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THERE ARE indications that the discipline of the foreign languages may well be in an unusual state of flux. Recently William Schaefer, Executive Secretary of the Modern Language Association, said: “Language study is in an interesting state of transition, a break from the traditional programs of the 1950's and the 1960's leading to the study of different kinds of languages under different methods, and, I believe, for rather different reasons.”
But it seems that at almost any given time we can be found to be in crisis, some crisis. We are engaged in some titanic struggle over which method is the method to teach foreign languages or whether the language laboratory should make the classroom obsolete. Or perhaps we are mounting the battlements to defend requirements the need for which is readily apparent to us and should be to everyone else. Or with our backs to the wall we are busy fending off the assaults of economy-minded administrators who have no readily visible sense of values. Or we may be preoccupied with repairing the serious inroads which the “do-your-own-thing” philosophy seems to have made in our sacred preserves. In short, any time is a busy time as we leap from crisis to crisis and become increasingly more expert in the art of brinkmanship. The retrospective view may convince us that these crises seem to fall into cyclical patterns, and this in turn tempts us to be lulled by the comforting thought that the concern of the moment is not really new and that it too will pass.
All of this of course leaves precious little time for taking stock and putting our house in a little better order. And I should like to suggest that there are areas seriously in need of being put in order. On the broad scene of higher education in this country I am convinced that the years immediately ahead will bring us a considerable rearrangement of the patterns to which we have long been accustomed. At least I believe that they should do so. As is well known, the past few years saw our enrollments rise dramatically, but as they did so, there was an attendant surge in the number of students who were in school because their parents insisted that they be or because everyone else seemed to be, or because student registration might postpone or replace military service, or because there just didn't seem to be anything else to do at the time. In short, all reasons which might be understandable enough but which have little to do with serious motivation for learning. This situation is graphically illustrated by the alarming number of students one readily encounters who come to their last college year without having been able to find anything to major in. Having finally, through some mystic process, picked a major they can manage to complete, they graduate and turn in recrimination on the system which processed them and dumped them out without having prepared them to “do” anything. As a result we are witnessing, particularly in my state of Wisconsin, a new emphasis on vocational education. But it is my conviction that before we can expect any deep or lasting changes in the structure of high school and college education there must be some reordering of the values and priorities of society at large in the direction of accepting the idea that there is no reason for an overwhelming majority of our youth to feel obligated to acquire a college education in the traditional sense. Any substantial de-emphasis on traditional college education will, of course, have an immediate effect on the structure of the secondary curriculum. This general problem has no doubt had a considerable impact on the role of foreign languages which, of course, require considerable discipline and motivation. And it is the widespread factor of lack of motivation which has caused some teachers to accept the reduction or elimination of requirements with a sigh of relief. They may have many fewer students, but those that they do have obviously have some sense of purpose. As welcome as this relief may be, it is my feeling that the only satisfactory, long-range solution lies in the restructuring of higher education and that this must be accomplished before the traditional college degree becomes so watered down as to be meaningless either as traditional or vocational education.
As a matter of fact it may well be that we are already able to discern some of the features of the coming educational structure. For example, the community college is clearly establishing its place in that structure. It is an arresting thought to consider the fact that more than one thousand of these colleges now exist and claim at least two and a half million students. The community college is new only in the sense that it is now a widespread phenomenon and it is growing at a rapid pace. Its clientele is markedly different from those of the traditional institutions in that only a fraction—and perhaps a small one—of its students have the goal of a college degree. A high percentage of its students are part-time—either from choice or economic necessity—and their goals are chiefly technical-vocational training. In addition, many of its students are adults who are returning to school to fulfill desires unsatisfied in their earlier schooling or to investigate various fields of learning as enrichment for their later years. Whatever the case, it is evident that the expectations of these students, who may differ in many ways from the BA-bound student, pose a host of new questions and problems for foreign language teachers. Usual goals, traditional techniques, and timeworn approaches will no longer serve.
But lest we be tempted to settle back in the hope that a restructuring of higher education may resolve all of our problems, let me invite you to look at areas of our own house which may need immediate attention. In my opinion one of these is teacher training. Does the prospective teacher in the elementary or secondary school receive the same attention and care in preparation as the student more clearly destined for graduate study? How exacting are our standards for certification? Does the candidate whose pronunciation is poor or whose fluency is inadequate receive certification anyway? I fear that candid answers to such questions may often reveal an attitude that I believe to be quite widespread in our colleges and particularly in our large universities, an attitude which says in essence: “Let somebody else (often someone in the School of Education) worry about those people; my interest is in seeing that students are well prepared in literature.” Yet those who express this view, overtly or not, are usually the first to lament the lack of preparation of students coming into college from the secondary school. Obviously our college students cannot be expected to be any better than the teachers we send to train them. There was a time when oral competence in the foreign language was not considered indispensable, but that time is long past. To certify a language teacher incompetent in this area today is the equivalent of certifying a teacher in chemistry who is unable to conduct basic laboratory experiments or a teacher in mathematics who is unable to handle basic theorems and equations. But oral facility is not the only area of teacher preparation in need of scrutiny. Recent years have witnessed a great deal of research in the fields of linguistics and educational psychology, among others, and it is important that these developments and their implications for language teaching be a part of the preparation of every teacher trainee. Hence we have the responsibility to see to it that our teacher-training programs are current, and students have every right to expect to be trained by staffs who take pride in being informed about current trends in their fields rather than leaning heavily on yellowed notes which carefully depict how things were twenty or even ten years ago.
On this score, we are reminded again of the emerging importance of the community college. Notice has already been served that preparing foreign language teachers for this special type of institution will require real modifications in traditional training programs. Traditionally trained masters and doctors, who have concentrated on a specialty in literature or linguistics and who, in approaching the job market, have often scorned lower level language teaching in their eagerness to acquire status by teaching an upper level course or courses in that specialty, may well not be qualified to fill this new type of position and would run a high risk of being very unhappy in it. I am not suggesting that the traditional programs be abandoned in a rush to try to prepare people for this new market. I am saying that the community college has a right to expect that training programs will provide an opportunity for persons willing and able to acquire proper training for such positions. Louise Allen of Parkland College in Champaign, Illinois, not long ago described the requisites she believed essential for a person to teach successfully in the community college. Among them were such items as: a thorough, native or near-native command of the language, and personal knowledge of its contemporary culture; familiarity with mechanical aids—language labs, films, filmstrips, slides, overhead transparencies, cassette tapes, electronic classrooms; a real interest in and enthusiasm for teaching elementary and intermediate courses; some know-how about learning theory and teaching strategies; an interest in course and curriculum design, with innovative ideas and the courage to try them out; and, most importantly, a genuine interest in and concern for people—all kinds of people, not just the great reader or the student of culture or the gifted language major. And she put the challenge directly to the trainers of future foreign language teachers: “Shouldn't we begin to think together about producing the best community college teachers we can, rather than the best unemployed university researchers we can? We in the community college want—and need—your very brightest, most inventive, most creative master's and doctoral graduates.”
The need for wholesale revamping and revitalizing of our teacher-training effort was dramatically stated by Richard Brod of NYU and MLA when he told a Los Angeles meeting: “The task of highest priority right now is to achieve a consensus on reforming our work in teacher-training along professional and scientific lines. What on the M.A. level has too often been done haphazardly, and on the Ph.D. level too often not at all, must now be done systematically, with scientific control. In the past, teachers were assumed to be born, inspired, anointed, or ordained, but heardly ever trained. Our students and colleagues have been letting us know, none too subtly, that they can tell the difference.” 1
Another area of concern is our relationship to those trainee-graduates once they have gone into the field. I suspect that a certain remoteness, either real or imagined, exists between secondary and college teachers in most fields, but certainly there is no field where it is more important to eradicate it than in the field of languages. Not only do we have common interests, but our problems are inseparable. There is a desperate need for agreement on basic goals. Secondary teachers saw a dramatic illustration of this problem a few years ago with the largely ill-fated introduction of languages into the elementary schools, when they were suddenly confronted with large numbers of entering students whose widely varying experience with the language made them no longer fit into the long established patterns of secondary school courses. The same situation has long been true of the relationship or lack of it between secondary and college language courses. What level of proficiency in reading, writing, and speaking should be expected of the student who enters college with two, three, or four years of high school language study? The student has a right to know what will be expected of him and his high school teacher needs to know as well. It may be reasonably suggested that the great variation in institutions makes it virtually impossible to establish norms for the various levels which will find general acceptance. This does not, however, exempt individual institutions from stating their expectations and making them known to secondary school teachers. I am well aware that such a statement suggests a unilateral decision on the part of colleges and universities training teachers and I certainly do not feel that it should be a unilateral decision. What I believe is urgently needed is more contact and discussion of problems between teachers of the two levels with the goal of arriving at common decisions. I realize that this is more easily said than done. Ideally such decisions should be arrived at after extensive consultations and discussions on a statewide basis in the manner undertaken by the Indiana Language Program a few years ago. Such a procedure is time-consuming and, above all, extremely expensive. But it does seem to me that much can be gained from approaching the problem from the other extreme. That is, if each teacher-training institution would undertake such discussions with junior high and high school teachers in its locality and perhaps in nearby cities and towns, at least a beginning could be made. Such local initiatives could then be followed up by regional or statewide coordinating meetings using such vehicles as the State Association of Language Teachers or chapter meetings of such professional societies as the AAT groups.
Admittedly, there is nothing novel in this idea and we have all heard the problem of articulation or lack of articulation between elementary school and junior high school and between junior high and high school and between high school and college discussed and lamented on many an occasion. But the more relevant question is has anything come of these talks and laments? What is needed, I feel, is a coordinated, consistent, sustained attack on this problem. This can be most readily accomplished at the local level by individual units and once even provisional agreements are reached at that level the more difficult talk of broader coordination can be addressed. Failure to act is only to perpetuate the situation which was accurately described by Professor Schaefer when he said: “The failure of foreign language programs in America has in the past been vertical in nature, a lack of communication from the elementary school programs to the high schools and on up to the colleges and universities. This continues to be a failure, and the consequences are most serious.” It is indeed ironic that a class of people whose lives are supposedly dedicated to making communication possible in other languages should themselves suffer from a lack of communication in their own language. But it must be recognized that communication and understanding are not easily attained and that they require the setting aside of old prejudices and antagonisms. Elementary and secondary school teachers must stop excusing their failure to engage in such efforts with the claim that teachers at the college level are ignorant of and uninterested in the facts of life of language teaching at lower levels. And college and university teachers must demonstrate through positive action that such claims are not valid; they must recognize that the problems at elementary and secondary levels are inextricably entwined with their own problems. Failure to recognize this interdependence can only result in the cold comfort of everyone going down together.
But such communication and such coordination can only come about through the personal involvement of each and every member of the profession. It is disheartening to see how widespread this inaction and failure to meet professional responsibility is. For example, it is significant that only fifteen percent of the nation's foreign language teachers belong to ACTFL. I suspect that the membership percentages for MLA, the AAT's, the state associations, or other groups are scarcely more comforting. And I do not suggest that simple membership in any one or all of such organizations is the solution to anything. Obviously only membership in terms of active personal involvement can have any real results. It is, of course, always easiest to stand outside of any group and to criticize its lack of accomplishment, but it seems to me that this right should be reserved for those who have already given a full measure of personal commitment. What I am suggesting is that there is a desperate need for the development of a genuine spirit of professionalism which can emerge only after each individual has assessed his contribution on this score.
“Spirit of professionalism” is a lovely phrase, but exactly what does it mean and what does it imply for each of us? I am sure that every one of us has at some time or another felt great indignation at the suggestion that the teacher is not in every respect as much a professional as the doctor or lawyer. But let us develop this parallel and its implications for a moment. I feel sure that no one of us suffering from a serious ailment would knowingly put himself in the hands of a doctor who he believed to be anything short of a thorough professional. He would expect that doctor to be fully skilled in his field and further that he be fully conversant with the most recent developments of knowledge concerning treatment of that ailment. And how is he supposed to be able to keep constantly adding to and reappraising the basic fund of knowledge which we expect him to have mastered when he was a medical student? I suppose that the reasonable reply would be that we expect him to be constantly reading professional journals, consulting with colleagues, and attending professional meetings so as to keep abreast of the results of current research, new discoveries, and the ever-expanding and ever-changing body of medical knowledge. These are the assumptions we make, consciously or not, when we turn to a doctor for professional help. Now if we are to insist that we are fully as professional as we expect him to be, can we ask any less of ourselves? The answer is, I think, clear, but it needs closer examination, for it is true that our failures as professionals may not be as dramatic as those of the doctor and it is easier for us to ignore them or to gloss them over. Our patients may not die, but nonetheless we may well have killed their interest and concern for our field of knowledge and they may have abandoned us for a more proficient professional in another field, or we may well have effectively crippled them for future work in our field by our shortcomings as professionals. And let me hasten to add that I am not here making a plea that we all need to be researchers making original contributions to the basic body of knowledge in our field any more than we need expect our doctor to be the maker of new discoveries in medicine. But there is every reason to demand that we be the professional practitioners we expect him to be.
But once we have agreed that we must seek to become the professionals we claim to be there still remains much to be decided about what that entails, recognizing from the outset that it is a goal never fully attained. It is, of course, a lifetime task of striving but a striving that we dare not abandon.
First, it seems to me that it requires that we be as proficient in our special areas as we can possibly make ourselves. This in itself is an endless task of self-renewal, for many aspects of our fields are constantly changing. But, to begin, we must be as fluent in all aspects of the language we teach as we can possibly be. Like playing the piano, this requires constant practice and not just practice repeating our own inadequacies in isolation. It requires the constant re-exposure to native sources of the language and culture lest our techniques and form become rusty and outmoded. Travel and foreign residence will be necessary so as to enlist their aid in making it possible. Even so, personal sacrifice will often be required. But the day is gone when students can be expected to respect teachers who claim to be experts and professionals if they cannot demonstrate real expertise with the tools of their trade.
Secondly, we must keep abreast of what is going on in our fields. We do this, most obviously, by constant reading, by familiarity with the principal journals, by professional conversations with our colleagues, by belonging to and actively participating in our professional organizations and by participating in professional meetings. This is a big order but one we cannot ignore. Students of recent years have been demanding many changes in academe and one of the most persistent of their complaints is against the abuses of the tenure system, but what we must prove is that the system is not being used for the protection of mediocrity, or, worse yet, professional incompetents. And one of the best protections against this is the constant self-improvement and professional involvement of each of us. We must be professionals committed to and involved in our profession. We must work at communicating first with each other and then with those outside the profession. To do so we must put aside our petty jealousies which have so commonly plagued us. Having participated for several years as a consultant-examiner for the North Central Association reviewing educational programs for the purpose of accreditation, I have had occasion to visit many institutions in many parts of the country. My personal interest always causes me to make early inquiry into the health of the foreign language program of the school in question. In an alarming number of cases such inquiry has been met with the apologetic admission that this is one of the weakest spots in their armor and the weakness is usually attributed to the lack of internal agreement and leadership. Such explanations need not be taken at face value always and may only be a coverup for other problems. But certainly we are all familiar with the kind of strife that has resulted from the French getting a larger share of the library budget than the Spanish or from the German enrollments surpassing the French or from the Italian teacher's salary being higher than that of the Portuguese teacher. At times it indeed seems that we are more bent on destroying each other than affording that pleasure to our real adversaries. It is not necessarily that we suffer from these understandable human frailties more than our colleagues in other disciplines, but simply that the fabric of our usual departmental organization has more seams through which these shortcomings are exposed. But it is ironic that in these days of frequent battles about foreign language requirements, for example, the most effective defense is often forthcoming from colleagues in other departments rather from our own ranks, even recognizing that it is always difficult to defend oneself without seeming to be petty and self-serving.
Likewise, as I indicated earlier, we must have far more interaction and meaningful communication among ourselves at various levels. We cannot afford gulfs of ignorance and indifference to separate the elementary, secondary, and college foreign language teacher. Professor Schaefer expressed this well when he said flatly: “Above all, what the foreign language profession needs at this time is a voice. It needs to be able to hear itself, know itself as a profession, as a viable and significant area of humanistic studies. Not just French, German, or Spanish, but the foreign language ‘profession.’ At present the high school Spanish teacher sees no connection between his ‘field’ and that of the college German instructor in Chicago or the Harvard professor of Oriental languages. But there is a connection; there has to be a connection.” 2
On this score we cannot escape the need for leadership. I have always thought it strange and extremely detrimental to the profession that the foreign language people have seemed to play so small a role in academic leadership. How many deans, chancellors, and college presidents do you know who come from the foreign language fields? I am well aware that administrators are often thought by teachers to be the natural enemy as epitomized by the definition of an Associate Dean as a mouse training to be a rat. But it doesn't seem to me unrespectable or even unreasonable that foreign language staffs should contribute actively to the shaping of academic policy. If we honestly believe that humanists in general and foreign language experts in particular can provide more enlightened academic policy, then we have the obligation to provide the leadership to demonstrate that. And fortunately I think we can do this without necessarily lowering ourselves to be administrators. We can do it simply by being professionals, by assuring that we have meaningful and continuous contacts with each other and with our colleagues in other disciplines, and by taking an active role in the activities of our profession and in the broader sphere of academic affairs as well. Each of us can do this in his own institution, be it elementary school, high school, or college.
Therefore, as we look ahead and ask: “What next?”, I think what's next depends in no small part on ourselves. And if we are tempted to be discouraged or to think that the demands are unreasonable, it is worth reminding ourselves that what we seek is worth it and that what we are involved in has probably never been more important. Nowhere recently has this been more graphically put than by Norman Cousins writing in an October issue of World with which you may be familiar. He says: “Communications technology is clearly equal to the needs of world community, but the same cannot be said of communications philosophy or even communications systems. People and nations establish contact far more readily than rapport. The conveyance of human bodies from one part of the world to the other can be accomplished more efficiently and satisfactorily than the conveyance of meaning. Today literally millions of people are involved in close-range verbal traffic. Almost every day, in different parts of the world, non-governmental people are coming together in international meetings. What all these diverse groups have in common is the problem of making themselves clear. They convene with ease but converse with effort. Contact is achieved far more rapidly than genuine communication. Being within earshot of one another has not brought people within ready range of one another's minds. Through electronics, transmission is certain, but comprehension is still an open question.” Contributing to the solution of this problem seems to me to constitute a vital challenge for us in the seventies.
A paper given at a meeting of the Modem Foreign Language Association of Virginia, 4 November 1972, at the University of Richmond. The author is Associate Dean of the College of Letters and Science and past Chairman of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
1 Richard I. Brod, “Foreign Language Manpower Needs in the Seventies.” ADFL Bulletin 2 (March 1971), 7–10.
2 William D. Schaefer, “The Plight and Future of Foreign Language Learning in America.” ADFL Bulletin 3 (March 1972), 5–8
© 1973 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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