35, no. 1 (Fall 2003): 7-8
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ADFL Updates
At the Interface of Chairing: Vision and Management
Planning is moving ahead for the 2004 ADFL Summer Seminars. Since 1971, seminars have offered chairs of foreign language and literature departments a chance to meet and discuss issues and challenges in their daily work on campus and in the field. Participants confirm year after year that there is no substitute for face-to-face conversations with peers. ADFL Seminar West will take place 10–12 June, sponsored by the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and hosted by Tey Diana Rebolledo. ADFL Seminar East will take place 24–26 June, sponsored by Miami University of Ohio, Oxford, and hosted by Charles Ganelin. Each seminar is preceded by a six-hour Workshop for New Chairs, in which experienced department leaders from the ADFL Executive Committee address such topics as budget; curriculum development; time management; hiring, promotion, tenure and retirement; record keeping; and personnel issues.
This year’s seminars focus on the chair’s dilemma: how not to lose sight of intellectual leadership in the day-to-day managerial necessities of the job. Central to the seminar theme is the importance of the humanities in liberal education and the need to advocate for the vital role of languages in the humanities. Speakers will also consider how departments can respond to the heightened awareness of America’s language education needs in the face of demands for greater national security. Language has been frequently mentioned in the press since 9-11, but the nation’s concerns have been described in instrumental terms that are sometimes suspect in academic circles. The humanist approach to language and culture has in turn sometimes been seen by the security community as inappropriate to the nation’s needs. Speakers will reflect on what college and university language, literature, and culture programs might offer a nation suddenly discovering that it ought to know more languages and on how this question can affect community-outreach programs on many campuses.
Elvira García (Univ. of Nebraska, Omaha, emerita), recipient of the 2003 ADFL Award for Distinguished Service in the Profession, will present the keynote address at Seminar West; Domna Stanton (Graduate Center, City Univ. of New York), 2004 MLA second vice president, will present the keynote address at Seminar East. Seminar West features a workshop on meeting the diverse challenges of assessment in college foreign language programs and a special session on the teaching of Chicana/Chicano literature and culture in departments of Spanish and English. Seminar East features a workshop on engaging with local media to develop coverage for department projects that serve the community and a special session on assessment and curricular transparency. Both seminars have sessions on collaboration between area studies programs and departments of languages and literature. Other topics for sessions and discussion groups at both seminars are interdisciplinarity and the language and literature department, the crisis in scholarly publishing and its effect on foreign languages and literatures, building enrollments and strengthening the major, and heritage languages and the relation of the language department to the off-campus community.
The seminar registration fee of $300 for members and $400 for nonmembers includes most meals and the Workshop for New Chairs. Hotel accommodations this year will be $69 per night at Seminar West at La Posada de Albuquerque, and $89 per night at Seminar East at the Elms, a Holiday Inn hotel. Information about membership in ADFL as well as about seminar programs, hotel accommodations, and travel can be obtained at ADFL’s Web site (www.adfl.org), or contact David Goldberg, Associate Director, ADFL, dgoldberg@mla.org.
The MLA Language Map of the United States
The office of foreign language programs of the Modern Language Association is developing an interactive Web tool based on data about language from the United States 2000 Census. Housed on the MLA Web site, the new interface with census data will provide information on numbers of speakers of the thirty languages most spoken in the United States at both county and zip-code levels in maps and tabular form. Users of the site will be able to zoom in and out on maps reflecting the density of speakers of a language or call up two maps simultaneously to compare the density of speakers of the same language in two states or the density of speakers of different languages in the same state. Tabular data will provide numbers of speakers of each of thirty languages by state, county, city or town name, or zip code, and speakers will be broken down into two age groups, 5–17 and 18 and older. In addition, users will find charts to illustrate the percentage of speakers of the top ten languages other than English in each of the fifty states.
The United States Census long form, distributed to approximately one in six United States households, has asked whether respondents spoke a language other than English at home since 1980. Three hundred and eighty languages were listed in response to this question in 2000. Not included were speakers who reported that they used their other language only at school or work or that their language use was limited to a few expressions or slang. Of the 47.0 million United States residents who reported that they spoke other languages at home (18% of the entire population over five years old), 55% said they also spoke English “very well,” 22% reported that they also spoke English “well,” 16% reported they also spoke English but “not well,” and 7% reported they did not speak English at all.
The language data site will be available in the spring. The office of foreign language programs hopes to add a historic dimension to the comparative section of the site at a future date, although census data since 1980 is not perfectly comparable to previously collected data. Between 1890 and 1980, census questions about the respondent’s native tongue were focused differently—for example, regarding what language was spoken at home when the respondent was a child or what the respondent’s first language was or what language was spoken before the respondent immigrated to the United States. (For information about the 2000 census, see www.census.gov/prod/cen2000/doc/sf3.pdf.)
© 2003 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 35, no. 1 (Fall 2003): 7-8 |
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