32, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 1-3
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From the Editor
ELIZABETH B. WELLES
THIS fall, an article in the New York Times, “All aboard the Foreign Language Express,” described the way a “linguistic iceberg” has “barged rather suddenly into the American workplace.” Some Americans are learning languages to improve their businesses, and some businesses are teaching their employees languages other than English—not so much because of need to communicate with speakers of other languages in the rest of the world as because those speakers are here. The article notes that the need is greatest in Spanish, but Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian, and Hindi are also in demand. “English, of course, is the lingua franca of the global economy,” but American executives who can get by with English are finding out that linguistic ignorance can be a disadvantage, “while just a little effort can pay big dividends.” For example, IBM offered its employees a two-day immersion program in Japanese. “The idea was to teach them a few common greetings and also a little bit about Japanese customs.” The language emergency has hit not just executives and professionals but also the rank-and-file workers at banks, telephone companies, hospitals, police stations, and construction sites. “As more immigrants pour into the country and as more Americans do deal with foreign companies, learning a foreign language has increasingly become a career plus, and sometimes a career must.”
This article says a great deal about language learning in the United States as well as about the American attitude toward languages. That the usefulness of languages for business and work should be the subject of an article in a major newspaper is indeed cause for reflection. In what other country would such information be considered newsworthy? As the article points out, the motivating force behind language learning is strictly pragmatic and tied to—money, career advancement, and partially to image and saving face. Americans are waking up to the language need because it is walking through the door. Trade with Latin America may be one compelling reason to learn Spanish, but another is that Spanish-speaking customers, employees, students, and so forth are a growing presence around the corner. And typically, as we see from the article, Americans want a quick fix, the two-day immersion in Japanese, or “just a little effort,” hardly the long, connected sequences of language learning and study in the target culture advocated by experts in the field. But such articles—and there have been a fair number, ranging from those on Spanish and Vietnamese for a ministry in Iowa to those on Japanese and French for dentists in New York—are a good thing, because they reinforce and make visible to the everyone-speaks-English group one good reason to wish they had learned a foreign language better in high school or college.
The situation is obviously much more complicated than this article suggests. Any consideration of language learning in the United States must always be put in the context of the majority English-speaking population that can buy anything and talk to almost anyone without bothering to learn any other language. English has been an incredibly strong unifying agent in this country; it is quite amazing that you can drive from Maine to Arizona and always (more or less) be understood. In a nation of immigrants, it is odd that the knowledge of other languages doesn’t seem, if not urgent, at least interesting and desirable. Yet since languages are attached to foreignness, languages spoken by immigrants become signs of difference, and as many immigrants take menial jobs in order to survive, foreign languages become signs of low status. Most immigrants strive to get rid of their foreignness as soon as possible, learn English, and insist their children know English well, because that knowledge means entrance into full participation in American life.
An acquired foreign language is another matter. Long the mark of an educated person, knowledge of other languages was once the preserve of the elite, providing access to prestigious cultures of the West; to the classics: the Bible, Dante, Racine, Goethe, and Cervantes; to a cultural haut monde that our newly rich and educated wished to join. In the nineteenth century, teaching of languages in schools and colleges was somewhat sporadic; only the most prestigious schools offered a continuous course of study, with few faculty members. But by 1883 there was enough of a cadre of departments to form the MLA, which was established as an assertion that the (scholarly and philological) value of modern languages was equal to that of Latin and Greek. This is not the place to delve into the rather short but fascinating history of foreign language education in this country; suffice it to say that that education has been strongly influenced by domestic politics and economy and by international trade and world events; that language teaching was almost completely in Western languages until the last quarter of the twentieth century; and that enrollments in higher education were very small until after World War II. Enrollments in foreign language courses rose dramatically after Sputnik was launched in 1957, languished in the 1970s with the removal of language requirements, and began to rise again after President Carter's Commission on Foreign Languages and International Studies of 1979.
More recent developments in the language field are the result of an increasing student population and changes in demographics: college students are more diverse than ever in preparation and linguistic background. They are also career-minded, technologically savvy, and likely to be nontraditional, that is, older than twenty-two and working. The university has shed some of its ivory tower graces ýor a more streamlined corporate organization that often seems to be more concerned about the bottom line than about scholarship and education per se. Thus the tension between the motivation to study a language for career-oriented, pragmatic use and the desire to learn a language to gain knowledge of another culture has become intensified in classrooms across the country as language departments seek to redefine themselves in ways that will serve their students, their institutions, and the educational ideals of the faculty. The predominance of English both nationally and internationally and questions about the need to learn other languages have come to permeate both educational and social institutions in the United States today. In this ADFL Bulletin both John Edwards and Humphrey Tonkin take up the complexity of these issues, discussing their history and emerging paradoxes.
Edwards describes the lack of importance ascribed to English as a language in Elizabethan times and points out that the popularity of any language resides in its perceived cultural and economic capitol. He draws distinctions between instrumental (pragmatic) and integrative (desire for knowledge) motivations and teases out the place of favorable attitudes and positive motivations in language learners. He argues that in a country that approves of “immediately applicable learning” even the instrumental motivation for learning languages loses its edge “in a world made more and more safe for anglophones.” The solutions Edwards proposes for those of us who think language knowledge is important are satisfaction with the small clientele of integrative learners and the hope that the interest in instrumentality will rise in the face of growing commercially active populations, particularly of Spanish speakers within our borders. But he questions why the study of Spanish has not grown in proportion to the strength and significance of the Hispanic community and notes that, either despite or because of the multiethnic status of the United States population, this significance has instead strengthened the position of English both domestically and globally. What has happened is that other languages are viewed with suspicion. Contrary to expectations, Spanish, the one language that could bolster the role of other languages, has been attacked as political bodies reassert their Englishness.
Tonkin looks at the predominance of English from a different angle. He points out that while more and more people are speaking English, a greater number around the world are also learning other languages: “Americans are being left behind.” While English has acquired a global status in diplomacy, business, university instruction, and the Internet, it has become the language of an elite that is associated with these institutions. Tonkin compares the widening gap between rich and poor to the widening linguistic gap between those who know English and those who don't, the disenfranchised whose loyalty to their local linguistic identities can be the cause of eruptions of violence. Americans tend to equate economic competition with freedom, but that equation does not work in the poorer nations. Tonkin urges us “go beyond the boundaries of our elite universe” (i.e., the English universe) “to engage the people at its fringes and beyond, in terms, and in languages, that they understand.” Fearing that American dependence on English will prevent us from understanding others first-hand, he reminds us that as academics we need language to move beyond our own context for deeper intellectual exchange.
The other articles in this bulletin confront how forces outside the academy can affect undergraduate and graduate curriculum and departmental management. Andrew Debicki offers a revealing portrait of his graduate training in comparison to that of today. Discussing the appearance of polarization between research and teaching in our institutional system, he emphasizes the importance of both in whatever the institutional setting, argues that “the discovery of new knowledge should underlie the work of all postsecondary teachers.” Acknowledging that attention paid to theory in graduate schools may have produced esoteric specialities, he believes, from his own experience, that it can be a positive intellectual catalyst and belongs in graduate training. Cultural studies, as a branch of theory, might well be applied to undergraduate programs as a means to reinvigorate teaching of the great variety of today's students confronting the global society. The job market, always a concern of graduate programs, can grow, as can the profession, which will flourish if its members take a central role in general education and participate actively in cross-disciplinary programs. By introducing a large percentage of students to the advantages of studying language, literature, and culture, language programs can gain visibility and influence on campus.
Returning to American pragmatism, Benjamin Robinson puts forward the model of the tactical humanist who can take advantage of a society and an academy grounded in the useful while maintaining the values of languages and humanities. Robinson asks, Given the mentality of corporatized administrators, how does the language department “set about properly designing a curriculum that distinguishes us as a unique and valuable administrative unit and that also integrates us into the broad, consensual mandates of humanities education?” His answer is that the department gains uniqueness through the language it teaches, because that language is the key to international business and development, to cross-cultural understanding, and to interpretive and communicative skills in the public sphere. The curricular design the author proposes is a hybrid course in language and culture based on his experiences teaching in a first-year German class simultaneously with a new core course entitled Myth and Modernity: Culture in Modern Germany. The essay concludes with a reflection of the tactical humanist in regard to curricular, departmental, and institutional conditions—and private values.
The department as a matrix of conflicting interests and hard decisions is the landscape Charles Stivale portrays in his essay on the responsibilities of the chair. He discusses the complications that arise in tenure and other personnel decisions and raises questions about how to apply criteria for advancement that vary from one dean to the next, about the claim that teaching counts in tenure decisions when the bottom line really rests on research and publication, and about the role of mentoring junior faculty members in these ambiguous circumstances. Another issue is the chair's loyalty to the institution and department versus the chair's responsibility to the profession, particularly when taking a side in a professional debate runs counter to the interests of the home institution. Further, Stivale speaks of the difficulty of managing a department while leaving oneself enough time and energy to attend to scholarly development, a crucial ingredient to a chair's health and efficiency. Chairs should serve as a model to their faculty in performing research while keeping in balance the job of chairing.
Two essays deal with new programs in Spanish that, having a very large clientele, have their own set of problems and opportunities. One program is the teaching of Hispanic students who come from a variety of backgrounds and have different linguistic characteristics. While most programs designed for such students have grown up in large institutions near a strong Hispanic population, the efforts at Peace College, which Ann Fountain elucidates, show how a program can be effectively developed even in a small woman's college in a state with a relatively new Spanish-speaking population. She writes that meeting the need of this new group of students was also an occasion to sensitize the entire college to Hispanic culture and to add another element of diversity to campus life. Through support for travel to Mexico and United States Hispanic communities, programs for volunteering and interning with local government and businesses, and many campus activities ranging from prominent guest lecturers to instruction in preparing salsa, the college has built a substantial cultural and academic program accessible and beneficial to both Hispanic and non-Hispanic students.
In contrast, the writing program described by Robert Strong and Joseph Fruth at the University of Minnesota has benefited from the resources made available by a large university to carry out its mandate for a campus-wide writing requirement; in this case, funds and expertise were supplied to set up a writing center for students of Spanish. The sheer number of the department's advanced students (seven hundred majors and minors) contributed to the viability of providing services for teaching writing in a language other than English—a first for the university. Located conveniently in the department, the center is furnished with computer and reference materials, staffed with writing consultants, and open for a variety of hours. The staff, made up mostly of advanced graduate students, is undoubtedly the cornerstone on which the success of the center rests. Criteria for their selection were carefully established and efforts toward their professionalization were made through workshops on the teaching of writing and through connections with other writing-support resources on campus. The authors point out the advantages of the role of consultant, who can act more like a coach working collaboratively with students and less like a teacher who must also evaluate them. Even after one year, students who have taken advantage of the center are learning more and getting better academic results, and the department has further benefited by the development of an esprit de corps among these undergraduates.
The range of topics here, from the global to the curricular, demonstrates how language professionals must keep a number of perspectives in mind at the same time. Public attitudes about languages are as important to the well-being of the profession as personnel decisions, curriculum revision, and attention to student needs. While programs like those mentioned in the New York Times article will take care of one segment of the population's linguistic ignorance, and while global English is a fact of life, our programs in classrooms, communities, and abroad continue to offer students that window into another culture that is unique, essential, and liberating.
Mohn, Tanya. “Workplace: All aboard the Foreign Language Express.” New York Times on the Web. 11 Oct. 2000. 15 Dec. 2000 http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/11/business/11LANG.html.
© 2001 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 32, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 1-3 |
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