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IT IS all too easy for those of us who teach languages to feel under siege. This nation has never been particularly committed to language learning. Xenophobia aside, the most benign explanation is that many Americans see no practical need to learn another language. We have been spoiled--and I mean that in both senses of the word, not just coddled but damaged--by two expectations: that everyone else would learn English and that everyone else's English was prophylactic against our ignorance. While the first expectation is increasingly true, abetted by the rapid globalization of societies and economies, the second is not, since language learning is not just about acquiring rudimentary communication skills but also about perceptual and attitudinal growth and cross-cultural competence.
These societal attitudes carry over into the academy, leaving language departments vulnerable to a variety of pressures. With their curricula often driven by general education mandates, many programs depend on captive and undermotivated students. And when languages are not required, enrollments often fall. Under either system, enrollment management remains a problem, and overenrollment in Spanish is at least as serious as low enrollments are in German, Italian, or Latin. Even more important, these enrollment issues combine--as cause, effect, or a bit of both--with the marginalization of language study on our campuses, and this combination often results in budgetary vulnerability when resources are allocated.
My experience as chair of two language departments and as college dean at two institutions convinces me that we language educators bear some responsibility for our current situation. I refer not to our preoccupation with hoary pedagogical debates on the merits of literature versus communication models of instruction but rather to the institutional role and posture of language faculty members on campus. The stratification of departments, for instance, into literature and language camps makes sense insofar as second language acquisition or applied linguistics is an area of special expertise; but when the division is about ideology or when language instruction devolves on lecturers, adjuncts, and graduate TAs with inequitable workloads, pay, and status, this structure contributes to the marginalization of language study. Language study is also marginalized because the responsibility for language instruction is typically distributed among different departments. Again, while this distribution has obvious disciplinary advantages, it can inhibit coordination and promote unwanted competition, particularly at budget time. Finally, if we have not always collaborated effectively with one another, at many colleges and universities we have been insufficiently proactive in forging alliances outside our immediate circle, shaping various constituencies' perceptions of what we do and its importance, and identifying areas where we can be responsive to the needs of traditional and new students and thereby promote our own goals by advancing those of the larger institution.
That is the bad news. The good news is that, in my experience, most administrations welcome and respond appropriately to such institutional vision and entrepreneurial spirit. And there has never been a better time, for the globalization of American campuses today offers unparalleled opportunities for language departments to achieve a more central role in three areas: international studies, professional education, and study abroad.
It is a truism that international studies programs do not necessarily promote language study, perhaps because they are often located in social science departments. In contrast, traditional area studies programs tend to have language requirements (you cannot pursue French studies without knowing some French) and can easily serve as sites for innovation in language teaching. At New York University, the Center for European Studies and the German Department have received an internal curricular development grant to design and implement German language recitation sections for two European studies courses; these courses will provide not only advanced language instruction for students in other disciplines but also a model for future language-across-the-curriculum efforts. Similarly, the activities of the Center for Ancient Studies have underscored the necessity of maintaining instruction in languages like Akkadian and have led to a collaboration between NYU and Columbia University to share instructional responsibility for a variety of less commonly taught languages, modern as well as ancient, thereby ensuring the languages' institutional viability.
Traditional area studies are now being transformed under the pressure of globalization. As issues transcend national and even regional boundaries, they demand a larger global purview, and comparative study is on the rise. What the consequences of these developments will be for language study is not clear. But there is one related development that can benefit language study and to which language departments can make a meaningful contribution: diaspora studies, whether they are pursued as part of traditional area studies, American studies, or ethnic studies. When I arrived at NYU four and a half years ago, I was greeted by a petition from students eager to study Hindi and Urdu; since then enrollments are up 227%. Our Africana studies program is responsible for adding Swahili to our offerings, and our new program in Asian-Pacific-American studies is promoting interest in Tagalog, not to mention the languages traditionally taught in our East Asian studies program. In all these cases, academic planning has been influenced by students and faculty members, fueled not only by identity politics but also by the need persons in such programs have for firsthand contact with the linguistic communities they are studying (which at NYU are right in our midst), whether or not they are members of those communities.
Another area for proactive intervention by language departments is professional education. But here, as in international studies programs, globalization has not yet resulted in regular or required language study. To be fair, the reticence of some business schools to bite the language bullet is more than matched by the anxiety of language faculty members about the possible compromising of standards by focusing too narrowly on applications. Thus business Arabic or business Japanese (or, for that matter, reading German for graduate students) does not typically count toward undergraduate language requirements, which emphasize all four skills sets (reading, writing, hearing, speaking) and include cultural and literary components. The same cautious attitude is encountered in colleagues from other departments at the mention of business math or business writing.
Legitimate concern about curricular integrity, however, should not displace concern about curricular integration, an issue about which professional schools have much to teach the arts and sciences. Liberal arts faculties often promote verticality, the sequentiality of instruction that is essential for mathematics, science, and languages and that is seen as desirable in other disciplines that have developed for their majors freshmen seminars, middle-year colloquia, and senior capstones and research experiences. But professional schools increasingly seek to balance necessary verticality with integration. Engineering schools are concerned about the excessive frontloading of basic science courses that keeps students from getting to engineering courses until midway in their undergraduate careers. Business schools and arts schools are asking why skill-building courses like expository writing are divorced from the subject matter of their disciplines, why students' essays cannot explore business and its public or the artist in society. Over the past two years the College of Arts and Science at NYU and the Stevens Institute of Technology have made changes in our joint engineering program to introduce students earlier to their vocation. The college has also implemented pilot programs to integrate writing more seamlessly into the professional curricula of the Tisch School of the Arts and the Stern School of Business (which received a grant from the General Electric Foundation for this purpose).
What we have learned in these cases can be applied to language study. The issue is not so much about compromising instructional integrity as about recognizing the different goals that students have and about developing multiple modalities of instruction to meet those goals and to integrate language study with professional aspirations. A good, if high-end, example of what is possible is the University of Pennsylvania's Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business. Jointly conceived and administered by the Wharton School and the university's College of Arts and Science, the program offers an integrated curriculum whereby the business and liberal arts cores and individual students' concentrations and electives are inflected toward international issues. Central to the program is the role of language study: students enter directly from high school with a language proficiency higher than what will be the exit proficiency of other undergraduates, advanced and applied language study is required, and study abroad is mandatory. The program recruits students of the highest caliber and places them superbly in both the public and private sectors; just a few years after its inception it attracted endowment.
With globalization has come a concomitant interest in studying abroad. The two-way traffic of study-abroad programs raises challenges for all institutions that aspire to global status. The first challenge is to rethink what we do for our international students. On American campuses, concern for international students has tended to focus on their perceived language deficiencies, particularly when they serve as teaching assistants in certain (mostly science) departments. This is an important and legitimate concern, though it is difficult to address successfully or without resorting to inappropriate remediation paradigms. At NYU, which this year ranked first among research universities for the number of international scholars and students on campus, we have reviewed what we do in this area. We have raised proficiency standards for the admission of all graduate students who will at any time have teaching responsibilities. The NYU American Language Institute, in consultation with the relevant school deans and department chairs, offers required summer and term-time programs for international teaching assistants, the successful completion of which is required before an assistant is permitted to teach in an undergraduate classroom. The focus is not on remediation but on professional development. Thus, in addition to language work that is customized for those who need it (and not all do), these programs feature an acculturation component, since the problems that arise in the classroom are often not just, or even especially, linguistic. By providing weekly seminars on American society, on the expectations of American students, on professional issues facing the academic community, and on teaching and presentation skills, we hope not only to improve the experience of our undergraduates but also to enhance the education we provide to our international graduate students.
American universities face a second challenge: how to internationalize the education they provide for American students (whatever their place of origin). Theorized anew not only as self-enriching but also as essentially practical studies, the liberal arts embrace analytic and communication skills, disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, and, increasingly, an international dimension. As a way of developing an understanding of other cultures and of our own in the larger global context, living and learning in another country has no substitute. While NYU leads in the number of international students on our campus, we have historically sent far fewer of our own students abroad. But we are making headway. To accord with our visionary president's positioning of NYU as a global university, we have moved beyond older models of study abroad like the "island" programs intended for nonspeakers and, on the other extreme, programs restricted only to students who are fluent in the language and who have majored in it or a related area. Our new institutional paradigm mainstreams study abroad for all students.
To accomplish this reorientation, financial aid has been made portable, and modest additional funds have become available for students whose packages include work-study jobs that are not available abroad or for commuters whose scholarships do not take into account residence hall fees. A new infrastructure for recruitment, academic advisement, and program administration has been put in place. Most important, the curriculum is being enriched to accommodate the needs of new students, and additional sites are being developed around the globe. Central to all this is language study. In the past two years, our long-standing programs in Madrid and Paris have added separate tracks for students who are not yet fluent in the national language; the students study language at the appropriate level and take subject courses in English. At our newer sites like La Pietra, the magnificent Renaissance estate in Florence that Sir Harold Acton bequeathed to the university, or our latest center in polyglot Prague, we require that all students study language intensively. Finally, to balance our historical strength in Europe, we are now developing our own programs in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and we are establishing exchange programs around the world through our membership in the League of World Universities.
This heady expansionism has created interest in and need for language study in New York City. We have the responsibility to provide curricular articulation so that students preparing for a term away can study in advance the host country's language and returning students can consolidate their gains and make further progress. There are plans under way for a summer language institute that will link language study to the cultural outreach programs of our many international houses, from Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò to the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies.
The most dramatic example of the mutually beneficial synergy between our language departments and study abroad initiatives has occurred not in the curriculum but on the extracurricular front, in a free program of informal language instruction called NYU Speaking Freely. The idea for this program was generated by NYU's president, L. Jay Oliva, a professor of Russian history who teaches undergraduates every year. Though the College of Arts and Science has a long-standing two-year (or equivalent) language requirement, the president believed that more could be done on the language front to promote the university's global agenda. The vice chancellor appointed a variety of experts to work with me to create the program, which my office now administers. The team included not only language faculty members from the college and the School of Continuing and Professional Education but also representatives from residential living, student affairs, academic computing, Bobst Library, and telecommunications. Together we spent an entire spring term identifying languages and developing for each language a curriculum and a mode of delivery. Since student participation would be voluntary, the experience would be offered at no cost, would carry no academic credit, and would involve no pressure. As a result, full coverage was not the issue. Our goals were more modest: to develop our students' basic communication skills and cultural awareness, to build confidence in their linguistic abilities, and to whet their appetite for study abroad.
To that end, instead of teachers we have "coaches," typically graduate students in the language departments, whose own learned fluency imparts hope to new learners. Instead of syllabi there are "itineraries" that organize sessions around basic themes like food and travel. The groups meet not just in classrooms but also in the residence halls and student lounges, and they take full advantage of their setting in one of the world's most international cities by visiting ethnic restaurants, cultural centers, foreign film festivals, and the like. Finally, they augment their weekly sessions by taking advantage of the latest technology in NYU's language labs, computer rooms, and College Learning Center.
In two years the number of languages in NYU Speaking Freely has grown from nine to thirteen; they range from commonly taught European languages to Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Japanese, and Korean; and several levels of instruction are now offered. Even more impressive, the number of students, mostly freshmen, has climbed to over 1,300. If the program actively recruited upper-class students or permitted graduate students to sign up, the number would triple overnight. This phenomenal growth is all the more striking since most of these students are subject to the language requirement, which NYU Speaking Freely does not fulfill.
Why are students flocking to this program? For some, it represents an opportunity to try out a language at no risk before committing to study it for credit. For others, who are fulfilling the language requirement or have already done so, it offers a way of learning an additional language outside an otherwise full or costly academic program. Many students tell us that they are attracted by the format of the sessions, which is relaxed and emphasizes oral communication. The most important explanation for students' interest is suggested by the fact that Italian untypically leads in enrollment or is right up there with Spanish. Clearly, students are studying Italian because they are thinking about spending a term at La Pietra; in other words, even students who are not language majors recognize and embrace the essential connection between studying language and studying abroad.
The author is Professor of Classics and Dean of the College of Arts and Science at New York University. This paper is based on his presentation at ADFL Seminar East, 4-6 June 1998, in New York City.
I wish to thank Elizabeth Welles for inviting me to speak at the 1998 ADFL Summer Seminar East and for stimulating discussion and advice.
Gonzalez, David. "At N.Y.U., Languages Si, Elitism Non." New York Times 10 Dec. 1997: B1.
Rubin, Amy Magaro. "A New Program Ends the Stress of Tackling a Foreign Language." Chronicle of Higher Education 22 Nov. 1996: A35-36.
© 1999 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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