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WHEN Rice University decided a few years ago to establish its Center for the Study of Languages, it recognized the educational necessity of attracting more students to language and culture study and preparing tomorrow's graduates for the challenges of an international labor market. The faculty members and administrators who developed the so-called Plan 2000--a carefully crafted proposal recommending measures to improve language instruction--envisioned Rice as an institution that, over the next decade, would become innovative in language learning and convince its students of the great benefits of bilingualism and cross-cultural awareness.
Much thought and energy went into drafting Plan 2000, and even more will have to go into its realization. Put quite bluntly, we want to accomplish nothing less than a transformation of a campus culture that now, to a great extent, reflects a national culture uninterested in other cultures and peoples.
A freshmen survey conducted in fall 1997 tells us that most of our students are monolingual, speak English at home, and have spent only a few weeks abroad (mostly in neighboring countries like Canada or Mexico). Slightly more than 50% of the freshmen, however, think that they will probably study foreign languages at Rice; more than 50% of this group may want to choose Spanish and focus on communicative competence. Even though about half of the freshmen are contemplating language study at Rice, only 20% think they will spend a semester abroad. These figures contrast starkly with other survey findings, which tell us that 95% of the freshmen strongly believe that bilingualism and cross-cultural awareness are very important and 70% realize that both educational qualifications will contribute significantly to their careers.
These attitudes and perceptions suggest that the Center for the Study of Languages, in collaboration with the language departments and all the other programs at Rice committed to educating a globally competent citizenry, will have to prove to our students that language learning is worth their while and that study or work abroad can be integrated into their normal studies. If we expect our students to open their minds and embark on the arduous journey of getting to know another culture, we must make sure we provide not only useful, encouraging guideposts but also exciting and effective means of transmission. We want our students to experience the delight of understanding foreign language sources, the pride that comes from being able to converse meaningfully in another language, and the pleasure of confidently coping with a foreign environment. Such achievement can and should be a reasonable goal for our students at this time in history.
Over the past months the Center for the Study of Languages has made several initiatives in its multitiered plan to advance language and culture study to prominence on the Rice campus. The center has started to offer seminars on second language acquisition (SLA) and methodology to introduce all language instructors--faculty members, lecturers, and graduate students--to current professional debates and acquaint them with new approaches to language-culture learning. The seminars supply the conceptual foundation for hands-on workshops. Experts in a variety of areas such as computer-assisted language instruction, cognitive linguistics, and curriculum design are invited to Rice to provide further professional development. These ongoing opportunities for on-the-job training benefit the language departments in their efforts to reform their curricula and redesign many of their courses. Obviously, Rice students will be the primary beneficiaries of a carefully constructed, learner-centered sequence of courses that builds on SLA research and makes sound use of modern technology.
To carry out the challenging agenda that the center has been charged with, all parties need to cooperate. The establishment of a faculty advisory board and a student council helps to channel valuable input from the campus to the center. An outreach committee allows the center to communicate with the worlds of business, industry, and government and respond to their interest in globally competent Rice graduates. Our plans for collaborative language programs for the School of Engineering or the School of Architecture or--an alternative plan--for the creation of a campus-wide languages-across-the-curriculum program will progress in this climate of dialogue and cooperation.
Faculty members and administrators at Rice expect the Center for the Study of Languages to be a catalyst for change, to help the language departments review their performance and search for new directions, and to encourage curricular experimentation and innovation. All this reflection and reform is to maximize the role of the language departments in the university's committed pursuit of internationalization.1
As one can well imagine, this objective requires scrutiny of a language department's identity and a reevaluation of faculty members' responsibilities. Foreign language instruction has the opportunity to demonstrate its value for an internationalized education and thus gain greater prestige. The constituencies outside the language departments want to see graduates who can demonstrate cross-cultural competency and linguistic proficiency adequate to increasingly rigorous professional requirements. Such outcome-based goals put pressure on language departments and bring new accountability into the game. But, at the same time, they reinforce the raison d'être of language-culture departments in a changed landscape, where the traditional sequence of skills courses (beginning and intermediate language classes) followed by content courses (upper-level literature or culture courses) neither fits our students' needs nor makes any sense in terms of SLA research findings.
Russell Berman, of Stanford University, recently suggested that we "identify the goal of the undergraduate [foreign language] curriculum as a reflective involvement in another culture," by which he meant "going beyond an enthusiastic fascination with alterity in order to achieve a cultural literacy with intellectual foundations" (44). I agree with Berman and suggest that any reform of foreign language learning at the postsecondary level first establish clearly defined cognitive, analytical, and affective goals that would constitute "cultural literacy with intellectual foundations" before we develop the curricular components and pedagogical strategies to reach these goals.
It may, indeed, be sensible and effectual to prepare our students for intercultural negotiations and help them see what pervasive influence language as a social practice has on the construction of one's self and one's perception of others. If we can lead our students to an awareness of the cultural processes that govern conventions, customs, perspectives, values, attitudes, connotations, and so forth, we will accomplish a great deal. And shouldn't such awareness be an integral part of the learning process a liberal arts education is supposed to foster?
Language is essential to the complex symbolic configuration of culture; it is "constitutive for the development and integration of national culture" (Seeba 407). Without bilingual competence, one cannot fully engage in a dialogue with otherness and develop empathy for it. We must recognize that proficiency with a second language (L2) increases when students get involved in cross-cultural comparisons and contrasts, when they are encouraged to make connections and position themselves in a larger context, and when they develop positive attitudes toward what is different. Then it is far more likely that students will continue with their language study beyond the minimal requirement. In that case, the value of the foreign language and culture training will be measured not just by its professional usefulness but also by its transformative power for the person who has learned to search for self-understanding.
Richard Lambert, founding director of the National Foreign Language Center at Johns Hopkins University, has asked some tough and telling questions: "If the primary purpose of collegiate foreign language study is to contribute to a student's general education, [. . .] if the goal is the reduction of ethnocentrism and the provision of an understanding of another culture, the question is, To what extent is this goal built into [. . .] teaching and to what extent is this goal achieved? [. . .] How can we guarantee in each semester of language instruction the greatest return in terms of perceptual and attitudinal growth?" (qtd. in Moore and Morfit 86-87).
Obviously, there is no one right answer to these questions, and educators might come up with a host of different solutions to the problems Lambert highlights. At Rice we have started to build the goals of communicative and cross-cultural competence into our teaching by systematically designing a sequence of task-based, content-based language courses in the language departments. At the same time, we are working on the development of one-hour, one-credit modules on language-culture awareness that will be team-taught by faculty members in the languages or linguistics and social sciences. These modules, taught in English and aimed at freshmen and sophomores, are intended to spark student interest in foreign cultures and in study or work abroad. Languages across the curriculum (LAC) programs represent the third instructional pillar on which we hope to build an educational edifice that provides integrated, coherent language and culture training.
I want to focus here on LAC programs as a successful means to contextualized, interdisciplinary, and student-centered learning; a key to high visibility of language departments on campus; and thus a wonderful way of ensuring that language competence will be crucial to the university's internationalization agenda.2
At Rice we have only begun to establish LAC programs, and therefore I would like to illustrate some of the core features of the LAC programs I initiated and administered at the University of Connecticut before moving to Rice not long ago.3 The Eurotech program and Linkage through Language (LTL), both initially funded by the NEH and FIPSE, emphasize learning in and about the target culture. They exemplify an integrated process of culture and language learning and build on Stephen Krashen's "input hypothesis," which maintains that "language is acquired most effectively through rich comprehensible input with the conscious focus on message, not form." Second-language proficiency and second-culture competence "can improve by concentrating on learning the content of an academic discipline through that language" (qtd. in Krueger and Ryan 9).
Eurotech serves as an example of collaboration between faculty members in the humanities and in the School of Engineering, as well as of unusual integration of academic and industry requirements. Linkage through Language illustrates how students and faculty members create contextual learning experiences by overcoming strong discipline-oriented insularity, thus enriching discipline studies and promoting the visibility of foreign languages in liberal arts and sciences.
In the Eurotech program, we wanted to provide students with practical, integrated foreign language study that would link academic training with industry experience and link technical preparation with experiential learning. Connecticut has a high number of foreign companies, almost one hundred of which are German, and there are several United States firms in the state with strong international connections. Understandably, there is a demand for professionals with cross-cultural awareness, foreign language skills, and overseas work experience.4
Eurotech is an international engineering program offering a BS in engineering and a BA in German after five years. The course of study includes two summer internships in the United States and a six-month internship in Germany.5 Eurotech is open to any qualified engineering student and requires no previous knowledge of German. We developed special Eurotech tracks of first- and second-year German instruction with topics and activities of interest to engineering students. To strengthen the link between the two majors, for the intermediate and advanced levels we designed three new one-credit German courses with technical lectures by German-speaking engineers and scientists. Engineering faculty members who participated in Eurotech took special classes to maintain and improve their German, and they could participate in intensive language courses at the Goethe Institute in Germany.
When designing the Eurotech instructional program, we made every effort to develop pedagogical approaches that would give engineering students of German an opportunity, first of all, to reflect on their own cultural background and their own Vor-Urteile (prejudgments) as they became familiar with the German language and culture; second, to experience cross-cultural differences and conflicts and to learn how to resolve them without resorting to cultural stereotypes; and, finally, to articulate and analyze their own experiences of Fremdbegegnung (confronting what is foreign). So that students may reach these objectives, the program stresses student involvement, student-centered teaching techniques, and local German resources.
Interviews of German teaching assistants in engineering, for instance, are an integral part of learning in and about language and culture. Through a variety of assignments linked to the topics covered in the German textbook (family, travel, hobbies, etc.), the students are to elicit information about the German students' attitudes, values, beliefs, and background. As Eurotech students carry out collaborative projects with these German engineering students, they become aware of and learn how to cope with cultural differences. The sheltered environment of the program gives the students a comfortable opportunity to experiment with their knowledge of culture and discuss their experiences with their German peers.
This aspect of the program becomes increasingly important in the second-year and third-year classes, where Eurotech students meet German engineers from Connecticut industry and discuss technology issues with them. In a course entitled Introduction to the Sciences, students attend talks given by these engineers on various fundamental issues in the sciences. In the sequence Fields of Technology, these talks continue as the engineers focus on their fields of specialization and their work in their companies. Experiential learning of this sort not only promotes the acculturation process but also allows for a constant application of technical knowledge and foreign language competence, which is challenging and fun.
Such abilities are put to more practice when Eurotech students carry out assignments in the Multimedia Language Center, where specially designed computerized instructional modules assist their process of language and culture learning. Apart from having specific objectives for language practice, these interactive modules, created with the help of the program HyperGasp, illustrate the cultural implications of German technological developments and introduce students to the German working environment for engineers.
Guided field trips to German companies in Connecticut are another way to encounter the target culture. The trips build on the cultural information students have accumulated and the sensitivity they have developed through their interaction with representatives of the target culture. The students' field notes, their particular observations as well as their evaluations of the information they record, become important material for class discussion and analysis after the field trip.
Summer internships with German companies in Connecticut give the Eurotech students more opportunities to meet with German-speaking engineers, German interns, and other professionals, as well as to learn about what a German company is really like inside. The experience of such summer work is critical to the preparation of the students for their six-month internship in Germany. The internship is the cultural and professional centerpiece of this LAC program, and professional, linguistic, and cultural preparation is vital to its success. Before students leave for their internship, German faculty members and German engineers from local industry conduct an orientation workshop also attended by German exchange students who have had a Praktikum in industry.
Everyone in Eurotech has a great deal to gain from the program: the students gain a pragmatic, highly contextualized, international education that prepares them for the global economy of the twenty-first century; American business gains in being able to hire young engineers who draw on solid academic and practical training and who bring communicative abilities, foreign language skills, and cross-cultural awareness to the workplace; and the university's teachers and administrators gain from industry support that translates into better education, increased funds, improved public relations, and more international connections.
Collaboration between language departments and professional schools demands of all players great flexibility and a fundamental willingness to transcend their particular mental framework. In a way, I would even say, it calls for a special kind of cross-cultural competence that none of us is required to develop as long as we don't leave the familiar grounds of our own departments and disciplines.
For many of us, it may be easier to cooperate with colleagues in the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Indeed, at about twenty universities and colleges across the country, the links between language and various liberal arts and sciences disciplines have created a much-needed integrated learning environment and an extraordinarily stimulating intellectual climate for students and faculty members alike. I would like to describe one such program.
The Linkage through Language program consists of three components:
1. The export model, in which a foreign language section--in either German, French, Italian, Russian, or Spanish--is added as a fourth hour to a three-hour course in the humanities or social sciences. In this fourth hour, selected foreign language texts that highlight topics of the discipline course are discussed in the foreign language. Students taking LTL export courses have, as a rule, completed four semesters of a foreign language or demonstrated an equivalent proficiency. Western civilization courses for freshmen are offered with Spanish and French trailer sections.
2. The import model, in which faculty members from various disciplines who are proficient in a foreign language give guest lectures in intermediate and advanced FL classes and thus add multidisciplinary components to the language course.
3. The co-curricular enhancement model, which each semester features a series of events that focus on a foreign culture. This enrichment program includes film series, colloquia, exhibits, and so on that are thematically linked to courses offered during the semester.
In such an LAC program, students enjoy the opportunity to use and expand their foreign language skills in the area of their interest (or their major); they appreciate gaining a deeper understanding of the course content and develop an increased regard for the importance of authentic materials; and they gain a new perspective on learning as they discover that their teachers are learners too. Faculty members consider the integrative aspect of LAC collaboration with colleagues in another discipline mutually beneficial and inspiring; they have learned about different teaching styles and as a consequence have modified their own teaching, and they have discovered new projects for their research through this interdisciplinary experience.
What happens in such LAC classes, one may ask, that would foster cultural competence, contribute to students' international perspective, and increase students' motivation to continue with their language study? I would regularly join a colleague in history who speaks excellent German and offers a course on the Habsburg empire. In his class, conducted in English, of course, there were usually about twenty students; our LTL section in German attracted seven or eight. I sat in his history class; my colleague attended the weekly LTL sessions. Together we selected the supplementary materials to be used with the foreign language group. These German materials (e.g., letters, memoirs, political manifestos, legal texts, poems, essays, feature films, historical videos, slides) furthered the students' understanding of historical issues, helped maintain and improve their reading skills, and sharpened their insight into cultural processes. The design of the course syllabus is crucial to a successful integration of content and language. We worked out the weekly assignments very carefully to guarantee intellectual links between the discipline class and the language section. We prepared weekly study guides including glossaries, prereading, reading, and postreading activities to accompany each foreign language text used in the LTL section; and together we set grading policies in both the discipline course and the LTL section.
When my colleague gave his introductory lectures, explaining the importance of the Habsburg empire and familiarizing the students with the territory it encompassed over the centuries, we chose two kinds of activities for the LTL class. The students were given historical maps of the empire and could review what they had learned in the history course by identifying countries, cities, boundaries, and so forth and their German names, names that are certainly not part of the vocabulary of a regular third-year German student. The map exercises were followed by the reading and discussion of an enlightening and entertaining text, the short and lexically easy poem "Mein Vaterland Österreich," by H. C. Artmann, which, in the form of a poetic listing, contrasts the exotic-sounding names and titles of all former Habsburg lands with the prosaic names of today's nine small provinces making up Austria. The poem wonderfully captures the rise and fall of the empire, and Artmann's concluding line "Tu, felix Austria, juble und jodle" "You, fortunate Austria, rejoice and yodel' invites discussions about the Habsburgs' famous marriage policy ("Tu, felix Austria, nube!") and the poet's play on words that in effect reveals his support of Austria as a modern republic.
Linkage through Language and similar languages-across-the-curriculum programs at various schools have attracted attention to foreign languages, brought more students into language department classes, and persuaded a good number of these students to opt for a stay abroad. These programs have brought together faculty members who worked on the same campus but who barely exchanged glances. Senior faculty members in particular tend to find such joint ventures invigorating and pedagogically enlightening. Joint ownership of an interdisciplinary project may indeed be the best guarantee for institutionalization of the project so that more students will graduate with adequate preparation for intercultural communication.
Some readers may immediately note that such curricular change demands a great deal of energy, resources, and perseverance, and it may not fit their notions of reform in language departments. Some might be even more inclined to lose interest once they realize what a great amount of work goes into the preparation of these projects and into the writing of grant applications necessary for such innovation in the first place. I believe that any constructive internationalization agenda driven by language departments will always result in plenty of work, and LAC programs are no exception. A healthy dose of realism is certainly necessary even though it is the spirit of idealism and enthusiasm that tends to drive reform.
To keep some perspective, I want to list some important variables to watch out for as committed faculty members contemplate introducing LAC on their campus:
What we need for a good-faith start, however, is serious reflection on the priorities that traditional language and literature departments maintain. For some, identity is at stake, and redefining what has become seemingly natural is never easy. Reaching out to other departments and university divisions for teaching purposes may be more of a challenge than persuading language faculty members of the benefits of interdisciplinary research.
No matter what foreign language departments decide to do, in every case the key to success in language-culture learning will be faculty members' willingness to undergo a special acculturation--a process that requires an ability to understand and interpret information about another disciplinary culture (e.g., social science, business, engineering) that stimulates and results in changes in perception, and, of course, that leads to self-reflection. Perhaps only then can we with confidence teach cross-cultural competence and an international perspective.
The author is Associate Professor of German and Director of the Center for the Study of Languages at Rice University. This article is based on her presentation at ADFL Summer Seminar East, 4-6 June 1998, in New York City.
1These introductory remarks are, in large part, a reprint of the author's comments in the first issue of Orbis Linguae, the newsletter of the Rice Center for the Study of Languages.
2For an excellent overview and evaluation of LAC programs across the nation, see Adams.
3More than a dozen colleges and universities in the United States have successfully established LAC programs over the past decade. Among the private and public institutions that offer their students innovative LAC approaches to language learning are Agnes Scott Coll.; Brown Univ.; Dickinson Coll.; Earlham Coll.; Monterey Inst. for Intl. Studies; Pacific Lutheran Coll.; Saint Olaf Coll.; State Univ. of New York, Binghamton; Univ. of California, Santa Cruz; Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs; Univ. of Minnesota, Twin Cities; and Univ. of Rhode Island.
4For more detailed information about the Eurotech program, see De Vries and Long; Kecht and Strack, "Cultural and Communicative Aspects," "Der Doppelstudiengang," "Jump-Starting."
5Eurotech is, in its curricular outline, modeled after the very successful International Engineering Program at the University of Rhode Island but also has its own characteristics, such as special technical courses for experiential learning. Over the past years several universities across the United States have started international engineering programs, but few offer integrated and tightly linked curricula leading to dual degrees.
Adams, Thomas M. "Languages across the Curriculum: Taking Stock," ADFL Bulletin 28.1 (1996): 9-19. [Show Article]
Artmann, H. C. "Mein Vaterland Österreich." Lächelud über Seine Bestatter: Österreich. Ed. Ulrich Weinzierl. Munich: Piper, 1989. 20.
De Vries, Herman J., and Richard P. Long. "The Eurotech Module: A Curricular Innovation for German Instruction." Foreign Language Annals 30.3 (1997): 369-76.
Kecht, Maria-Regina, and Thomas Strack. "Cultural and Communicative Aspects in the LSP Curriculum: German and Engineering at the University of Connecticut." Germanics under Construction: Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Prospects. Ed. Joerg Roche and Thomas Salumets. Munich: Iudicium, 1996. 210-19.
------. "Der Doppelstudiengang 'German and Engineering' an der University of Connecticut: Beurteilungsinstrumente und 'Kontinuierlicher Verbesserungsprozeß.'" Fremdsprachen und Hochschule 46 (1996): 102-10.
------. "Jump-Starting International Careers in Technology: German and Engineering at the University of Connecticut." Education Forum 15.2 (1995): 94-101.
Krueger, Merle, and Frank Ryan, eds. Language and Content: Discipline- and Content-Based Approaches to Language Study. Lexington: Heath, 1993.
Moore, Sarah Jane, and Christine A. Morfit, eds. Language and International Studies: A Richard Lambert Perspective. Washington: Natl. Foreign Lang. Center, 1993.
Seeba, Hinrich. "Cultural versus Linguistic Competence: Bilingualism, Language in Exile, and the Future of German Studies." German Quarterly 69.4 (1996): 401-13.
© 1999 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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