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FOR many reasons foreign language teaching in the United States continues to be a fragile enterprise: competition among the languages has led to disunity and vulnerability; relationships between language study and other disciplines are ill defined; motivations and incentives for long-range study are absent or unclear; the public is indifferent or even hostile; the language teacher has a negative image. As a result of this tenuous condition, foreign language study is more likely to be buffeted about by the winds of change than are fields that find it easier to adapt and survive.
An example of these winds of change, one that has penetrated the consciousness of practically every observer of education during the last ten years, is the shift away from the standard two-year (occasionally only one-year) language requirement for the B.A. degree. 1 Affecting over fifty percent of American colleges and universities between 1966 and 1974, the movement to abolish or decrease requirements has had a significant impact on language teaching, both directly in the colleges and indirectly in the secondary schools. Two important trends that have emerged as a result of lowering requirements are, first, a change in student preferences for specific languages and, second, an attempt on the part of colleges to make curricula more attractive to students and more relevant to their perceived needs.
The shift in preferences has meant, for example, that while French lost 142,000 enrollments at the college level between 1968 and 1977, Spanish gained 12,000, displacing French as the nation's leading second language. In the secondary schools, where Spanish has been the leading language since the 1940s, it declined only 2% between 1968 and 1974, while French lost 432,000 enrollments, or 25.6%. In colleges, German lost 81,000 students, or 37.4%, between 1968 and 1977, and Russian lost 13,000, or 31.7%. During the same period, Italian gained 3,000 enrollments, nearly 10%. Similarly, in secondary schools, German lost 35,000 enrollments, or 7.2%, and Russian lost 11,000, or 40%, between 1968 and 1974, while Italian increased from 33,000 to 51,000, for a gain of 56.5%. At the same time, in the colleges and universities, a number of the less commonly taught languages showed impressive enrollment gains, reflecting on the one hand a responsiveness to current events (the opening up of the People's Republic of China, the increasing commercial and political importance of Japan and of the Arab nations) and on the other hand increased consciousness of ethnic origins—that is, of “roots” —and of the satisfactions to be derived from the study of the language of one's origins. Hebrew, Polish, and Swahili are among the languages that have recorded noticeable enrollment increases during the 1970s.
These data make it fairly easy to summarize the enrollment shift of the 1970s: the traditional languages of European civilization—Latin, French, German, and Russian—have lost ground to Spanish and, to a lesser extent, to languages that offer either strategic importance or a significant ethnic identification. It would be too facile to conclude, however, that our students, in opting for Spanish (among other languages), have simply succumbed to the lure of “relevance” and have given little thought to humanistic values. Needless to say, if there are humanistic values to be gained from language study, they can be attained through the study of Spanish (or Tamil, Navajo, or Finnish, for that matter) as well as through French or Latin. The polarization is a false one. What is more to the point is that the students—insofar as one can generalize about them—appear to be interested in languages whose speakers have an immediate claim on their attention. (In this context, even the use of the word “speakers” is fairly revolutionary; thirty years ago, the operative word would have been “books.”) At a time when speakers of Spanish have become visible (and audible) in practically every city of the United States and when we are still engaged in the process of discovering Latin America in all its diversity and fascinating complexity, it should not be surprising that the languages of France and Germany, two relatively stable and predictable nations, should somehow seem less interesting.
It is clear, I think, that tradition is no longer a strong selling point in language education. Some aspects of this change are salutary: our brightest students, it seems to me, are aware of Asia and Africa in ways my generation never was; and, unless I am very much mistaken, they approach the cultures and value systems of these regions with less bias and a greater degree of acceptance than our white Judeo-Christian Anglo-Saxon teachers encouraged us to have. From this perspective the culture of Western Europe, because it is relatively similar to our own, may not be quite so attractive to students today as it was to us when we were students. The differences among Europe's subcultures are mere variations on a theme, and in this sense the study of one of them is not necessarily so instructive as the investigation of something more exotic. As a teacher of German I am painfully aware, for example, that there is nothing particularly “exotic” about contemporary German culture. The effects of historical differences are, of course, evident to those trained to see them, but they are often too subtle to be perceived by someone who has not been immersed in European culture for an extended period. As far as modern life is concerned, I think the differences between the Germans and us are simply not so deep or so strong as the affinities. Viewed in this way, Europe is no longer the ideal laboratory for the contrastive study of contemporary cultures. Indeed, Europe is not a laboratory at all, but merely a museum, and our students' loss of interest in Europe is neither good nor evil, but simply inevitable.
From another point of view, of course, our students' rejection of the language tradition, and the traditional languages, is wholly deplorable, not only for our profession but for the nation. I am filled with dread, for example, at the prospect of this generation of students and their successors knowing little or nothing of the facts of history, of the historical approach and method, of the sweep and meaning of history. It is but one step, I fear, from a rejection of history to a rejection of everything written down in the past, which of course means everything written.
Perhaps I am guilty of overstating the danger for rhetorical purposes. I did that a few sentences ago, too, when I suggested that, from a certain perspective, Europe may appear to have become a museum. Both ideas are ugly, but they may shock us into remembering, first, that the preservation of the humanities in our culture is an important mission and, second, that any attempt to defend and preserve the humanities will require a collective effort. Since humanists prefer to work privately and individually rather than on teams, it is conceivable that some humanists may not be competent or disposed to serve as defenders of the common cause. If this is true, then such people must be encouraged to submerge their individual differences and overcome their aloofness long enough to join forces with those who are in a position to respond articulately and forcefully to attacks on the castle. That some kind of defensive action will be necessary is, I believe, beyond all doubt. I have been discussing the extent to which humanists are capable of such action. I shall return later to the particular qualities of foreign language professionals that may make it even more difficult for them to take such action than it is for other humanists.
Let me review. Before digressing into some discussions that I considered both necessary and productive, I began by attempting to show that what is revolutionary about the language enrollment trends of the 1970s is that they have responded to the preferences of students rather than to those of faculty. Ironically, fiscal tightening may have already made a mockery of the students' hard-won freedom: instead of having more options, they will have fewer languages to choose from, as more and more colleges curtail the number of languages offered. Our surveys show, for example, that between 1974 and 1977 over 150 colleges discontinued German and over 75 dropped Russian, at least for one year. To be sure, the colleges have not necessarily chosen to drop these languages as a matter of cultural policy; they have simply reacted to a de facto decline in demand for them. The net effect, however, has been the loss of a resource and the restriction of choice.
The other significant trend in foreign language programs in this decade has been the expansion of the scope of advanced-level and elective curricula to encompass fields other than literature. The motivation for this broadening of departmental activity has been, needless to say, the necessity for keeping a program together in the “free-market” situation resulting from the removal of the traditional requirements. At the same time, this new breadth is also the result of certain historical forces, of which the pressure for relevance is only one. The others are the development of clearer definitions of culture and of more successful approaches to teaching it; the success of the oldest interdisciplinary model of them all, the study of the classics, supplemented by the models of foreign area studies programs; the availability of native instructional materials and of fresh sources of information on specific cultures; the growth of a parallel demand for such instruction in the proprietary schools; a slow but visible acceleration in the nation's acceptance of foreign cultures; and a revival of interest in the ethnic cultures rooted in our own population. Whatever the causes, language departments across the nation have shown great imagination in developing new courses in fields other than literature as well as new approaches to the teaching of literature itself.
A 1974–75 MLA survey of college-level curricula made use of an arbitrary but sensible system of classification that somehow managed to encompass within four broad categories all the newly created courses and programs reported by the 1,650 responding departments. The categories used by the survey were career-related, community-related, interdisciplinary, and nontraditional. The catalog portion of the final survey report, published by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages under the title Options for the Teaching of Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures , lists 1,682 courses and programs that, collectively, reveal a wide range of realities and possibilities. Since the survey was nonevaluative and there was no follow-up, we do not know the extent to which the innovations reported were successful in attracting students and in meeting educational objectives. In this sense, our survey, for better or worse, is little more than “That Was the Year That Was.” Yet within the report similar ideas recur often enough to suggest that there was then, and probably continues to be, some genuine creativity within our profession, as well as some functional channels of communication that enable the more energetic among us to make contact with our counterparts on other campuses.
It is fair to say, I think, that the courses mentioned most frequently in the survey embody ideas whose time has come. They include career-related courses ranging all the way from Spanish for Farm and Ranch Workers to Business German and community-related courses given in army camps, prisons, and manufacturing plants and designed to serve the needs of special-interest groups within the community surrounding the institution. There are interdisciplinary courses of all kinds, including both those taught primarily within a language department and those given on a team-teaching basis by colleagues from several fields. Interdisciplinary courses are often predictable: though the number of possible combinations is probably infinite, there are only so many that work. Such courses may concentrate on a specific period of time or on a single social or political topic or on both; they may be broad or narrow, traditional or tendentious, classic examples of the area studies approach or unique combinations reflecting the personal biases and specialized competencies of their creators. The Options book lists 560 interdisciplinary courses under 10 subcategories. I have a few personal favorites among them, whereby I mean that the titles and abstracts appeal to me; in the absence of evaluative information I have no way of knowing whether or not these courses were in any way successful. In any case, I am especially fond of the following course titles: Paris: Biography of a City; 1913; The Hispanic World Today; A Cultural Introduction to Languages; Music in German Literature and Thought; Latin American Literature of Social Conflict; and Myth in Practice and Theory.
The nontraditional category, the fourth and final broad division in the Options book, encompasses a wide range of subcategories: mediated programs, intensive or immersion courses, individualized instruction, courses for native speakers, off-campus programs, experiential learning, courses for tourism, and others. These, presumably, are areas where genuine experimentation has taken place, with a predictable quota of successes and failures. Today, however, four years after the MLA's curriculum survey, the term “nontraditional” already seems out of date, or at least irrelevant. I cannot speak for its usage elsewhere, but in this particular context it seems to me to mean nothing more than “miscellaneous.”
I also believe that an effort should be made to repeat the survey, possibly in the fall of 1979, with careful planning and consultation among curriculum specialists and with some consideration of the possibility of computerization. Decisions on how the survey should be conducted would of course depend on a clear understanding of the needs of its potential users. Our original plan was to maintain a curriculum file, by topic and language, so that we could answer inquiries about courses in, say, Spanish for Medical Personnel or Eighteenth-Century French Culture by supplying the inquirer with a list of existing courses and the names and institutions of the persons teaching them. I have no illusions about the potential of such an idea for curing the ills of our profession. I merely suggest it as one of many measures that might be taken to help improve the flow of information about and among institutional language programs and thus indirectly contribute to the improvement of teaching and the revival of stagnant faculty. It may be that many ideas are not replicable on other campuses, with other teachers. Or it may be that foreign language faculty are by nature insular and unwilling to borrow alien ideas. I am as skeptical as anyone about the possibility of changing human nature, and I am reminded daily of the high price we in foreign languages pay for our separatism and professional fragmentation. Nevertheless I have also on occasion seen evidence that we are capable of learning and of lifting ourselves out of routine.
A case in point is the Dartmouth Intensive Language Model, or the so-called Rassias method, named after its uniquely gifted and highly theatrical creator, John Rassias, Professor of French at Dartmouth College. When in 1976 Rassias received an Impact Grant from the Exxon Educational Foundation, I invited him to speak to language department chairmen at the two ADFL seminars held in June of that year at Wayne State University and Stanford University. In his presentation, and in the accompanying videotape showing scenes from language classes and from training sessions for the assistant teachers, Rassias demonstrated approaches and techniques that had succeeded, at Dartmouth, in producing significant and lasting increases in language enrollments and in generating increased participation in the college's study-abroad programs. At Dartmouth today, foreign language study has some of the attractiveness and prestige that on other campuses are enjoyed only by team sports: students rearrange their programs to make room for intensive courses; juniors and seniors compete for opportunities to work as assistant teachers; admissions officers use the nationally famous language program to lure new students. In short, Dartmouth has already achieved what we all want, an idyllic situation in which students, free from a requirement they would resent, are given meaningful incentives for electing our courses. Language instruction is no longer a punishment; it is a reward.
My point in all this is not to advertise John Rassias' program; his face, costumes, and unique classroom skills have already been featured in numerous newspapers and magazines, as well as on television. My point is that many aspects of his program can be, and in fact have been, replicated on other campuses, despite skeptical fears to the contrary. The skepticism seems justified, of course, when one considers that Dartmouth is a relatively wealthy and selective private college, overflowing with gifted and sophisticated students. Ninety-five percent of the campuses in this country do not share these advantages. Yet, with the aid of the Exxon grant program, Dartmouth has succeeded in imparting wisdom and method to some fifty-five colleagues who have attended special workshops on the campus and have subsequently carried the ideas and techniques back to their own departments in colleges of all sizes and types in various parts of the country. Presumably, not all of them will succeed in transplanting the program, but several of them have in fact already succeeded. This leads to the conclusion, I believe, that the essential ingredients for such a transplant are not so much wealth and sophistication as they are energy, capacity to learn, and institutional commitment. At Dartmouth, “commitment” has translated into a willingness on the part of the college administration to permit the intrusion of intensive courses into the normally heavy freshman program, to permit undergraduates to teach, to grant credit for overseas courses, and to allow some faculty members to devote more time to teaching than to scholarly activities. In other colleges and universities, this kind of institutional commitment could not be taken for granted.
Clearly, institutional commitment is one of the most significant factors determining the success or failure of any language program. Our profession and our product have an image problem, a less than wholly positive reputation among the public. To the extent that our institutional administrators are part of the public, overcoming their antipathy should be one of our major strategic objectives. If we can manage to attract students and provide exciting instruction before we achieve that objective, obviously we will have a strong case for regaining administrative sympathy and support. Success with students, other faculty, parents, alumni, or the community inevitably impresses administrators. In the absence of concrete evidence of such success, however, we have the burden of convincing these officials that we already have the will and the human resources to overcome all the ills that plague us, including drift, apathy, insularity, unprofessional behavior, and sometimes sheer incompetence.
Language teaching in the United States is a diverse and colorful enterprise, and the same adjectives apply to its practitioners. By any standard, our diversity ought to be a strength; one thinks nostalgically of the advice of one of the most famous chairmen of all time, Mao Tse-Tung, who said: “Let a hundred flowers bloom.” No one, I think, could fail to notice the variety in our foreign language garden: a rich array of plants and flowers, as well as lichens and weeds. Some of the flora are fruitful, others not; some, sadly enough, have died on the vine. The problem is not so much with the diversity of our garden; the problem is that it may not have been nurtured properly to survive in the climate in which we have planted it, the American educational system.
Leaving aside the metaphor, I should like to attempt to characterize the climate and to suggest why our enterprise has not thrived there. Our passionately democratic and fiercely antifeudal American public school system is firmly anchored in a tradition of local control and local accountability. Since most people, or at least most Americans, seem to be fairly possessive about both their money and their children, the system still makes sense. Yet it was developed in an agrarian economy at a time when distances prohibited family mobility—conditions that no longer apply in 1978. Still, as a lay observer, I have no sense that there has been any significant trend away from local control and accountability, even though the states and the federal government have had an increasing impact on broad educational policy and curricular trends.
Given local control, one is impelled to conclude that the patchwork quality, the unevenness, and the fragmentation that exist in American schools today are likely to continue. What does this mean for foreign language education? The negative side of being diverse and colorful is our hopeless lack of cohesion. Without wishing to chastise for the sake of chastisement, I must say with regret that in my experience the foreign language teaching profession is woefully and dangerously deficient in the sense that we lack a clear self-image, a unity of purpose, a rational perspective on the value of our enterprise, a philosophy of education, political experience, and general professionalism. Perhaps professionalism is too much to expect: we are, after all, neither lawyers nor physicians. But it is because we have failed to unite and to professionalize that we continue to be at the mercy of local control, local interest, and other extraneous political considerations that dictate educational policy in America. Worse yet, we continue to be at the mercy of those members of the education profession who have taken the trouble to organize, politicize, and professionalize themselves and who have thereby, without any real merit, gained ascendancy in the public mind as being the representative professional voices to be listened to on educational matters.
By our failure to organize properly, we have missed the opportunity to shape our own destiny and that of our enterprise. We have missed the opportunity to define authoritatively, and according to some respected standard, (1) the skills and levels of attainment necessary for functional accomplishment in foreign languages, (2) the skills and levels of attainment necessary for teaching a foreign language, and (3) appropriate objectives for instructional sequences in both schools and colleges. If we could produce the definitions and the authoritative statements I have just listed, we would go a long way toward our common goal of strengthening and expanding the role of foreign language study in American life and education.
Why, then, do we continue to fail to do what must be done? What prevents us from getting our act together? The paradox of our profession is that we are simultaneously both Europeans and Americans—in spirit and in substance, in purpose and in approach, and in our image of ourselves. (Please note that I am not here referring to the place of birth or the nationality of our teachers; these are largely irrelevant, as is evident from the many Americanized Europeans and Europeanized Americans among us.) It is, of course, our college-level enterprise that suffers most from the European way of doing things. Our secondary schools are mostly American in staffing and in the constraints under which they operate. At the college level, however, the European spirit is prevalent, quite visible, and, I regret to say, harmful. It is based on false premises about the things that can and should be imported into American education and about the ways in which our educational programs can be internationalized. It assumes that what is good for research and for graduate professional training is also good for undergraduate education; it is accountable only to authorities it has helped to select; it is faculty-centered rather than student-centered; it is compartmentalized and jealous of disciplinary privilege; and it is dedicated to the preservation of a beast called the Full Professor. Indeed, the irony of what I am here calling the European spirit is that it perpetuates a model that is well on its way to becoming extinct in Europe and will probably end up surviving solely in the diaspora.
For all its faults, the European model is of course also the historical source of some of our most cherished principles, including academic freedom, scholarly rigor, and professional integrity. Yet, these have survived several generations in the New World and thus have effectively taken root here. I am not suggesting that the European spirit, as I am calling it, should be uprooted. I would ask only that some of its outer trappings and accretions be examined rationally and impartially, so that steps may be taken to institute reform before it is too late. Regrettably, the failure of the academic community to examine its premises and values has already created a vacuum that the state bureaucracies, the institutional administrators, and other members of the educationist cartel have not hesitated to fill. Concerned with faculty privilege and with the preservation of their political purity, the adherents of the European model have already lost ground in the real power struggles that have been going on under their noses. The evolution, or perhaps revolution, in education has already occurred while the dinosaurs have been busy spawning sterile offspring. The metaphor is inept to the extent that our academic dinosaurs have been gifted and intelligent people; the tragedy is that they have applied their gifts and their intelligence to private concerns, while major questions of social and educational policy with long-range consequences for the nation have been decided without them. The even greater tragedy, of course, is the experience of their sterile offspring—the unemployed junior faculty who, conceivably, might have had the will and the energy to take action but who, as things now stand in a world they never made, have neither the leverage nor the standing place from which they might attempt to move the universe.
My purpose in all this is to suggest that the American university and college professoriate has been derelict in its responsibility to society and to its vocation. The foreign language teaching community is only a relatively small group, but it suffers heavily from the plague of Europeanism. Yet, who knows? Because we are only number eleven (or whatever number we are), we try harder; and because we have a clearer perception of what Europeanism is and where it comes from, we may be able to take leadership in the collective act of chaining the beast and putting it in its place.
Earlier I referred to a successful foreign language program that enjoys prestige on its own campus comparable to that of a winning athletic team. It is not, I believe, in conflict with our essentially humanistic image of ourselves to suggest that there may be advantages in attempting to reshape our school and college language programs to conform to the model of amateur sports. I am aware of the limitations of the model, of course, and I am prepared to admit that the era of cheerleaders, Super Bowls, and breakfast-cereal endorsements by language champions is probably still in the far distant future. Yet our profession has much to gain by replacing restrictions with freedoms and trading our aloof, condescending, and paternalistic behavior for an attitude of openness and encouragement.
Foreign language education is still a long way from achieving the acceptance and visibility in American society that we would like it to have. We need to win enthusiastic, not grudging, support from all segments of society—not merely from educators and administrators but also from school boards, students, community organizations, business leaders, internationalists of all kinds, and the media. In this year of the much heralded President's Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies, we have what may be, as one of its members put it recently, the last opportunity in this century to give foreign language education its rightful place in American society. How can we set about winning the support we need? I have no simple answer to this question. I know only that we will not win it easily and that we will ultimately succeed only if we learn to act with a better sense of professionalism, a stronger unity of purpose, and a clearer understanding of our role in society than we have had until now.
A paper presented at the National Conference on New Directions in Foreign Language Studies and Language Policy, The William Paterson College of New Jersey, 17 November 1978. The author is Director of Foreign Language Programs for the Modern Language Association.
1 The MLA's latest survey shows that a small number of colleges that never did so before are only now moving to abolish or reduce their requirements. As it happens, an equally small number are moving to restore them.
© 1979 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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