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WHAT is the state and character of East Asian language and culture departments in North America today? How do they differ from other foreign language departments? What are some of the difficulties they face, particularly in relation to the teaching of East Asian literatures and cultures? What are the main attractions and new directions for East Asian language departments and programs?
Generally speaking, there are several institutional models for the teaching of East Asian languages. In the first model, East Asian languages are taught within a foreign language department or program. It is not uncommon, for example, to find East Asian languages to be in a department that also includes Middle Eastern languages, European languages, and even with Latin and Greek. In the second, East Asian languages are taught as part of an East Asian language and literatures program, along the model of national language and literature programs traditionally found in Romance languages. In the third model, East Asian languages are taught as part of an East Asian languages and civilizations or cultures program, which embraces various disciplines such as history, religion, and literature. My department at Columbia University belongs to the last category, probably the most complex, since it combines language teaching with various other disciplines.
The significant differences between teaching East Asian languages and teaching European languages, particularly Romance languages, need to be taken into account in any assessment of the field. First of all is the extreme difficulty of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. It takes four or five times as long to learn an East Asian language as French, Spanish, or German. According to the Foreign Service Institute, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean are Category 4 languages, the most difficult, which take 1,320 hours of instruction to bring students to the same level of proficiency reached after only 480 hours by Category 1, which includes French and Spanish (Jorden and Lambert 3). It is not possible for a student who starts learning an East Asian language as a freshman to proceed to the study of literature within four years. In the fourth year, the student may be able to read short stories or newspaper articles, but at a very slow pace. By contrast, freshmen beginning the study of Spanish or French can normally make the transition to literature courses in the third year.
Second, the gap between spoken and written proficiency in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean is much wider than it is in Romance and Germanic languages. The Chinese writing system, which was adapted by Japan and Korea, contains a large number of graphs, or characters. (In modern Korean, the use of Chinese characters has been increasingly marginalized, whereas in Japanese, Chinese characters remain an essential part of the written language.) Because learning the large number of graphs requires significant time and effort, literacy in the East Asian languages takes longer to develop than it does in alphabetically written languages, even for natives. About two thousand graphs are necessary for minimal literacy, and most programs barely reach that number by the end of the fourth year.
As a consequence of the long period needed for language acquisition and the challenges posed by the written characters, attempts to implement writing across the curriculum or to combine language teaching with the teaching of literature and culture have usually not been successful. As a general rule, literature and culture are not taught in the target language at the undergraduate level. Only at the graduate level, at a handful of elite institutions, are content courses taught in the target language. Culture courses taught in English, therefore, must play a major role in sustaining the interest of undergraduates.
The difficulty of the languages and the gap between speaking and literacy create special instructional problems. Nonnative speakers often have trouble teaching an East Asian language. It is normal, at colleges and universities in the United States, for American-born professors to teach European languages. Most large research institutions also use graduate students to teach the first and second years of these languages. However, using nonnative teachers, whether professors or graduate students, is often not an option in East Asian languages.
My department consists of thirty-nine FTEs, fifteen faculty lines in different disciplines, and twenty-four lecturers, all of whom are native speakers of East Asian languages. A number of smaller East Asian language programs use a mix of native and nonnative speakers as teachers, but the reliance on language instructors who are native speakers is the prevailing model and occurs with much greater frequency than probably in any other foreign language.
The heavy dependence on native speakers of lecturer status for instructional purposes is not an entirely healthy one. It tends to create a divide along racial lines between lecturers, who are usually not on a professorial track, and the instructors in tenure-track positions who are often not native speakers. Because in most departments the lecturers are overwhelmingly women while most of the professorial appointments go to men, a gender imbalance is also created. The two-tier system may also reinforce the tendency, already inherent in many foreign language departments, to value language teaching less than the teaching of literature or history. Considerable effort must be made to compensate for any such tendencies, including the establishment of professorial positions dedicated to language teaching. One of the most pressing pedagogical issues today is how to train nonnative speakers to teach East Asian languages and how to construct East Asian language programs so that they can employ nonnative speakers alongside native speakers while maintaining a high standard. A nonnative teacher who has learned the language understands more deeply than the native speaker the complexities of acquiring the language and therefore can serve as an important model for students. The key point is that both native and nonnative speakers be thoroughly educated and rewarded for the job.
Given these significant problems, it would seem that Chinese, Japanese, and Korean would have difficulty attracting students and keeping them for three or four years. But there are large enrollments. According to the MLA, Japanese language enrollments in 1960 were almost nonexistent, at 1,746; they increased sevenfold by 1980, to 11,506; and by 1990, they had reached 45,717. The numbers are even higher today. Meanwhile, Chinese has overtaken Japanese as the number one East Asian foreign language, and Korean has emerged as one of the fastest-growing foreign languages in the world. Columbia College, the undergraduate school, has fewer than four thousand students, but about seven hundred a semester study East Asian languages, in the largest foreign language program on campus except for Spanish. And there are about thirty majors a year, probably more than in the Romance, German, Slavic, or Middle Eastern departments. Furthermore, the enrollments in East Asian-related courses are high. These big numbers are not unusual for large institutions that have resources dedicated to this area. And there have been comparable numbers in smaller colleges. The reasons are varied.
First, as is well known, the Pacific Rim has become a center of the global economy. Japan has the second largest GNP in the world, after the United States. China has become a major economic force as well. And Korea, along with the other Asian “tigers,” has become economically important. Students go where the money is. There was a spectacular rise in enrollments through the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the Asian economy was booming. With the recession in East Asia and with Japan in a prolonged economic slump, the enrollments in East Asian languages have dropped off. But relatively speaking, the growth remains enormous compared with that of other foreign languages.
Second, East Asian studies has now spread across the disciplines and departments. In the past, students who wanted to study East Asia went to the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, but now East Asian specialists are to be found in religion, history, art history, anthropology, sociology, political science, and economics departments, as well as in law and business schools. Whereas in the past, students came to the field from the languages and the humanities, particularly literature, religion, and history, students now come from all disciplines, especially the social sciences. Of the East Asian majors at Columbia University, over half are working in the social sciences, particularly political science and economics. According to Eleanor Jorden and Richard Lambert’s national survey of Japanese language programs, when asked what field they planned to enter after completing their study of Japanese, 49% of the students said business; 18%, government; 17%, science and technology; 15%, college teaching; and 11%, law. Equally important, when asked what their most important focus of interest in Japan was, 33% said business, 23% said culture, and 21% reported a general interest (123).
As these figures suggest, a program based solely on the national language and literature model found in traditional European language and literature departments would be inappropriate. While a large percentage of the students studying Japanese language have a sincere interest in the culture, they are simultaneously equipping themselves for professions that are not in literature or the humanities narrowly defined. They want to learn about the target culture, but they are preparing for an array of professions and require an equally diverse array of disciplinary training.
As a humanities department, with professorial lines almost entirely in literature and history, the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia could not alone train such a body of students. As a consequence, in the late 1970s an East Asian major was constructed, which required majors to take introductory courses in the discipline they had chosen, whether economics, political science, history, religion, literature, or anthropology. By the late 1980s the disciplinary dimension had been beefed up to stress methodology, including a junior proseminar in preparation for writing a senior thesis in a specific disciplinary area under the tutelage of a faculty specialist. This approach was combined with introductory courses on East Asia as well as more specific East Asian courses in a chosen discipline. Three years of an East Asian language was also required. In short, disciplinary training was combined with language and area studies.
The change in direction in the study of East Asian languages, away from a strictly humanities-based model toward one that includes the social sciences and the preprofessional fields, is of considerable significance. Generally speaking, in the past twenty years, the interest in East Asia has shifted focus to the present, and from the humanities, particularly philosophy, religion, literature, and history, to the social sciences and the professional schools, especially business, law, journalism. At the same time, the humanities continue to provide the foundation for understanding East Asia and for acquiring the languages. Any serious study of culture requires examination of the past, of culture in a broader historical context, particularly when the culture is as distant from the Western example as those of East Asia. The teaching of literature, history, and religion thus remains, together with language training, the basis for the exploration and appreciation of East Asian cultures.
The shift toward the social sciences and preprofessional fields in East Asian studies has led to a marked change in the content of the language textbooks and in the emphasis, in language training, on proficiency and active use. Twenty or thirty years ago, the emphasis was on learning grammar and deciphering complex texts, often of historical, literary, or religious importance. Now most students need to be able to converse and to function in everyday business or professional settings. Japanese and Chinese are treated as “living” languages. Earlier textbooks included large chunks of literature or history, but there is now heavy demand for readings on contemporary affairs. This trend was anticipated by such textbooks as Jorden and Hamako Ito Chaplin’s Beginning Japanese (1963) and Reading Japanese (1976), and now Jorden and Mari Noda’s Japanese: The Spoken Language (1990). Addressing the needs of students in social sciences and preprofessional courses creates a dilemma at the upper level, since a department such as ours must continue to train students in the humanities even as it welcomes this newer, ever-growing constituency.
The third reason for the growth in enrollments is the significant demographic shift toward the Pacific Rim. When I attended Columbia College in the early 1970s, there were almost no Asians in my class. Now Asian students constitute close to one-fifth of the class, even though Asians as a whole represent less than 5% of the United States population. At the University of California, Berkeley, over half the undergraduate body is of Asian descent. While Asian students do not necessarily take courses in the East Asian department, their presence on campus has radically changed the department’s demographics and the target audience. A major difference between the East Asian language program today and that of twenty years ago is the emergence of the heritage students. Twenty years ago, students were almost entirely non-Asian, with no linguistic background; now a large percentage of students taking East Asian languages are of Asian descent and frequently have some linguistic background. At Columbia College, over half the Chinese-language students are heritage learners, and close to 90% of Korean language students are of Korean descent. The situation has necessitated a two-track system in Chinese. Heritage students are of all backgrounds, making language teaching far more complex than it ever was, with most heritage students speaking but not reading or writing the language.
Another major shift in undergraduate instruction has been the stress on multiculturalism and the integration of non-Western cultures into general education. From the 1980s through the 1990s, there was pressure on colleges and universities to incorporate non-Western cultures into what had been a Eurocentric curriculum. At Columbia College, the integration occurred in a dramatic fashion, since the college had a large Western-based core program. All undergraduates are still required to take two years of European great books—in courses called Contemporary Civilization and Literature and Humanities—and a semester each of Western music and Western art. In the early 1990s I was asked to chair a committee whose task was to bring non-Western cultures into the core curriculum while addressing the issue of ethnicity and multiculturalism in America. We created a program (called Major Cultures) that required all undergraduates to take two semesters of non-Western core courses in addition to the existing Western core. We created an A list, for courses that were general introductions to a major non-Western civilization, and a B list, for more advanced courses in a specific non-Western culture, courses that could be taken only by students who had completed a related A list course. Introduction to Chinese Civilization, on the A list, for instance, was followed by Contemporary Chinese Politics, from the B list. Students also had the option to take two A list courses.
At the same time, we created a C list, a selection of courses on non-European-derived American ethnicities—mainly African American, Asian American, and Latino studies—that could be taken to fulfill the Major Cultures requirement only after the student had taken a related A list course. For example, a student who wanted to take an African American studies C list course had to take, first, an A list core course on African civilizations. Those who wanted to enroll in an Asian American studies class on the C list likewise had to take an A list course in Asian civilizations, and those in Latino studies had to take an A list course in Latin American civilizations. This program was designed so that minority groups did not end up simply studying and reaffirming themselves. Instead, it integrated ethnic studies into a larger non-Western core program.
The reform of the core curriculum had the institutional effect of reinforcing the already growing enrollments in East Asian courses, which included Japanese Civilization, Chinese Civilization, and a seminar called Asian Humanities, in which the great books of Asia were read in small discussion sections. I should note that these core courses, particularly Asian Humanities, were also intended to do what English departments do, teach the fundamental techniques of reading, writing, and sorting information into a coherent argument. In other words, these non-Western core courses carry out the fundamental tasks of general education even as they introduce students to broad new areas of knowledge and culture. Since a thousand students a year have to take at least one A list course, the likelihood of the average Columbia College undergraduate becoming interested in East Asian studies is much higher than it has ever been. Some of these developments are specific to the institution that I belong to, but they also represent a general trend, which is greatly amplified on the West Coast, where the number of students of Asian descent is far greater and the issue of multiculturalism is far more pressing.
Under these circumstances, where do the East Asian language programs stand relative to the European national language departments? Where should they go from here? Large East Asian language departments in major universities were originally created for strategic purposes, to defend the United States; the last three major wars, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, were fought against or involved East Asian countries, and the fellowships that graduate students were given were called NDFLs, National Defense Foreign Language fellowships. Historically, then, the emphasis was on the languages and cultures of a specific region; regional studies programs were designed to train a “China hand” or a “Japan hand,” and the departments consisted of a hodgepodge of faculty members in different disciplines.
Thus East Asian programs did not have the option of following the model of national literature and language, based on canonical genres and texts, with a faculty position for each major period or genre. Because of their small numbers and their positions in regional studies departments or programs, professors of East Asian literatures in North America have always had to teach a variety of courses that used literature as a means of presenting various aspects of the culture. Doing close analyses of literary masterpieces, like our colleagues in the English or French department, was a luxury that could occur only at the graduate level at a few elite universities.
However, the old regional studies model, in its revised form as an East Asian studies program, had the unexpected effect of anticipating the recent shift from a national language and literature model to a cultural studies model that is both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary. I am using “cultural studies” to refer not to the study of popular culture per se but rather to the strategies of cultural studies, which imply the breakdown of the traditional barriers between elite and popular, literary and nonliterary, textual and material culture. In this model, East Asian studies becomes a means of understanding a wide variety of cultural phenomena, of literary and nonliterary texts, of material culture, architecture, cities, visual arts, and mass media, particularly as a way of understanding the construction of collective identities, past and present. The newer model transcends the traditional boundary between the humanities and the social sciences, as well as those between literature and the arts, while still demanding rigorous disciplinary training, linguistic expertise, and in-depth knowledge of the culture.
The danger of this strategy is that there is a strong tendency to do cultural studies without linguistic expertise. The reading of primary texts might even drop out, as the emphasis is shifted to visual media such as anime, manga (comic books), film, and so forth. Before long, Nintendo would become our master. So it remains necessary, even as we explore new media, to maintain a language-mediated, firsthand study of primary texts, which, in the East Asian case, requires far more patience, devotion, and intensive training than normally required in other languages. East Asian texts tend to be highly intertextual, constantly saying things by indirection. Not to know the canon is to be culturally illiterate.
On the positive side, the cultural studies model provides opportunities for moving beyond regional boundaries, an issue that is crucial for East Asianists who are on the outside of the outside. When it comes to issues of gender, popular culture, media studies, nationalism, postcolonialism, and so on, we speak a common language, particularly as a result of globalization and what has been called cultural translation. Equally important, this approach reflects the interests of many of today’s students. A course on women and gender in Chinese literature will always draw more students than a traditional survey of modern Chinese literature. Likewise, a course on Chinese film and the novel will attract higher numbers than a traditional survey of Chinese fiction. For example, the Chinese film directed by Ang Lee, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, was the first film in American history to have both American and Chinese producers and directors and both American and Chinese target audiences, and it was the first East Asian film to reach more than a hundred million dollars in sales in both East Asian and United States markets. Watching Crouching Tiger can never substitute for reading a Chinese poem or even a Chinese newspaper in the original, but it can certainly motivate students to strive for those more difficult goals.
East Asian languages and cultures are far from being homogeneous. They are as diverse as the different national languages and cultures in Europe, and the potential for division and conflict are equally great. Common intellectual and pedagogical interests such as gender, women’s studies, postcolonialism, cultural studies, and human rights bring together East Asianists just as they bring us together with non-East Asian colleagues, since most of these disciplines exist on a campus-wide basis or in interdepartmental programs or institutes.
I see a three-pronged approach for the near future. The first is the disciplinary and preprofessional approach, which combines language learning with disciplinary training in a specific field such as political science, literature, or economics. The second is the cultural studies strategy that reaches out across disciplines, departmental lines, and the East-West divide to understand East Asian cultural phenomena in a cross-cultural, global context. The third, which is humanistic and linguistic in orientation, recognizes the need for language-based, long-term textual study, for appreciating both past and present cultures through the written word. A purely humanistic approach could not address the diverse needs of today’s students, while a purely cultural studies model would be simply the roller-coaster of the latest trends and fashions. But when these two approaches are combined circumspectly with a disciplinary approach, the potential is great.
This three-pronged approach, which is regional in focus and cross-national in methodology, draws on the strengths of both the humanities and the social sciences. It also requires more energy and effort, but the payoff is that it attracts more students and gives them a wider perspective. This approach takes foreignness and uses it as an advantage, as a means of deeper understanding of the human condition while still responding to ever-changing market conditions. It also allows us to be practical and utilitarian even as it stimulates us in creative and intellectual ways.
Berman, Russell. “Global Thinking, Local Teaching: Departments, Curricula, and Culture.” ADFL Bulletin 26.1 (1994): 7–11. [Show Article]
Brod, Richard, and Elizabeth Welles. “Foreign Language Enrollments in United States Institutions of Higher Education.” ADFL Bulletin 31.2 (2000): 22–29. [Show Article]
Gessel, Van. “Teaching the Devil’s Own Tongue: The Challenges of Offering Japanese in a College Environment.” ADFL Bulletin 28.2 (1997): 6–10. [Show Article]
Jorden, Eleanor, and Richard Lambert. Japanese Language Instruction in the United States: Resources, Practice, and Investment Strategy. Washington: Natl. Foreign Lang. Center, 1991.
© 2003 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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