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THE intent of this anthology of essays is to provide information and advice to chairs of foreign language departments about prominent changes on the landscape of the field that have entered the chair’s domain since the publication of the first Chairing the Foreign Language and Literature Department seven years ago. The 1994 volume was intended as a handbook needed especially by those who had recently assumed the position of department chair. It was a consolidation of much of the thinking about departmental leadership and management that had been the purview of ADFL seminars and the Bulletin since their inception in 1969 and of the Workshops for New Chairs since 1991. As Ann Bugliani, the editor of the 1994 collection remarked, few chairs receive any training for the job. Most faculty members who become chairs have succeeded as teachers and scholars but are unprepared as administrators to deal with either the thicket of institutional bureaucracy or the range of departmental responsibilities, such as hiring and promoting faculty members, planning curriculum, working with the dean, and allocating scarce departmental resources. Chairs can still find in the first volume a mine of information, strategies, and encouragement to illuminate the right path, however dark the wood. This new volume is meant not to take the place of the old one but, rather, to enrich its already very thick descriptions and well-modulated advice.
Much has changed in the last seven years. Are faculty members supplied with typewriters? (Riegel 64) was one of the questions in the first volume’s “Checklist for Self-Study for Departments of Foreign Languages and Literatures,” meticulously updated for the current volume by Arthur Mosher. But more important than such anachronisms are the political, legal, technological, and demographic developments that now occupy the terrain of higher education and affect the way languages are taught and departments are organized. Thus it is necessary for chairs and departments to maintain a flexible and open-minded attitude, be willing to learn new approaches and skills, and listen carefully to the world around them. Chief among the problems is the difficulty change poses: embracing the new may be viewed with fear (who has not been terrified of a computer?) as new programs and ideas seem to edge out strongly held, time-honored values.
In planning this new collection, we offered the authors of the previous one the chance to update their articles: nine of the twenty-one did. Some brought their essays up to date (Brittain; Garcia, “First Year”; Jarvis), while others took the opportunity to explicate how new developments affected the topics of their earlier work and chose to write largely new pieces (Byrnes; Quinn; Schrier). Three contributors to the 1994 edition look specifically at change from the chair’s seat. Readers would do well to read first the essays of George Peters and Tom Beyer, which can serve as an introduction to many of the concerns aired in the volume and which also mention a few that are left out—grist for a future mill. Ann Bugliani, who here has the last word (she had the first before), reflects on the afterlife of a chair. Returning to ordinary academic citizenry both professionally and financially is also a change, one that has advantages and disadvantages.
Among the features of the new landscape is the altered shape of language enrollments, which have been evolving continuously since the beginning of the twentieth century. It is estimated that in 1910 0.6% of all secondary school students studied Spanish, 11.4% French, and 23.6% German. During World War I the teaching of German was suppressed, and by 1922 only 0.6% of students were enrolled in German. French, meanwhile, increased nearly threefold, and Spanish, which had barely figured in the language consciousness of the country before, increased about sevenfold, filling the vacuum left by the absence of German (Stone 34). Language education in general languished between the wars as the United States adopted an isolationist attitude. Several commissions and studies funded by the Carnegie and Rockefeller endowments had positive effects on the situation and set the stage for the new teaching methodologies developed during World War II that emphasized speaking and practice with native speakers over reading, grammar, and translation (Parker 36–39). But what really caught the nation’s attention was the launching of Sputnik in 1957. That Russia got into space first was a public embarrassment, and the comparisons that were instantly made showed how much better prepared Russian students were in sciences, mathematics, and languages. Generous government support for these disciplines was forthcoming in the National Defense Education Act (NDEA). In the foreign languages, the NDEA supported institutes for teachers, which their participants remember today, and funded area and language study in the so-called critical or less commonly taught languages on university campuses. These area studies programs (now funded by Title VI of the Higher Education Act) remain the backbone of the teaching of non-Western languages in universities today.
The effect of Sputnik on language enrollments was stunning. MLA did its first enrollment surveys in 1958, 1959, and 1960. In just the two years from 1958 to 1960, college enrollments increased more than 27.8% (Reports i). Language study continued to increase dramatically through the sixties, rising another 74% by 1970, about the same percentage as the increase in the population of college students. However, after student protests fomented the elimination of most college course requirements, enrollments in languages began a decline that lasted through the seventies. ADFL was founded in 1969 largely to reverse this downward trend. Students began to return to language study in the eighties; their numbers reached a peak in the last MLA survey of 1998, the nineteenth in the series (Brod and Welles, fig. 1).
These latest enrollment figures show that for the first time Spanish can claim more than half, 55%, of enrollments in higher education; French and German account for 24%, and Italian and Japanese 7.7%. Much is made of the predominance of Spanish, especially by the people who teach other languages, but that predominance is not new. Spanish enrollments overtook those in French between the surveys of 1968 and 1970, and they continue to grow; in the three years between 1995 and 1998, registrations in Spanish increased 8.3% (table 5).
Another important story the surveys tell is that language enrollments in general have remained stable since the late seventies: about 8% of students at some time in the school year are studying a language. This figure should be used with caution, and only as a barometer with which to make comparisons with other years. Misinterpretation has sometimes led our readers to believe that only 8% of the student population ever studies a language. However, since many elementary and secondary schools offer language study and 60% of colleges now require language study for graduation, at least 60% of all incoming students either will study a second language or will have studied it enough to waive the requirement. The 8% is often contrasted with the 16.5% of 1965 (the earliest year for which a comparable figure is available in our published reports), when the post-Sputnik aura still surrounded educational programs and 88.9% of colleges and universities had a language requirement. The profession should feel encouraged that after the turmoil of the sixties and with the shift toward Spanish, enrollments have remained remarkably constant for almost a quarter century.
Besides the field’s concern about enrollments, some external factors have emerged over the last decade that have strongly influenced our profession, affecting the work of department chairs: policies on sexual harassment, affirmative action, the Americans for Disabilities Act (ADA), the development of technology, and the mentality of globalization. Legal issues tied to these developments impinge more and more frequently on department chairs, many of whom worry that their knowledge and experience of the law are inadequate. Rarely have I seen an audience listen with such rapt attention as when Maxine Colm delivered at a 2000 ADFL Seminar the paper included in this volume. It deals with many situations, particularly those concerning discrimination and harassment based on gender, race, color, national origin, religion, age, and disabilities both physical and mental. Her advice is to try to avoid costly litigation by paying attention to university procedures, reporting incidents to the proper authorities (now a legal requirement in cases of sexual harassment), keeping records, and using a lot of common sense.
Learning disabilities, in regard to teaching approaches and course substitutions for language requirements, have been a serious consideration for institutions since the Rehabilitation Act of 1971; but they are claiming a larger piece of the chair’s agenda since the implementation of the ADA. Richard Sparks, Lenore Ganschow, and Robert Shaw give an overview of what aspects of this area chairs should most attend to: definitions of learning disabilities, diagnosis of the learning disabled, teaching methodology for the struggling student, accommodations for the language requirement, and student rights. The authors include a copious bibliography, which should be a useful resource for those who need to familiarize themselves with these issues.
To return to enrollments and their consequences, informal polls taken at ADFL seminars indicate that the participant chairs find their greatest problem is enrollments that either grow beyond the bounds of staffing possibilities or dwindle to the point that courses cannot be offered. Many chairs have come to the conclusion presented here by Elvira García, that the robust departments of Spanish, even with their own problems, must support other languages or end up as the only language besides English on campus. Another language-specific development that may require a stretch on the part of chairs is the addition of less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) into the multilanguage mix. Although only a third of language students were taking languages other than French, German, or Spanish in 1998, only 7.7% of language students were reported to be studying languages other than the big three in the MLA survey of 1968 (Kant 247). A growing number of students are increasingly demanding a greater variety. The list of the more commonly taught languages (those having student populations above 4,000) increased from twelve to sixteen categories from the 1995 to 1998 survey report (Brod and Welles, table 1). Citing national needs for security and trade, the existence of heritage language communities, and the value of developing critical thinking skills, Karin Ryding makes the case for studying these truly foreign languages. She also discusses the needs and ramifications of supervising the teaching of LCTLs, covering the nature of the curriculum, the state of the field, and available resources.
Because the introduction of computers and the Internet as educational tools has had such a profound effect on foreign language education, we have given considerable space here to the exposition of many aspects of the uses of technology. The growth of technological inventions has happened very quickly, and it is not uncommon for chairs to feel overwhelmed by the amount of new knowledge they need to master. Robert Blake gives an extensive review of the potential of the Web, CD-ROMs, and computer-mediated communication (CMC), which offer much exposure to authentic language and culture and many opportunities for practice and interactivity. Robert Quinn shows how the language laboratory, no longer that dank basement afterthought, can become the primary point of convergence for the department. At his college, the laboratory gained momentum as a support for collaborative learning, curricular reform, and study abroad, resulting in greater visibility for the foreign language department on campus and increased enrollments in courses and programs.
Joel Goldfield offers looks at the integration of technology into the foreign language program as an institutional project. He points out that while evidence shows there is enhancement of language learning through technological resources, faculty competence lags behind. Taking a global view of education, he emphasizes the need for the training of all faculty members and administrators, including those who teach graduate students and prepare future teachers. Goldfield believes that “new and emerging technologies are enabling us to create innovative ways of expressing our thought, research and teaching, and the interactions across disciplines. Thus appropriate interdisciplinarity; [. . .] interweaving of technology into the curriculum; and increased communication among our departments, administrators, and technical experts are vital to the success of our mission in language and literature.” Goldfield includes many examples, much advice, and a thorough bibliography of printed and Internet materials.
Under the rubric “Administrative Approaches,” some unfamiliar features of the landscape are introduced, while other more familiar ones are seen from new perspectives. Laurel Rodd reveals how a business model, an anathema to most humanists (and to her), made her a better chair. After World War II, W. Edwards Deming helped rebuild Japan’s economy with a theory of management based on quality control, collaborative effort, improving the work environment, and creating better processes for decision making. Rodd boils down her mentor’s fourteen points into seven applicable to department administration. Drawing on her own experience as well, she posits a form of departmental leadership that focuses on long-term goals, the process of change and improvement, a safe environment for innovative ideas, faculty development, leadership, and collaboration. We republish here an up-to-date version of Elvira García’s excellent advice for incoming chairs, which accents knowing the department and the institution, working with colleagues, being accessible and dependable, and not wasting time. Patricia Ward goes into the thorny territory of graduate education, thorny because for the last decade new PhDs have faced such a constricted job market. She addresses the problem of the mismatch between the kinds of positions available and the research agenda of graduate programs. She urges departments to keep before them the “vision of a student-oriented program, articulated in a series of ever-broadening contexts” through keeping up with national issues, thinking ahead for the long term, and engaging in cross-disciplinary discussion in the institution. She recommends seven specific practices covering areas from admissions to professional preparation for the job candidate and stressing collegiality, coherence, and disclosure of information.
A new edifice on the institutional topography is the language center, which can have as many variations as it has campus homes, as suggested by the “Mandates and Structures” of Nina Garrett’s title. She has gathered information about these centers, ranging from the rationale behind the founding of a center—usually to coordinate and strengthen language teaching—to questions and objections about its existence on campus. She discusses fully the delicate relation of the center to the department, the parameters of the position of center director, the role of LCTLs, the uses of technology, and the question of tenure lines for center staff. She concludes that in whatever form, centers can successfully address a number of issues in college-level foreign language education that are recognized as problematic.
Faculty members are the sine qua non of a department, and their care and feeding have been given extensive treatment in print. Thus we thought it useful to select for discussion a few of the points of tension—hiring, development, and evaluation—in the hope of opening up some new territory. A faculty search is difficult at best; a search for a diversity candidate is even more complicated, because of the paucity of minority PhDs in the field. Dellita Martin-Ogunsola maps out strategies gained from her experience in hiring an African American faculty member at her institution. She makes the point that all the usual forms of institutional commitment, administrative support, faculty involvement, and recruitment efforts must be intensified when one competes for a person from such a small pool. Though she describes the case history of only one search here, her advice for those wishing to make their way through this difficult terrain is sure to be of general use.
Building on her previous essay, Heidi Byrnes singles out three interrelated areas in her exposition of faculty evaluation and assessment: the nature of the procedure; the rhythms of professional life; and mutual rights and responsibilities, particularly in the process of posttenure review. Believing in an evaluation system that promotes development, she ends by saying that a well-conceived appraisal system can help faculty members realize their potential as teachers, scholars, and departmental members. Also emphasizing the benefits of positive reinforcement, Donald Jarvis revisits his previous foray to give a blueprint of how to organize a strong year-round faculty development program; he touches on everything the department does. Such a program depends on a “cooperative enterprise involving shared goals, mutual growth, and persistent good examples,” as well as willingness to change.
Elizabeth Guthrie focuses on a single type of faculty member, the language program director (LPD), giving an account of the LPD’s responsibilities, credentials, and status in the tenure system. As cultural and textual content becomes more important in introductory courses and as attention to language learning is emphasized throughout the upper levels of the curriculum, this position acquires a more complicated and expanded role. Guthrie argues that the LPD affects all aspects of the department, from curriculum building to graduate student teaching, and deserves to be considered a fully tenurable colleague in a department of intellectual peers.
Departments do not function solely on their campus islands but must have ties to their communities, to secondary schools, and to the world beyond. For the preparation of future teachers, a connection to and knowledge of elementary and secondary schools is crucial. In the MLA’s recent project on preparing students to be English or foreign language teachers, we came to the conclusion that, in general, the discipline-based departments did not have a strong sense of responsibility for the task (see Franklin, Laurence, and Welles x). Thus it was with some satisfaction that I read Leslie Schrier’s confirmation of the department’s power to shape new teachers. That power is an important opportunity, because schoolteachers can influence a great number of students and will represent the profession to parents and the public. Schrier outlines four characteristics essential in teachers and describes how they should be incorporated in teacher preparation, as both the field and the students change. Departments also look to high schools for their future students. Fé Brittain reviews the pertinent issues while stressing the importance of articulation for strengthening student accomplishment.
Study abroad represents another path departments use to connect with the world outside the campus and enrich student learning. Lisa Chieffo and Richard Zipser describe how their program has benefited their department through cooperation with other entities and departments on campus and has increased the number of better-prepared students for advanced courses. Two keys to success are the integration of the study-abroad program into the academic curriculum and the credit system at the university and some well-honed strategies for recruitment of students that include advertising and the giving of scholarships.
The general theme of this volume is change: how to confront influences that cannot be controlled and turn them to your and your department’s advantage. That change can be the catalyst for creativity and innovation is amply demonstrated in these pages. But it does not happen in isolation. Two other threads are interwoven throughout: integration with what came before and collaboration with colleagues, other disciplines, and other parts of the university. The new for the sake of the new is not enough; unless it is carefully built into a coherent structure, its advantages will be lost.
Brod, Richard, and Elizabeth B. Welles. “Foreign Language Enrollments in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 1998.” ADFL Bulletin 31.2 (2000): 22–29. 21 June 1999. 26 Apr. 2001 http://www.adfl.org/bulletin/index.htm; click on “Winter 2000.”
Franklin, Phyllis, David Laurence, and Elizabeth B. Welles, eds. Preparing a Nation’s Teachers: Models for English and Foreign Language Programs. New York: MLA, 1999.
Kant, Julia G. “Foreign Language Registrations in Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 1968.” Foreign Language Annals 3 (1969): 247–304.
Parker, William Riley. “The MLA, 1883–1953.” PMLA 68, pt.2 (1953): 3–61.
Reports of Surveys and Studies in the Teaching of Modern Foreign Languages by the Modern Language Association of America, 1959–1961. New York: MLA, 1962.
Riegel, Jeffrey K. “A Checklist for Self-Study for Departments of Foreign Languages and Literatures.” Chairing the Foreign Language and Literature Department. Ed. Ann Bugliani. Spec. issue of ADFL Bulletin 25.3 (1994): 57–64. [Show Article]
Stone, George Winchester. “The Beginning, Development, and Impact of the MLA as a Learned Society, 1883–1958.” PMLA 73, pt.2 (1958): 23–44.
© 2001 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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