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HUNTER College, founded in 1870, is part of the City University of New York, the largest urban university system in the United States, with an enrollment of some 200,000 students. Hunter is the midtown Manhattan senior liberal arts college of CUNY. Its student body in fall 2002 totaled 20,679 (10,192 full-time undergraduates; 5,374 part-time undergraduates; and 5,113 graduate students). The college enrollment is predominantly female (72%). Almost half the students attend part-time (46%); 29% of the full-time and 46% of the nondegree undergraduates are age twenty-six and older. Between 1997 and 2001, the percentage of whites has declined slightly (now 37%); the percentages of African Americans (now 21%), Latinos (now 24%), and Asians (now 18%) have increased somewhat. New York’s foreign-born population stands at over two million. At Hunter, the percentage of foreign-born students is 40% among entering freshmen and 44% among transfer students.1 About 60% speak a language other than English at home. The last few years have seen a significant influx of students from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.2
The department offers courses throughout the day, from 8:00 a.m. to 8:15 p.m. Our students come to school sometimes after a day’s work, sometimes before a night’s work; some of them complete their entire degree in the evening school. They are courageous, bright, and determined people. In German, we set high standards. Our teachers work hard and expect the students to work hard, and almost uniformly the students rise to the challenge.
The location of Hunter College, on Park and Lexington Avenues, contributes to the strength of its evening school as well as to its arts and humanities programs in general; public transportation connects it easily with Lincoln Center, the New York Public Library, and the many Manhattan museums and cultural institutions, such as the Goethe House and the CUNY Graduate School on Fifth Avenue and 35th Street.
In this report, we discuss the efforts that the Hunter College German department has made to adapt to the college’s situation. The German department is one of the college’s original departments. Its mission is to provide, maintain, and increase open access to the study of German language, literature, and culture at all levels for the students of the City University of New York; our mission extends beyond the student body of Hunter College itself because we have the only German program still fully functioning at the lower and upper levels in CUNY. Most CUNY students learned no German in high school, and few are of German origin. We view the study of German language, literature, and culture in our department as a path to high literacy levels in German, which may be useful to our students in conjunction with many professions, including teaching. A highly professional approach to teaching the German language itself is a top priority. We believe that such teaching is best done in a cultural, literary, humanistic context, and we see no reason to separate the teaching of skills from the teaching of content. The one endeavor enhances the other.
We work with clearly defined linguistic proficiency objectives, and those students who take the four required language courses in our department come out with Intermediate level proficiency in speaking and writing and a somewhat higher level in reading. This means that they can maintain a face-to-face conversation on a simple topic in the language and that they have some familiarity with German culture. Those who complete the major, or about six more courses beyond the requirement, reach a good Advanced level in speaking and writing and Advanced-Plus in reading. This means that they are ready to use the language for general purposes in certain kinds of jobs and to develop it to specialized professional levels if they choose to do so. Our work with proficiency levels and our experience in guiding students through these levels makes our department unique. There are probably few, if any, departments in the country where an organized system of language development carries through all the courses in the literature major with all the faculty members working together toward mutually understood linguistic outcomes. Most courses are taught by full-time faculty members who are either trained ACTFL testers or are familiar with the principles of proficiency-based teaching and testing. This well-articulated curriculum was developed and put in place under the leadership of Dorothy James, who chaired the German department from 1983 to 1999. We gained much experience by regularly conducting oral proficiency interviews since 1985. We interview all students at the end of the first year and the second year and at points through the upper-level courses. These interviews are voluntary but encouraged by all teachers, and about a hundred students sign up for them every semester. They enjoy the interviews and the opportunity thus provided for a face-to-face conversation in the German language with a faculty member other than their classroom teacher. Students test out at what seems to be the national average: Novice High / Intermediate Low at the end of the first year and Intermediate-Mid at the end of the second year. All students in the first upper-level language sequence (301/302, Advanced Conversation, Composition, Comprehension) must take an oral interview at the end of each course, and over the two-course sequence most make the transition to Intermediate-High, and some to Advanced. As students progress through the upper-level literature and culture courses, they clearly progress through the Advanced level as outlined above. This achievement is considerable for students who have little opportunity to study abroad. A few reach this level without ever having been to Germany.
The testing program has been the catalyst that brought about our rethinking of the curriculum. If most students were not reaching a higher level than Intermediate-Mid at most by the end of the four required courses, we could not go on doing what many departments of language and literature do, and what we had previously done, namely, taking those students and putting them straight into Superior-level courses, that is, literature courses taught in such a way that students would need a Superior-level proficiency to make the course worthwhile. We had to consider ways of helping our students progress over the threshold into the Intermediate-High level and on through the Advanced level toward the Superior level. (We are using here the terms of ACTFL scale, not because we subscribe in every way to the scale and its validity, but because it is a useful shorthand, comprehensible nowadays to most professionals in the field.) We added some language courses, but our main innovation was to rethink how upper-level literature courses might help the students progress through to the high ranges of the Advanced level.
In 1988, we received Board of Higher Education approval for a restructuring of our upper-level program, which put into place a two-level system of language and literature courses and which modified the existing major requirements, so that while students still had to complete twenty-four credits for the German major, they were now obliged to move through the levels in a more organized way.
Our upper-level language and literature courses emphasize individual learning goals and group work, as well as graduated speaking and writing assignments. In our selection of texts, we consider not only the linguistic difficulty and cultural framework of the text but also the possibilities it holds for use in classroom activities and homework assignments. We use the same text for all students in a class and tailor the assignments to the proficiency level of the individual; that is, students functioning at lower proficiency levels are assigned narrative tasks whereas students who are more advanced are given argumentative tasks. We help our students move through a series of courses in which their cultural awareness is developed alongside their language skills.3 Through this approach, we have markedly increased our enrollment in these courses.
Our work on the upper-level curriculum took clear shape early on. At the same time, we were trying to improve the attractiveness and the retention in our basic language sequence. We realized that the commercially produced textbooks did not fit our student profile. One of our faculty members, with input from the others, wrote a three-semester textbook sequence that reflects the proficiency-based teaching approach of our department.
We consider our curriculum an integral part of the liberal arts curriculum of Hunter College. Our emphasis on language learning does not diminish the contribution the program makes to the humanistic education of the Hunter College student; on the contrary, that many of our students reach a high level of functional proficiency in the language means that further humanistic study is open to them in the German language, which is not true for students who cannot function in German beyond the Novice and Intermediate level.
Nevertheless, we are aware that most of our students will not go to graduate school to pursue the study of German literature. Many of them will be looking for jobs after the BA in which they can use what they have learned in college. For this reason, we created a course sequence in German for business and economics, which is carefully meshed with our language, literature, and culture courses. As far as performance standards and goals are concerned, each strand of our curriculum enhances the others.
Another way to measure student achievement is by having students take internationally given exams. The Hunter College German department is a testing center for the Goethe Institute tests of basic and advanced proficiency in German (Zertifikat Deutsch and Zentrale Mittelstufenprüfung). These tests, which last four and a half to six hours, help our students realize that what they are doing in the classroom has validity in the outside world. Every year, about eight students take the Zertifikat and about two the Mittelstufenprüfung. In the past, more students took the exams, but the Goethe Institute has increased the fees over the years from $15.00 to $65.00 and $90.00 respectively.
One of our faculty members has also trained as a tester for the Prüfung Wirtschaftsdeutsch International, an examination given internationally and sponsored jointly by the Goethe Institute, the Carl Duisberg Society, and the German-American Chamber of Commerce. Our business German sequence helps students take this exam. In the difficult economic times facing our students when they graduate, the confidence gained from some outside certification of their skills as well as the certificate itself seems to warrant our spending time and effort on this endeavor.
The curricular development in our department would not have been possible without strong support from outside funding. Between 1982 and 2000, the German department received four major grants to work on curriculum development. The first priority was to address the big drop-off in enrollment after the four-semester language requirement, and we looked at the transition from the lower- to the upper-level courses. Under the next grant, we continued with the redesign of the undergraduate curriculum and later received funding to include the graduate curriculum. Our last project focused on language needs in the workplace and what proficiency is required for certain types of employment. Through the research done in these grant-funded projects, we were able to design a program that leads students to achieve a high linguistic, literary, and cultural proficiency useful in many different occupations.
In comparison with other departments of Hunter College, our total enrollments are small: in the fall of 2002, we had an enrollment of 441 (including one course taught in English translation and a course offered jointly with comparative literature). In spring 2003, we had 17 registered majors, 3 double majors, and 32 minors. In comparison with other German programs at CUNY, and indeed with many other German programs across the country, our enrollments are large. Table 1 (p. 45) shows the numbers of majors and minors and enrollment figures in the introductory sequence and advanced courses in selected years from 1995 to 2002 (excluding courses taught in translation or offered through the comparative literature program).
We have been carefully following the enrollment patterns in the department since 1983, when we began restructuring our curriculum. Our work on this long-term project is ongoing, so we need to take the long view. The most interesting fact to emerge from our enrollment figures is that while our total enrollments over this period have diminished, our upper-level enrollments have increased in a way that many departments of German in other institutions find amazing.
These relatively high numbers at the upper levels do not stem from native-speaker enrollments, as they do in some other upper-level language programs. Our upper-level program is designed in its entirety for nonnative speakers of German, and native speakers are admitted only to the highest-level courses offered in the department, namely, the level-2 literature and culture courses.
The students in our upper-level program are by no means all German majors, since we feel the viability of a language program does not hinge on the number of students majoring in the language. A viable program offers students in many fields the opportunity to take carefully sequenced lower- and upper-level courses. We encourage students to see German as a useful second string in their professional bow, and we are just as concerned with running a well-structured upper-level program that contributes to the education of nonmajors as we are with garnering actual German majors.
Another fact to be noted in connection with our enrollment figures is that our upper-level program consists of German language, literature, and culture courses taught in German. We have not converted our upper-level program, as have many German programs in the United States, to literature and culture courses, or area studies, taught in English. Every semester we offer one course in English for the wider student body, but enrollments in these courses are not included in the enrollment figures shown in the table. Our basic upper-level program and our major program continue to be conducted in German, and our enrollment in these courses has increased between 1983 and 2003 from approximately 35 to over 100 students a semester. While we have introduced new upper-level language courses and business German, our literature courses still provide the backbone of our upper-level program. To describe the direction of our work in one sentence: We have not taken literature out of the language program but we have very much increased the emphasis on language learning in our literature program.
On graduation, our students pursue different paths. Some go on to graduate school, and some win fellowships to do so. Such students plan to enter the university teaching professions. Other students are double majors in German and education and plan to become high school teachers in German. Perhaps because German is no longer taught widely in New York City, our students do not generally have teaching as a career goal. Over the last seventeen years, only four have chosen this path. Some graduates have gone on to continue their studies in different fields, for example, translation at New York University, law at various law schools, theater and film directing at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, and medical school in Germany. Others have entered the job market, taking positions with, for example, accounting firms with international departments, a German art auction house in New York, and Internet companies where the knowledge of German is a plus.
Our most consistent scholastic successes have been in the Fulbright teaching fellowships. Our students regularly win such fellowships; in the last ten years, seven Hunter College students have spent a year under this program serving as teachers’ aides at secondary schools in Germany. Our most recent recipient of a Fulbright award also won a Congress Bundestag Youth Exchange scholarship and had the difficult task of selecting between the two. In awarding the Fulbright teaching fellowships, judges emphasize the applicants’ ability to represent the United States in other countries. One difficulty connected with these fellowships is the stipulation that the participants be American citizens and that they be no older than twenty-five or thirty. Since many of our students are foreign born and not yet naturalized, our most promising students are often prevented from applying for these and other scholarships.
We have limited departmental resources to support our students financially. Of the five department prizes, funded from long-standing endowments and awarded annually, three are awarded on the basis of scholastic record, and two on the basis of an essay competition. In recent years, we have offered the two in alternate years in order to award a larger prize each year — $1,500 for a student to spend some weeks at a summer course in Germany. Award-winning students have taken university summer courses at various universities and language schools in Germany. Unfortunately, after this year’s competition, the funds for this essay prize will be depleted, and we have submitted a grant application to a donor to continue offering this opportunity to our students.
The classic junior year abroad is beyond the reach of most of our students; they cannot afford to jeopardize the jobs on which they often depend to support themselves. To enable more students to have an academic experience abroad, even if it has to be brief, the department is cooperating with a language institute in Germany, Europa-Kolleg, Kassel. This joint effort makes a foreign experience accessible to many more students and helps boost interest in advanced language study. Through the program, students can receive Hunter College credits for a four-week period in Kassel during the summer. There they are under the guidance of one of our faculty members while they are integrated into the activities of the language institute. Their academic experience is more diversified than it would be in programs catering to Americans alone. The institute also arranges for students to stay in the homes of German families and to go on field trips. It is an ideal short-term arrangement for Hunter College students in the first two to three years of their study in German.
Through its literature and culture courses taught in English, the German department contributes to the general education requirement. We primarily teach two courses intended for the lower levels of the curriculum, which can be taken as electives but which also satisfy general education requirements. German Thought and Culture satisfies a humanities requirement and German Fairy Tales a literature requirement. These courses usually enroll a large number of students (40 or so), and they sometimes inspire students to learn the German language. We would like to teach more courses in translation, but we lack the faculty members. We are so engaged in teaching the basic language sequence and the upper-level courses that we can spare faculty members for only one course every semester taught in English. We cannot spread ourselves too thin; our emphasis has to be on the courses in German.
The use of technology is common in today’s workplace, and we want to expose our students to its use and benefits in learning a new language. In 1999, Hunter College opened a new language center where students can work with computerized learning materials. The budget for this center comes directly from the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, and funds for software, videos, and other materials are allocated to the individual languages. Unfortunately, there is currently no specialist in educational technology on the staff who could help the faculty with developing language-specific materials.
The German department has been a leader within CUNY in offering distance-learning courses through interactive television. Our partner school is Brooklyn College, where there are no full-time faculty members left in German. Over four semesters, we offered Brooklyn College students who wanted to continue their German studies the opportunity to take part in our courses without traveling to our campus. In recent semesters, this collaboration has stopped, primarily because of curricular changes at Brooklyn and scheduling difficulties between the two campuses.
The administration is interested in expanding distance learning, particularly Web-based instruction. The department received an internal distance-learning grant for the development of such courses. During the academic year 2001–02, we offered for the first time a hybrid course where half of the work was done in a face-to-face setting and the other half online. The course was in our two-semester sequence in business German since we felt its content would lend itself well to such a format. The enrollment was comparable to that of a traditionally taught course, and judging from surveys, students were positively disposed toward the format once they got used to it. Since the hybrid format’s effect on enrollment seemed negligible, we will offer the course again in fall 2003. Since CUNY has a site licence for BlackBoard, the delivery platform for these courses, no direct costs are associated with offering such classes. These courses are more time-consuming to prepare and teach than traditional courses are. The issue of how to reward instructors electing to teach online courses has not yet been addressed by the administration.
Since the German department is known for its innovative teaching and assessment approach as well as its forays into the use of technology, the administration’s attitude toward our program in general is favorable. This does not necessarily lead to larger budget allocations. However, allowing the department to fill the lines vacated by retirements is the biggest testament to the support of our program.
About five years ago, Hunter College instituted a Block Program for incoming freshmen. Groups of twenty-three students together take a block of courses organized around a theme. The idea is to foster a community spirit in a commuter school where students often do not form lasting friendships and thereby to increase retention. No language courses are included in the Block Program, and thus students often start their language study at a later point in their college career. Most of them come with a high school background in Spanish, and they elect to continue with that language since they can often enter into the third or fourth semester and shorten their length of study, because the language requirement stipulates the completion of the fourth semester. We feel that this policy has had a slight impact on the lower-level enrollments in German. At the same time, there has been an influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe, a number of whom had some German in their home countries. Some of these students place into our fourth semester and then elect to continue into our upper-level courses while many more go through the entire sequence.
Another priority of the City University of New York is a new cooperative effort with the city’s public high schools. The College Now project furthers better articulation between the two systems and encourages high school students to attend CUNY. The German department has received a grant to work on faculty development and arrange student visits at the college. The program is in its initial phase, and we do not have any specific data on its outcomes.
Extensive program development can be achieved through faculty collaboration and governance as well as institutional support. The two following sections discuss staffing and departmental governance.
The department currently has five full-time members, three associate professors, two assistant professors, and one graduate assistant A (which counts as a half-line). Two of these faculty members are male, and one is of Southeast Asian descent. In recent years, adjunct faculty members have usually taught a few courses a year. The members of the full-time faculty are specialists in different literary and cultural periods, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. They share an interest in teaching, and some have subspecialties in foreign language pedagogy, language acquisition, and language testing.
Over the last nine years, three senior faculty members retired. We have been fortunate to get these lines back and hire new faculty members, largely because of the reputation of our department as an innovative force in the field of language and literature studies. Replacing faculty members lost to retirement has been crucial to our success. We can offer a good selection of lower- as well as upper-level courses taught by full-time faculty members and do not have to rely heavily on adjunct funding, which in times of fiscal uncertainty can be scarce and can easily be cut. Our full-time faculty members spend extra time on student advising, whereas adjunct faculty members are not contractually obligated to perform any duties outside classroom teaching. Our graduate assistant A is a doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate Center. She teaches two courses in the required language sequence and is familiar with the oral proficiency interviewing technique and can help us in our proficiency-testing program.
The official teaching load at Hunter College is 3/4. Until fall 2002, all full-time faculty members in the German department taught a full load to cover the courses we offered in the program. Then our dean granted us additional adjunct funding to bring our teaching load in line with that of most faculties in other departments, where a 3/3 load is normal. The kind of teaching we do is time-consuming because we work closely with individual students, performing diagnostic testing in each course and helping students set individual performance goals in all our upper-level courses. We also conduct oral proficiency testing in the last two weeks of every semester; each faculty member and the graduate assistant spend about fifteen hours performing oral interviewing in those weeks. Numerous other student-connected activities occur during the year, such as administering four- to five-hour Goethe House examinations, advising the German Club, doing collaborative work with selected high schools, as well as keeping extensive office hours and reading and responding to large amounts of student writing in every course.
Nonetheless, the department has an impressive record of professional activities in the national arena. In conjunction with the significant curricular reform instituted under the leadership of our former chair, Dorothy James, we have presented many papers and workshops around the country on teaching issues. Our faculty members have a scholarly life in their own fields and spheres of interest. We have also maintained some record of publication in literary research and in pedagogy, though not as much as we might have liked, having consistently given priority to the teaching mission of the department. Few as we are, we participate widely and frequently in college and university activities and serve on college-wide committees. Assisting us with administrative tasks is a full-time secretary.
A department does not function in isolation but is dependent on the larger structure of the academic institution, the departmental governance system, and its financing. The City University of New York is a public institution, which has been chronically underfunded for decades. Small departments in particular function on a very limited budget. We are unionized. Salaries and faculty support for travel are negotiated between the administration and the union. There is no provision for merit pay. Except in the initial hiring process, the chair has practically no say in salary matters.
In the CUNY system, chairpersons are elected by the full-time members of their departments to serve a three-year term. In addition to customary administrative duties, chairpersons have full responsibility for scheduling and assigning faculty teaching programs. They represent their departments on Divisional Personnel and Budget Committees and on the college-wide faculty Personnel and Budget Committee. Chairs receive two courses released time each semester off the official 3/4 load. Most departments have adopted a 3/3 load, and chairs usually teach one course a semester. In the German department, the chairperson teaches a full 4/3 load, which translates to two courses in one semester and one in the other with the occasional overload of two extra courses each semester.
The Personnel and Budget Committee is essentially the executive committee of the department, responsible for all personnel actions at the departmental level (appointment, reappointment, promotion, and tenure), and it oversees the department budget, which includes only a few items—namely, postage and duplicating costs—other than personnel services (OTPS), such as office supplies, repairs, small equipment, and temporary service. The amounts in these categories are very small, for example, $1,000 for duplicating, $1,000 for OTPS. Since fall 2001, we received no money for temporary services. Through special funding from another program, we could arrange to get some money for hiring two student tutors. This tutoring service is free to our students. There are no discretionary funds for extracurricular activities, unless they are coming from grants, special projects, or donations.
Support for faculty development and travel is also limited. Each faculty member has a travel allowance of $250 every academic year. For junior faculty members working toward tenure and promotion, $750 can be spent if a person requests it. These funds are in the dean’s office, and the chair of a department does not have extra discretionary money to spend on travel, unless it comes from outside grants. Faculty members can apply for internal funding for research through PSC-CUNY research grants (sponsored by our union, the Professional Staff Congress). Junior faculty members are particularly encouraged to submit proposals.
Over the last few years, the administration has made an effort to equip each faculty member’s office with a computer. However, it is difficult to upgrade the equipment, and only recently has a plan for periodic replacement been set up. Every year, the department can submit requests for equipment, but there is no assurance these requests will be granted. In the past, we were able to purchase equipment considered standard at other institutions through grant funds (a fax machine, an extra computer, office supplies, etc.). Since we have no grant money at the moment, this option is not available.
Despite the scarce financial resources, the departmental governance system has worked well at Hunter for German. We have been able to build a unique program and to govern it effectively. We have been able to raise money from outside the university and to maintain a strong voice outside the university as well as inside it.
At the moment, we face some major challenges. Over the next two years, two experienced faculty members will be on leave for a year each, and a junior faculty member may get a semester off for pretenure research. Under the current tight fiscal situation, enrollment figures are scrutinized extremely carefully. We hope the administration will allot the department sufficient funds to hire adjuncts to staff the necessary courses. We also face challenges on the curricular front. We strongly believe that all full-time faculty members should teach in both the language sequence and upper-level courses. With two professors away and upper-level courses traditionally taught only by full-time faculty members, we are left with less time for the crucial language courses. In addition, because neither the newly hired faculty member nor the adjuncts are familiar with our proficiency-based teaching and testing model, we will have to organize faculty development workshops for them. We have requested funding for the new full-time member to attend an OPI tester workshop in November 2003. At the moment, except for the internal College Now grant, we do not have any outside funding and thus no released time to pursue extensive curricular projects. Particularly our junior faculty members who are working toward promotion and tenure can hardly be asked to put much additional time into projects when they already have a heavy teaching load.
The dire fiscal situation of New York City and New York State, particularly in the aftermath of the events of 9/11, poses potential problems for the City University and for Hunter College. At the moment, the repercussions are not exactly known. We hope that in spite of all these uncertainties the German department at Hunter College will prevail and prosper. Even though our department is small, we have a lot to offer Hunter College and the City University of New York. The administration has shown its support for our program in the past, and we hope our work will convince them to do so in the future.
Annette Kym
2www.nyc.gov./html/dcp/pdf/soc99cl.pdf
3For further discussion of this work, see Hoffmann and James; James; and Kym.
Hoffmann, E. F., and Dorothy James. “Toward the Integration of Foreign Language Teaching at All Levels of the College Curriculum.” ADFL Bulletin 18.1 (1986): 29–33. [Show Article]
James, Dorothy. “Re-shaping the ‘College-Level’ Curriculum: Problems and Possibilities.” Shaping the Future: Challenges and Opportunities. Middlebury: Northeast Conference, 1989. 91–95.
Kym, Annette. “Looking Back at East Germany: A Literature Course to Advance Foreign Language Skills and Build Cultural Understanding.” Die Unterrichtspraxis 2 (1993): 140–47.
| 1995 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Introductory sequence | 176 | 231 | 236 | 233 | 257 |
| Advanced courses | 73 | 83 | 79 | 85 | 92 |
| Majors | 18 | 19 | 15 | 15 | 17 |
| Minors* | ñ | ñ | 15 | 17 | 27 |
© 2003 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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