower-division to dovetail with the upper-division specifications, overriding attention must
2. To implement these goals, departments would do well to utilize the Standards for Foreign Language Learning or other appropriate framework documents, since these recommendations represent a pragmatic model for coherence between courses and levels of language instruction (Swaffar, "Major Changes"). The Standards are particularly recommended since they
3. To ensure the future existence of foreign language departments, those with graduate programs must acknowledge changing expectations in the discipline by preparing their students to
The chances for the success of the proposals outlined here depend on whether a foreign language department's faculty members can assume more interactive collegial and disciplinary responsibilities than they have heretofore. They will not simply be able to insist on custom and usage. If foreign language students are to learn how individuals and groups use words and other sign systems in context to intend, negotiate, and create meanings, they must be exposed to years of consistent teacher practice and expectations. Moreover, assessment practices in the students' majors and required classes must reward student fulfillment of those expectations in a way valued at the institution as well as beyond--a major with an anchor in a particular environment and in model disciplinary practices. That curriculum can emerge only when faculty members eschew fiefs and exclusionary thinking and commit themselves to working together to realize complementary programs.
The author is Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. This paper is based on her keynote presentation at ADFL Seminar West, 25-27 June 1998, in Victoria, British Columbia.
1In the discussion following the presentation of this paper at the ADFL Seminar West, an audience member pointed out that no mechanism is in place that ensures application of the Standards in the secondary schools and thus ensures that these programs are implemented. Elizabeth Welles observed that it would be unproductive to construe the professional Standards as apodictic. The purpose of the document is to articulate guideposts of informal consensus as envisioned by its framers and the professional organizations that adopt it.
2I am indebted to Peter Richardson for calling this link to my attention.
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© 1999 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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