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THE United States Department of Education's Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language Program,1 now in existence for over twenty-five years, offers small grants for institutions of higher education to encourage initiation or strengthening of international components in their undergraduate curricula. In its earliest years the grant funds were used only for strengthening nonlanguage curricula, but since the early 1980s every grant has included both language and nonlanguage components. Over the years some five hundred grants have been awarded, providing an important incentive for internationalizing undergraduate instructional programs and encouraging internationalization across a broad spectrum of the American higher education system.
Despite its longevity, the Title VI undergraduate program had never been systematically evaluated. Some applied and policy-oriented research on international education for the undergraduate has been done in the last two decades, however, giving potential evaluators and researchers important context for further studies (see Kelleher; Lambert; Ruther). More recently the Department of Education and, more particularly, Congress have been requesting evaluative information about all Title VI programs and, specifically, about the relation between the federal funding and results. Our research undertaking responded to the converging research interests of campus international education administrators and the government's information needs about program impact and grantee performance. The resulting report was published in June 1999 (Schneider and Burn); this article summarizes the language instruction aspects of the report and, in addition, incorporates data from a 1998 MLA survey that was not available for the June 1999 report.
Research Plan
The general approach to the research called for a questionnaire to be distributed to a sample composed of the 107 projects funded in alternate years between 1982 and 1990. Additional information was obtained in site visits to half of the institutions in the survey. The research was conducted by a research team of six and was overseen by an advisory board; all team and board members were established experts in international education.
We anticipated that data collected with the questionnaire and in site visits would be supplemented by information in the applications, budgets, and reports for the Title VI-funded projects. However, these sources of information proved impossible to obtain. Consequently, the questionnaire results and the site visit information were the principal data sources, with little additional corroborative evidence. The full report includes information about the method of sampling, the list of responding institutions, and the questionnaire and the site visit protocol. About 75% of the institutions in the sample responded to the questionnaire--in all, some eighty former grantees. Fifty-one (64%) of the respondents received site visits, resulting in a wealth of information about the projects funded and about the changes in both curriculum and the campus environment for international education at their institutions.
General Findings
The research results indicate that the program's effect has been strong and long-lasting, for both curriculum development--including language instruction--and campus environment. Nearly 80% of the survey's respondents reported a high overall impact (a 4 or 5 on a scale of 1 to 5). None gave a rating of 1 (low impact), and less than 7% gave their grants' impact a rating of 2 overall. Over 90% indicated that their institutions are currently supporting the programs that had received Title VI funding five or more years previously.
The survey data on course offerings and enrollments and on the campus environment fully corroborate the overall rating on impact. Grantees used a variety of strategies and combinations of strategies for achieving their goals. The study indicates that the "604" program has had a positive effect on many elements deemed critical to the development and strengthening of international components in American higher education--institutional leadership, the salience of the interdisciplinary, and foreign language program development appear to have been crucial in successful grants.
Pregrant Conditions
The respondents included many types of institutions--public and private, large research institutions, small four-year liberal arts colleges, large urban universities, small and large rural universities, and community colleges. Sizes ranged from fewer than a thousand students (seven institutions) to sixty-two thousand (one institution). To learn about conditions before the institutions received their Title VI grants, we asked for information about their pregrant international education programs and institutional environments. Fewer than 40% of the respondents reported having an international or area studies major, minor, or other kind of concentration, and only 19% had any kind of internationally oriented course as a graduation requirement. Fewer than 25% listed offerings in seven or more foreign languages, 10% reported offering only one or two or none; and 25% reported that foreign language offerings were limited to French, Spanish, and/or German. Fewer than 40% had a formally designated adviser for students interested in international studies or a central office for international studies, and most of those who did were at larger institutions.2
General Objectives and Outcomes
The general foci of the grants varied. About 35% of respondents were building an "area" studies program, and more than half of those focused on Asia. While a substantial portion (21%) specified "international" or "global" studies, another strong percentage (24%) said that their focus was "curriculum development." Another question asked all respondents about language focus. Consistent with the data on area focus, respondents specified Asian languages (35%) more often than they did any other language group, followed by attention to European languages (26%).
Most of these Title VI grantees reported a variety of grant objectives; in fact, half had four or more. Most of the data on the outcomes parallel the initial objectives, both at the end of the grant and in 1996-97. Of the respondents, 75% initially planned to strengthen an existing program; 81% felt that they had achieved that objective by the end of the grant, and even after several years had intervened there was little decrease in that reported achievement. In the longer term a few objectives were actually achieved by institutions that had not planned for them: the improvement of linkages, intra-institutionally and with foreign institutions, and the establishment of new majors and minors. While three respondents had reported no pregrant languages, all respondents reported having some language offerings in 1996-97. The questionnaire data on objectives show that the addition of at least one new language was planned by 43% and achieved by 37%. Details on overall language offerings demonstrate stronger successes on this dimension, with increased numbers of institutions offering at least twenty of the twenty-eight languages reported by the respondents.
Courses and Enrollments
The questionnaire asked specifically how many courses were added, how many were revised, and what the enrollments for those courses were in 1996-97. Slightly above 60% of all respondents were able to provide course information; for languages, the average program offered 2.8 new and 2.9 revised courses. Consistent with the questionnaire data on target languages, at least 31% of the new courses were Asian, more than any other category, while more than half of the revised courses were European. A number of grants did not propose to add new languages but, rather, focused on improved instruction for languages already offered.
The questionnaires' enrollment data for 1996-97 show substantial continuing student interest. For the forty-seven institutions reporting information on their grant-funded language courses (new and revised), the average 1996-97 enrollment per course (including all sections) was 39, and the range was from 2 to 343. A more complete picture is provided by data from the Modern Language Association's periodic surveys, from which MLA staff members have been able to extract data on each grantee institution's enrollments in target languages before the grant, at the end of the grant, and in the next postgrant survey.
Interestingly, the MLA data show that of the 146 reporting lines (some grantees focused on only one language, others on as many as five), 36 showed no enrollments for the pregrant period. The combined results for each language are shown in table 1. The reader may ask why this table includes fewer than the twenty-eight languages mentioned earlier and why languages with no enrollments are listed. On the first point, ten of the languages offered by one or more respondents were not targeted by any grantees. For the second question we can only guess at possible answers. Some two-thirds of the grantees with no postgrant enrollments reported to the MLA, according to the questionnaires, are at institutions that planned to develop self-instructional teaching methodologies. All are less commonly taught and may still be offered, but not in a way that their enrollments would be picked up from registrars' data, because such low-enrollment classes are often taught under "independent study" or general linguistics rubrics. Consequently, it is likely that many of the enrollments in this table are underreported. Nonetheless, the results are interesting, with a 17% overall increase for all the languages reported--another indicator of the program's impact. If the enrollments for French, German, and Spanish are excluded, the increase is over 50%. It is also interesting that the majority of grantees for nearly all languages--including German, Russian, and Spanish--show increases in their enrollments between the two time periods. Comparisons of the increases for these respondents with the recent MLA data on enrollment changes may be encouraging (nationally, an 8.3% increase for Spanish and a 7.5% increase for Chinese, for example; see "Prime Numbers") but not necessarily appropriate, because the time periods vary--some grants having been awarded in 1982 and others as recently as 1990.
We also obtained information about the larger range of language offerings on each campus. For all the languages targeted, the number of institutions offering each increased; in other words, a grantee funded for the initiation of Chinese may have been sufficiently encouraged by the response to have subsequently added Japanese. The increase was strongest for Japanese, which was offered on thirty-seven campuses before the grant and went to sixty in 1996-97, a 62% increase. Chinese showed the next largest jump, by sixteen, or more than 40%, followed by Russian with an increase of eleven, closely followed by Arabic. Increases were recorded even for the commonly taught French (+2), German (+4), and Spanish (+4), and for some nontargeted languages as well (Greek, Irish, and Kazakh). Although the survey responses were sometimes incomplete, table 2 provides highlights, demonstrating positive spin-offs from the grants' attention to language instruction. However, the reader should keep in mind that many grants were for improvements in instruction for languages already offered, not for the initiation of more languages. Again, more details are available in the full report.
Strategies
An important research question was which strategies helped respondents attain the strong impact that so many reported. Grantees used many tactical combinations in pursuing their objectives; the average respondent used thirteen of the twenty-two possibilities listed in the questionnaire. Nine of the twenty-two possibilities clearly concerned language instruction, while others, such as faculty retooling, library development, addition of new staff members, and strengthening orientation for study abroad, surely could be. During site visits staff members, especially senior administrators and nonlanguage faculty members, frequently cited strategies for change in language instruction as major contributors to the success of the grant. Staff members for at least thirty-seven of the sites visited, and often people other than those who had filled in the questionnaire, were eager to talk about the grants' effect on language instruction. Roughly in the order of frequency, the following are the language strategies most often cited:
Many additional strategies were mentioned in the site visits, among them TV programming from abroad, improvements in language lab facilities, foreign film festivals, more intensive language offerings, training of nonlanguage faculty members to participate in languages across the curriculum programs, and improved training for language teaching assistants. Several of these experiments in the early 1980s provided important models for the language-teaching community. In a more general vein, several interviewees noted that the grant-inspired improvements in foreign language instruction contributed in an important way to more pervasive campus internationalization.
Adding instructional staff was cited as a useful strategy by nearly 40% of the respondents. These findings are interesting because Title VI funds rarely included enough salary money for a full position, so this strategy had to be accomplished with institutional contributions. The site visits indicated that few of these new positions had been dropped, and in subsequent years more were added. The "initial position in Chinese [or Japanese] is now at least two," was an oft-cited example and a notable demonstration of a Title VI leveraging effect. However, looking at the detail of the MLA enrollment data, in those instances where enrollments in languages such as Chinese have dropped to zero, we must wonder whether it is a matter of how the enrollment data are recorded or whether the only instructor for the language has been dropped more recently.
Other Changes
In addition to information about direct outcomes, the survey asked about other changes related to internationalization that might be attributed to the Title VI-funded projects. Whether the reported changes resulted from momentum or impetus generated by Title VI or whether they are coincidental could be debated. Perhaps these are the characteristics to which the term seed money is most applicable, serving, as several suggested, to speed up an internationalization process that was already under way. In any case, for most of the characteristics covered in the study, the changes reported by the end of the grant clearly continued five or more years after the grant was over.
The survey asked a number of questions about the campus environment, both in curriculum and in administrative arrangements, first, before the grant, then by the end of the grant, and continuing to the present in every respect covered in the questionnaire. Particularly relevant to language instruction, the proportion of respondents with a language requirement for graduation increased from 46% to 60% (from 36 to 47 institutions), higher than the recent nationwide percentage of 48% (for all higher education institutions) estimated from data collected by the Modern Language Association (Brod and Huber). Among several developments in institutional administration, by 1996-97 81% of the respondents had an office for study abroad, and fifty-four of the respondents had a formally designated adviser for students doing international or area studies, an increase of nearly 150%, compared with twenty-two at the beginning of their grants.
Looking further at indirect impacts related to language instruction, we discovered during the site visits that not only were more overseas study programs established but student participation also increased at an even greater rate. At a few institutions we heard of tenfold increases since the grant. Several faculty members reported increases in language enrollments that they attributed directly to the stimulus of increased study-abroad options. One project director noted an important linkage between development of content-based language instruction on campus and improved study-abroad participation; others saw relations between increases in the number of students going abroad and enrollments in advanced language classes (after participants' return).
Again, the site visits revealed developments--apparent spin-offs--in addition to those already mentioned. Among those most relevant to language instruction were
Project Continuation
Returning to seemingly direct impacts, we asked whether institutional support for the project had diminished at the end of the grant and in 1996-97. Fewer than 10% (of 80 respondents) reported diminished support even in 1996-97; in other words, as noted earlier, at least five years after the termination of their grants more than 90% of the respondents were receiving institutional support at or above the grant-period level, indicating that they were firmly established at their institutions, that the seeds had indeed set down strong roots.
The site visits elicited many thoughts about the salient institutional ingredients for project continuation and about strengths or obstacles for institutions developing international studies programs. Responses to all the articulations of the question put faculty interest at or close to the top of the list--responses consistent with the grants' emphasis on faculty development as a strategy. Campus leadership was ranked not far behind faculty interest. Improvements in language instruction were considered key. However, only when the discussion moved to obstacles did issues explicitly related to language instruction arise, among them low enrollments in specialized language courses and lack of relation between language instruction and any major or concentration. The positive and negative possibilities--and their sources--should be of interest to future planners of international education innovation; more are described in the full report.
The Importance of Title VI
The positive long-term and even pervasive institutional responses to the small amount of Title VI funding are clear from the research results, although many of the indirect impacts were likely in process anyway, "signs of our times," albeit at a slower rate. Nonetheless we wondered how the results, direct and indirect, from such relatively low outside funding could seem so strong. Why, we asked in our site visits, is Title VI important? Again, the responses were thoughtful and thought provoking.
Many interviewees found that success in a competition for Title VI funds (or any government funding) bestowed an important sense of legitimacy on the project, both within the institution (giving the program validity vis-à-vis the administration) and in the larger academic community. Having been legitimized, the project then was able to leverage more funds from within the institution. The legitimacy and consequent leveraging effect frequently extended to other funders and even the business community. Senior administrators noted that the grants gave faculty members added and tangible incentives, and faculty members felt that the grants persuaded their administrations to give greater support to their efforts--grants make the institution pay attention.
From both faculty members and administrators we heard about more-practical attributes, such as institutions' need for essential seed money to help start the change process and to foster innovative activities that otherwise would not be done. One project director noted that the prestige of the grant was helpful in facilitating interdisciplinary activity. The importance of and obvious long-term payoff from Title VI-funded released time for faculty members to work on curriculum revision were other elements cited. One faculty member noted the added importance of seed money to demonstrate student interest in new courses and more language offerings to his administration.
From the information garnered by this research an obvious conclusion is that the program has had an impact on foreign language instruction at the great majority of grantee institutions in the survey. Although a high proportion of the projects may have been initiated by faculty members in the social sciences, language faculty members had to be fully involved with the changes wrought by the grants. Indeed, the research results underline the importance of the interdisciplinary, intra-institutional linkages in successful projects. The information available about the program's effectiveness, both here and in the full report, indicates that many of the strategies for improvement have worked and are worthy of consideration at the full spectrum of American postsecondary institutions.
The report makes a number of recommendations--for institutions of higher education considering any strengthening of their international orientation, for the United States Department of Education, and for researchers--on the basis of the findings of this research on the Title VI Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language Program.
2It should be noted, however, that on some campuses the central office for international studies deals primarily with study abroad rather than on-campus international education.
Kelleher, Ann. Learning from Success: Campus Case Studies in International Program Development. New York: Lang, 1996.
Lambert, Richard. International Studies and the Undergraduate. Washington: Amer. Council on Educ., 1989.
"Prime Numbers." Chronicle of Higher Education 5 Nov. 1999: A14.
Ruther, Nancy. "The Role of Federal Programs in Internationalizing the U.S. Higher Education System from 1958 to 1988." Diss. U of Massachusetts, 1994.
Schneider, Ann Imlah, and Barbara B. Burn. Federal Funding for International Studies: Does It Help? Does It Matter? Amherst: U of Massachusetts Intl. Programs Office, 1999.
© 2001 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
| Enrollments Reported by Grantees to MLA | Total Number of Grantees for Each Target Language | Grantees Reporting an Increase | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Target Languages | Pregrant | Postgranta | Percentage Change | ||
| Arabic | 18 | 124 | 589 | 5 | 5 |
| Chinese | 1,467 | 2,166 | 48 | 17 | 10 |
| French | 11,129 | 11,146 | 0.2 | 26 | 11 |
| German | 4,432 | 4,173 | -6 | 14 | 8 |
| Hebrew | 8 | 17 | 113 | 1 | 1 |
| Hindi | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | |
| Indonesian | 0 | 24 | 1 | 1 | |
| Italian | 163 | 324 | 99 | 3 | 3 |
| Japanese | 1,581 | 2,570 | 63 | 23 | 15 |
| Korean | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | |
| Polish | 4 | 9 | 125 | 2 | 1 |
| Portuguese | 87 | 125 | 44 | 4 | 2 |
| Russian | 723 | 836 | 16 | 12 | 7 |
| Spanish | 15,143 | 19,171 | 27 | 28 | 21 |
| Swahili | 29 | 38 | 31 | 4 | 2 |
| Thai | 0 | 27 | 2 | 2 | |
| Vietnamese | 0 | 45 | 1 | 1 | |
| Yoruba | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | |
| Total | 34,784 | 40,795 | 17 | 146 | 90 |
| Total Number of Campuses on Which Language Was Taught | Amount / Percentage Increase (Pregrant to 1996-97) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Target Language | Total Number of Grantees for Each Target Language | Before Grant (76 Respondents) |
End of Grant (75 Respondents) |
1996-97 (79 Respondents) |
|
| Japanese | 23 | 37 | 51 | 60 | 23 / 62 |
| Chinese | 17 | 38 | 48 | 54 | 16 / 41 |
| Russian | 12 | 48 | 55 | 59 | 11 / 23 |
| Arabic | 5 | 8 | 12 | 18 | 10 / 125 |
| African (Hausa, Swahili, Yoruba) |
5 | 2 | 6 | 10 | 8 / 400 |
| Korean | 1 | 4 | 5 | 9 | 5 / 125 |
| Vietnamese | 1 | - | 2 | 5 | 5 / - |
| German | 15 | 68 | 69 | 72 | 4 / 6 |
| Spanish | 28 | 74 | 76 | 78 | 4 / 5 |
| Indonesian | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 2 / 100 |
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