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FOR this issue of the ADFL Bulletin, we take the opportunity of the editorial column to bring you some highlights from the results of our project Models of Good Practice, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The intent of the project was to determine what programmatic and pedagogical factors contribute to the success of foreign language departments. Successful departments were defined as those that had stable or increasing enrollments between 1995 and 1999 and also those that had steady or growing numbers of majors. While there are other crucial ways to measure success (student accomplishment springs to mind), we chose to use student numbers, because administrators often use them as a criterion for determining the level of support they will give a department.
The first part of the project was a survey conducted in 1999 that collected information about a broad range of features characteristic of language and literature departments as well as data about undergraduate enrollments, majors, and staffing. The questionnaire was sent to 2,631 foreign language departments, of which 1,962 or 75% responded. The distribution of institutional types among the responding departments, by control, size, and highest degree granted by the institution, shows that this group is proportionately representative of the 2,631 departments contacted. The report from which the highlights are taken, “Successful College and University Foreign Language Programs, 1995–99: Part 1,” appears in MLA’s annual journal, Profession 2001. It focuses on three aspects of the study: enrollments in introductory and advanced courses; the distribution of certain teaching approaches, curriculum characteristics, administrative arrangements, and resources for faculty members; and program features associated with growing enrollments in introductory courses.
The first ten papers in this Bulletin issue were generated by the ADFL-sponsored forum on cultural studies and language and literature study at the 2000 MLA convention. The content of these papers and the curricular information provided by our project on good practices are two sides of a coin: the increasing interest in the theoretical examination of culture and the increasing attention to the teaching culture in foreign language departments as revealed in the study are on parallel tracks. Cultures other than our own, if often on the periphery of the curriculum, have always been the purview of language departments. Literary criticism, however, embracing film studies and popular culture, has advanced the notion that all cultural acts can be considered texts. At the same time a new generation of students has pushed curricular focus into areas other than literature. The move toward culture, however construed, is reflected in the survey results. The responses to questions about the curriculum indicate that in introductory courses, culture forms the basic subject matter. In advanced courses the preference is still for teaching literature rather than nonliterary texts, but at least a third of the respondents said that their courses place equal emphasis on literary and nonliterary texts. Further, the choice of texts, while not ignoring the canon, shows a preference for a mixture of canonical with less traditional works, often incorporating approaches based on race, class, and gender. In other words, the expanded curriculum that allows the free play of culture, language, and literature that is under discussion in the forum papers is clearly reflected in the survey results. If, as Russell Berman says in his forum introduction, “the critical discourse of cultural studies has paid scant attention to the intersection of language and culture,” the authors represented here demonstrate the variety of ways in which this intersection can build on directions that the survey shows the field is already taking, ways that help close the gap between the theoretical impulse of cultural studies and the teaching of culture in language departments.
The programmatic and pedagogical innovations in the last three papers tie in nicely both with the MLA project on good practices and the ADFL forum on cultural studies. Rosmarie Thee Morewedge discusses alliances with other programs that promote double majors and allow students from other disciplines to study abroad, and she describes the development of a cultural studies approach to introductory language with weekly discussions in English that won first-year German a place in the general education curriculum. Randa Duvick shows how participation in a program that emphasizes international economics and culture and thus study abroad and double majors has strengthened the language department at her university. Gregory Wolf describes how a language house can function as a cultural center by encouraging interdisciplinarity and cultural studies and by providing a locus for campus-wide events and outreach to local high schools. These authors describe programmatic practices characteristic of departments with growing enrollments at the introductory level and emphasize the intersection of culture and language.
Enrollments, Majors, Minors, and Double Majors
Enrollments
The responses to the questions about departmental course enrollments in 1995 and 1999 were surprisingly positive. The results were analyzed to show the percentages of programs with growing, stable, and decreasing enrollments. Across all languages and institutional types, about two-thirds or 67.2% of language programs reported stable or growing enrollments in introductory and advanced courses. The exception is Russian at advanced levels. The profession should be encouraged to know that most programs, even in languages where recent MLA enrollment surveys show a downturn, are flourishing or holding their own. It is our hope that departments will be able to use this information to justify continuing institutional support for language programs.
Majors
Numbers of majors are significant because they demonstrate a department’s ability to attract student commitment beyond occasional involvement. More than half of the programs in Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish and exactly half in Italian experienced growth in the number of majors between 1995 and 1999. Of the language programs studied, 67.5% had stable or growing numbers of majors.
Minors and Double Majors
We asked departments whether the number of students enjoying the options of minors and double majors had increased, stayed the same, or decreased between 1995 and 1999. For double majors, departments reporting a gain accounted for 60.3% of the total that responded, 35.3% reported stable numbers, and 4.5% showed a decline. The results for minors showed 69.2% of the programs reporting increases, 25.9% reporting stability, and 4.9% reporting losses. In other words, in most departments students increasingly utilize these options, and these options are attracting students to advanced level courses.
Departmental Practices and Features
Language Requirements
The data show that language requirements are on the rise. Of the departments’ institutions, 24% have an entrance requirement and 60% a graduation requirement. Dividing the respondents by institutional type, we can compare them with those in the MLA’s 1994–95 survey of entrance and degree requirements (Brod and Huber 36, table 1). For two-year institutions, entrance requirements have risen from 3% to 8% and graduation requirements from 23% to 31%; for four-year institutions, entrance requirements have risen from 21% to 31% and graduation requirements from 68% to 75%.
Technology
Technological resources for teaching and research are widely available to most faculty members and students. More than 98% of faculty and 75% of students have access to e-mail, personal computers, and the World Wide Web. More than 70% of departments say they use technology in the classroom and for student practice outside class, but less than a third use it for testing or distance learning.
Support for Faculty
Departmental or institutional support for faculty activities was common to many respondents: 90% gave faculty members money to attend conferences, more than 75% said support was available for training in technology, more than 60% provided support for research and scholarship, 47.9% supported study abroad, and 41% provided support for course development. Contrary to our expectations, we found that 36% of the two-year colleges provide support for study abroad; 32% of the two-year colleges provide support for faculty research and scholarship.
Curriculum
The field has been debating for many decades how best to teach language, literature, and culture. Pedagogical approaches and the place of literature and cultural materials in the curriculum are central to these debates. Twenty-three percent of the departments reported that their courses at the introductory level emphasize oral communication over reading and writing, and 38% give these functions equal weight. In the culture-literature balance, culture defines courses much more frequently than literature does at the introductory level (68.5%), while at advanced levels the situation is reversed.
Respondents reported that literature is the foundation for slightly more than half of their advanced courses; but in nearly half, the approach to literature has been expanded to take account of issues of race, class, and gender. The canon remains important, yet surveys of civilization are not prevalent. Courses based on nonliterary or largely on noncanonical texts are rare. About a quarter of the respondents reported that they had a nontraditional language strand for business or other purposes.
Special Opportunities for Language Learning, Practice, and Use outside the Traditional Course Frame
Departments that offer special opportunities for language learning are less frequently in evidence. Intensive courses and exchange programs abroad have substantial use in only about half the departments. Internships and service programs abroad and internships in the local target-language community are characteristic of a quarter to a third of departments, but other kinds of programs—immersion, language across the curriculum, language houses, weekend or winter-break programs—are characteristic of only 20% or less of departments.
Practices in Programs Reporting Growth in Introductory Course Enrollments
Comparing the percentage of programs that gained enrollments and reported having a particular feature with the percentage of programs that gained enrollments and reported not having that feature, we were able to calculate the likelihood of the association between or concurrence of enrollment growth and a given practice. The following practices were among those consistently associated with programs reporting enrollment growth in the introductory language sequence.
Faculty Discussion
Formal faculty discussion of a variety of professional issues (notably, a department’s mission statement, broad educational theories, content-based teaching, and teaching for oral proficiency) is associated frequently with rising enrollments across all levels and languages.
Off-Campus Connections
Community outreach programs (e.g., language courses, films, and lectures) co-occur frequently (i.e., in a third to a half of all reporting program types) with rising enrollments in introductory courses.
Study Abroad
Strong study-abroad programs are often associated with effective language departments. Language programs in BA- and MA-granting departments reporting increasing enrollments in study abroad consistently reported rising enrollments in the introductory sequence of language courses.
Technology
Of the twenty-one program types examined (i.e., Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish programs in BA-, MA-, and PhD-granting departments), more than half report the co-occurrence of growing enrollments and the use of technology for testing and placement. By contrast, there is co-occurrence between growing enrollments and the use of technology for teaching in class and for practice outside class in a third of these program types.
Language Coordinators
The presence of a full-time coordinator or supervisor of introductory and intermediate language courses in BA-granting departments (but not in MA- and PhD-granting departments) is strongly associated with enrollment growth in the introductory language sequence.
Language Centers
Having an entity separate from language departments that is to some degree responsible for language teaching—for example, a language center or a language resource center—co-occurs with increasing enrollments in almost all language programs in MA- and PhD-granting departments.
Curriculum
An emphasis on oral communication is consistently associated with increasing enrollments in the introductory language sequence. By contrast, an emphasis on writing and reading or on balancing writing and reading and oral communication equally is associated with growing enrollments in only half as many program types as those that emphasize oral communication. Notably, no single curricular emphasis in advanced undergraduate courses (e.g., canonical literature organized by period, author, and genre; canonical literature with the addition of approaches based on race, class, or gender; surveys of civilization) co-occurs regularly with growing introductory enrollments. Both more and less traditional approaches show occasional association with enrollment growth.
While the results of the first part of the study of good practices are preliminary, they tell us a great deal about practices that contribute to effective teaching, administration, and design of foreign language programs. Some of the programmatic features and pedagogical practices that we have found to be associated with enrollment growth may not in and of themselves attract students to departments or programs. For example, a student would not be likely to say, “I am going to take Chinese because the modern language department is involved in an articulation project that invites high school teachers to talk with departmental faculty members.” Rather, the student may hear of a lively department in which incoming students are placed at appropriate levels, are enthusiastic, and make notable progress. The student may never recognize that appropriate placement and an awareness of the need to work with secondary teachers are among the reasons for the positive buzz about the department on campus. The data show what is behind the buzz that students are attracted to: an engaged faculty and lively, varied programs that offer the maximum number of opportunities to learn effectively, to practice and apply the language beyond the traditional classroom format, and to be exposed to cultural difference in a variety of contexts.
Much of the survey data has yet to be analyzed. Future reports will interpret the relation of departmental practices to increasing enrollments in advanced courses and report on fluctuation in faculty size by department and on the relation of full-time faculty to enrollment patterns.
David Goldberg
Elizabeth B.Welles
Brod, Richard, and Bettina J. Huber. “The MLA Survey of Foreign Language Entrance and Degree Requirements, 1994–95. ADFL Bulletin 28.1 (1996): 35–43. [Show Article]
© 2002 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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