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IT IS almost impossible from where our office sits in lower Manhattan not to be reminded daily of the 11 September terrorist attack on the once familiar World Trade Center. While there have been many reverberations of the attack in our collective memory that have prompted us to think about the future, in this editor’s column I speak about the aftermath of the tragedy only from the point of view of language education in the United States. That the terrorists were Arabic speaking jolted many Americans into realizing how little they knew about the Arabic-speaking world. Thrust into the national consciousness, countries like Afghanistan, where Pashto, Farsi, and Uzbeck are spoken, seem remote from our experience. When Robert Mueller, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had to advertise nationally for translators of Arabic and Farsi documents (Hebel), various commentators (among them Paul Simon in the Washington Post and Dennis Baron in the New York Times) scolded the nation for not learning languages and the government for not supporting language education. Margaret Talbot in the New York Times Magazine laid the blame on multiculturalism as a stand-in for learning other languages and about other cultures, while Geoffrey Nunberg in the Washington Post urged us to make use of heritage speakers. While these authors did not specifically fault the field of foreign language education, their dismay over the sorry state of language education left it with an undeservedly tarnished image. However, I have to agree that too many Americans, especially English-speaking ones, do not know—or care—very much about other cultures, particularly those that may seem among the furthest from our own, like those that generated the attack against us.
To a language professional, the lack of cultural and linguistic knowledge and understanding comes as no surprise. In a prescient essay in this issue, “Global English—Global Freeze? The Cultural Expertise of Foreign Language Departments and the Future of Intellectual Diversity,” Michael Geisler demonstrates the dangers of an Americanized world expanding through the importation of American English. Though terrorist attacks might end (he specifically mentions embassies abroad; the essay was written before 11 September and slightly amended afterward), linguistic sameness would create a loss of identity depriving people of specific cultures and languages to call their own. We have paid little attention to the worldwide backlash against the cultural and economic colonization by America and American English, which can be counted among the motivations for terrorism against the United States.
Now it appears that Congress is responding to the lack of language knowledge: it has increased funding for Title VI, the part of the Higher Education Act that funds university area studies, by 26% for programs in three critical areas: Central Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. Legislators are further engaged in discussions about support for Arabic, Pashto, and Russian through the Defense Department’s National Security Education Program. A report from the General Accounting Office that showed language shortfalls in the Armed Services, State Department, Department of Commerce, and the FBI has given added impetus to congressional concern (Barr; Hebel). The rationale for this concern is national security, which, everyone would agree, is a necessity; yet cozying up to the Defense Department makes many educators nervous. How do we reconcile security and defense interests with the cultural and educational advantages of learning languages? Do we not believe that learning about other cultures and languages should lead to increased respect and understanding, rather than support war efforts or information gathering? Or should we be glad that the field of foreign language study will receive some badly needed recognition and funding?
In truth we all know that the goals of language study in this country have always been poised between the pragmatic purposes of world trade, diplomacy, and defense and the educational values of the liberal arts. Our profession has lived with the funding arising from this dichotomy for a long time. Title VI is itself a remnant of the National Defense Education Act, which aimed to remedy American deficiencies in math, science, and languages that became apparent after the USSR launched its first sputnik in 1957 and which supported the education of a generation of language teachers. Politics and economics have always affected language popularity. The cold war produced enormous growth in the study of Russian, and the end of the Cold War has seen concomitant decreases in its study. Japanese and Chinese language studies have grown considerably over the last twenty years, not because of their enormous cultural capital, but because of commercial interests and immigrant groups. And where are the most efficient language methodologies most prominently practiced? At the Defense Language Institute and the Foreign Service Institute.
We also know that only 10.4% of language learners in higher education study the unfamiliar non-Western languages: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and other less commonly taught languages (Brod and Welles). According to the FSI ratings, Arabic—like Japanese, Chinese, and Korean—is in the most difficult category of languages. It takes 720 hours to achieve even a middling proficiency in Arabic as opposed to 240 hours to achieve the same level of proficiency in French or Spanish. It is heartening to me that a small percentage of the American student body is willing to risk the foreign and the unfamiliar, the very difficult languages and cultures, and if not master them, at least confront them. We cannot, however, expect students to learn these languages if no programs exist. With or without government funding, colleges and universities need to make opportunities available to learn these languages, however small the enrollments. Greater institutional support for small programs might have provided a greater supply of educated Arabists when they were needed. Only in higher education can students gain the deep knowledge of language and culture that turn them into world citizens. Despite the government’s focus on security and the nation’s edgy mood, we can hope that many of these risk-taking students will gain from the positive effects of learning another language and culture, that this “weapon” will in time prove benign, that the knowledge gained will produce understanding and not arrogance of a dominant culture.
For Richard Kern and Gwendolyn Barnes-Karol the dual goals of language education play out as a divide between language and literature teaching. Drawing on the pedagogies of both, the two authors show how insights gained from textual analysis and the communicative method enhance each other to give students greater depth of knowledge in language and culture. Kern focuses on literacy as “ways of creating and interpreting meaning through texts” that are taught within the larger framework of communicative-based language learning. Noting that literacy involves critical reflection on the relations of text and context, Kern offers seven principles that apply literacy to teaching and span the gap between the introductory level and advanced coursework. Students at the introductory level should be given cognitively engaging but linguistically appropriate tasks that lead to more advanced levels, where a broad range of texts and writing will be subjected to reflective analysis and written interpretation. “[T]he point is not just to give students something to talk about for the sake of practicing language but also to engage them in the thoughtful and creative act of making connections among grammar, discourse, and meaning; between language and content; between language and culture and between another culture and their own.” Barnes-Karol brings the pragmatic and educational goals of language study together through Martha C. Nussbaum’s concept of “narrative imagination,” which suggests that the study of literary texts promotes civic and intellectual development and allows students to see the world from another point of view. After further exploring theoretical views of the value of reading and literature, Barnes-Karol sets forth five interconnected reading goals as guides for adapting literature to all levels of students and all subject matter included in the curriculum. Fiction, she says, helps students imagine another culture through the lens of personal and cultural interactions, and these in turn foster continual linguistic and personal development.
Two research papers present findings from their studies about levels of language attainment by groups of language learners at opposite ends of the spectrum, the heritage learner and the nonnative speaker. Heidi Byrnes and two of her graduate students, Cori Crane and Katherine A. Sprang, ask whether students can learn a second language well enough to teach at advanced academic levels and, if so, what program would help them achieve this level. Byrnes, Crane, and Sprang propose that by teaching advanced courses, graduate students, whose language development usually receives scant attention, will have the opportunity to improve their linguistic competence. Affirming the points made above about the connectedness of language and literature by Kern and Barnes-Karol, the authors contend that courses should be designed with the intent of giving students multiple literacies. Two courses taught by Crane and Sprang serve as case studies; each has a different approach and understanding of what advanced language is: one is based on genre and discourse, leading to social discourse of public life; and the other is based on the intersection of vocabulary and grammar, leading to cognitive fluency in the second language. Exploring the defining of native, near-native, and advanced language, the authors proceed with a detailed description of the structure and teaching of the courses and offer a rich array of theoretical and empirical examples that argue for the inclusion of such carefully scaffolded linguistic experiences in graduate programs.
Kim Potowski also focuses her discussion of heritage learners on the circumstances of both instructors and students. Pointing out that many students with Spanish backgrounds at her university enrolled in courses designed for learners of Spanish as a foreign language, she undertook a project consisting of questionnaires for students and their TA instructors about their course experiences and course decisions. The results led her to understand student perceptions about the level of their language expertise in Spanish, about the advantages and disadvantages of having heritage fluency in a class of native English speakers, about the linguistic proficiency of their TA instructors; and about being corrected by TA instructors. Potowski found that TAs did not realize that heritage learners had difficulties in their classes, and she concludes with suggestions for better instructional training to make the TAs more sensitive to ways of encouraging the linguistic development of heritage learners.
With the next cluster of papers, we move from insights about teaching and learning to a focus on chairing the foreign language department, which was titled “Conflicting Identities, Competing Loyalties,” for the 2001 summer seminars. The three authors here explicate and expand on the chair’s position at the intersection of exigencies of administration, demands from colleagues and students, duties to the institution, the requirements of scholarship, and responsibilities to family. While pulled in many directions at once, the chair has to be the center that does hold, that balances many functions creatively to move the department forward. Julie Candler Hayes, ironically adopting the Aristotelian unities of time, space, and action through French classic drama, discusses the chair’s fractured time, the department’s space (or lack of it) within the university, and the complicated action of putting a united front on the diversity of opinion and levels of involvement characteristic of faculty members in any foreign language department. By seeing the job as an “ensemble of fragmented unities” serving different groups for different purposes, she finds she can perform the chair’s task better. Martha LaFollette Miller affirms that scholarship is still the coin of the realm for language and literature faculties. Though humanistic research may not be particularly valued by administrations on the prowl for big grant moneys, it keeps academics intellectually alive and growing both as scholars and teachers. Noting that new developments like technology are crowding the chair’s already full schedule, Miller offers inventive strategies to help chairs encourage scholarly development in their colleagues and maintain a place of their own in the research community. José Suárez sees the department chair as the middleman encircled by demands from students, faculty members, and the administration. For a chair at that juncture he supplies ideas about dealing with deans, especially in the use of part-time faculty; support for and lack of recognition of faculty research; and technology in relation to the role of a good teacher. He decries the demand for accountability with ever-diminishing resources that, he believes, forces university administrators to act like heads of corporations instead of educational institutions, thus putting them at odds with the very faculty members and chairs whom they hire. But chairs are not just expected to hold the department together; they are also expected to lead it. Hayes reminds us how important it is to give forceful and public expression to the many ways in which the study of languages, literatures, and cultures is congruent with the purposes and values of the liberal arts, “to inculcate habits of reflection and analysis, sensitivity to textual nuance, openness to new ideas. Departments of languages and literatures offer the opportunity to carry out this work in a cross-cultural context, providing yet another crucial part of what it means to be a citizen in the world."
The last section of this issue I have called “Signs of the Times” because the problems addressed, students with language learning disabilities and mergers of English and foreign language departments are relatively new phenomena on the horizon of foreign languages in higher education. When Walter Saunders, chair of the English department at Mansfield University in Pennsylvania, was charged with organizing the merger of the two departments, he wisely called in Catherine Porter, professor of French from State University of New York, College at Cortland, to act as an outside adviser. As coauthors of the report published here they give a very realistic history of the challenges, obstacles, and successes involved in the process. While members of both the English and the foreign language program saw the benefits of the united department—among which was a stronger voice for language and literature, and thus humanities, on campus—implementing the plan met with some resistance. Faculty members were uncomfortable with the change in identity, and most had legitimate questions about teaching and administrative responsibilities. In general, however, a collaborative spirit saw the departments through the stressful first transitional year, and as the authors say, there is now little regret about the reconfiguration.
Noting the requirements of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, Sheila Graham Smith maps out how Baylor University created a policy to accommodate students with language learning disabilities so they could meet the foreign language requirements of the university. She explains how language-based learning disabilities are diagnosed and how they are related to foreign language learning, what the legal obligations of an institution are, and how universities are coping with the accommodation of disabled students while enabling them to meet degree requirements. Again, solutions to these issues required collaboration among various entities: the foreign language department, the administration, and the Office of Access and Learning Accommodation, who worked together to set up a procedure for individualized plans for each student requesting course substitution.
While the parts that individual foreign language departments play may be small in relation to the World Trade Center disaster, they are the locus of learning and teaching intercultural competency. Now more than ever, as Geisler says, language departments need to reassert their roles not only as linguistic but also as “cultural mediators,” in an effort to overcome the lack of interest about other cultures among college students and faculty members. Such ignorance in turn becomes “cultural arrogance.” But to put languages at the forefront of global education requires establishing the relevance of foreignness on campus from a number of fresh perspectives and in a variety of unconventional sites. We need to assess the knowledge students already have to determine what we can teach them. We also need to collaborate with colleagues across the curriculum so we can give energy and support to interdisciplinary initiatives and polish the image of the field. It sounds like a huge undertaking, but the groundwork may already be laid. And as we have seen, foreign language department chairs are superhuman, and teaching methods to bring the strands together have been thoroughly thought out; we already have the personnel for the job and the blueprint of how to do it.
Elizabeth B. Welles
Baron, Dennis. “America Doesn’t Know What the World Is Saying.” New York Times 27 Oct. 2001: A19.
Barr, Stephen. “Looking for People Who Can Talk the Talk—in Other Languages.” Washington Post 12 Mar. 2002: A17.
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. [Show Article]
Hebel, Sara. “National-Security Concerns Spur Congressional Interest in Language Programs.” Chronicle of Higher Education 15 Mar. 2002: A26.
Nunberg, Geoffrey. “The Answer Is on the Tip of Our Many Tongues.” Washington Post 9 Dec. 2001: B2.
Simon, Paul. “Beef Up the Country’s Foreign Language Skills.” Washington Post 22 Oct. 2001: A23.
Talbot, Margaret. “Other Woes.” New York Times Magazine 18 Nov. 2001: 23–24.
© 2001 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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