|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
BY NOW we have all rejoiced that “Americans' scandalous incompetence in foreign languages” has finally, however fleetingly, been brought to the attention of the American public. 1 The question we are faced with is, What now? What are or will be the results of the more than $200,000 and the massive efforts expended in the commission's assessment and recommendations?
By all present indications, the Reagan administration will not make education—and particularly foreign language education—a major priority. Cut-backs in funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities, for programs in international education and bilingual education are already a fact; the Fulbright Exchange Program is in jeopardy. One cannot avoid the anxious question, Was the work of the President's Commission an exercise in futility?
It wasn't. Because of the commission, there has been a considerable increase in public awareness of the deficiencies in foreign language competence in the United States and the possible effects of those deficiencies on our economy and on our political and diplomatic relations. Television reports, newspapers, and journals, from the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science to the Readers' Digest and U.S. News and World Report , have focused (in the Reader's Digest's phrase) on “our shocking illiteracy in foreign languages” and our ignorance of the world around us. Paul Simon's recent book, The Tongue-Tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis , presents the most comprehensive treatment of the problem. Several professional organizations, among them the National Society for the Study of Education (NSSE) and the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), have come out in support of increased and improved foreign language study. Unfortunately, public awareness has not yet been converted to action. According to preliminary findings of the 1980 MLA undergraduate enrollment survey, the decline in foreign language enrollments continues. 2
The commission's activities led to the establishment of the National Council on Foreign Language and International Studies. Consisting of two dozen distinguished citizens from various professions and regions and supported by funds from private foundations, business corporations, and government agencies, the council attempts to focus “public attention on the crucial importance to the United States of effective communication with and comprehensive understanding of the world beyond our borders.” Its primary task is “to make a coherent, persuasive, and persistent case that high quality foreign language and international studies are vital to America's future.” 3 The council has already appointed task forces to study the topics, “National Manpower Targets for Advanced Research on Foreign Areas” and “The Utilization of International Skills in the National Interest” and has organized a task force on elementary, secondary, and undergraduate education. The council is planning a fourth task force, on the role of the business community in international studies and research, in the near future.
In general, I believe that the commission has increased the profession's awareness of the need for political activism to further our interests. It has made us aware of our lack of professional unity and the need to consolidate the aims, purposes, resources, and memberships of our many foreign language organizations, if we ever want to exert significant political influence? To exert that influence, a national liaison office has been established in Washington by the Joint National Committee for Languages (JNCL), a consortium of twelve foreign language professional organizations (AATF, AATG, AATI, ACTFL, AATSEEL, AATSP, ATJ, MLA, NABE, NCOLG, NFMLTA, and TESOL). The JNCL seeks to monitor and solicit support for legislative proposals dealing with foreign language and international studies and to work with governmental and nongovernmental agencies in promoting such study.
The ACTFL Alert Network, which also originated during the term of the President's Commission, continues to inform and mobilize the profession regarding legislative and policy events through a highly efficient communication system with foreign language leaders in all states.
In addition, the commission:
If the commission's report and recommendations are to have any lasting impact, however, the major effort and the major changes have to be made by individual departments. The commission's call is not just a call for an increase in quantity of foreign language study. If, indeed, as the report states, world peace and the nation's security and economy are at stake, the call must be not merely for more Americans to study a second language but for more Americans to become competent in a second language.
Recent professional and even legislative efforts have been predominantly directed at increasing enrollments—a worthy effort, but one doomed to failure unless we make a concerted attempt to improve the quality of our programs for those students who heed the call. Improved programs may indeed lead to competence in foreign languages by a larger number of Americans. For those who agree that we need to orient foreign language education toward competence, I am making the following six proposals:
My proposals are not all original, but they are based on pragmatic as well as psycholinguistic considerations. Pragmatic in being realizable without major increases in public funding in many if not most institutional settings and pragmatic in calling for accountability that is measured by language competence acquired rather than credit hours earned. Psycholinguistic considerations take into account that acquiring some level of mastery in a second language outside the territory where the language is spoken (i.e., in the artificial setting of the traditional college classroom and within the time constraints imposed by the undergraduate curriculum) is difficult, if not impossible, for most American undergraduates who have had no extensive language study in high school.
Some elaboration of my proposals is in order:
1. Language teaching must become the priority in American foreign language departments . To those who claim that language teaching already has that status I pose the questions, How can that be, when in practically all institutions with graduate programs most language courses are taught by relatively untrained and inexperienced teaching assistants? How can that be, when the senior staff consists almost exclusively of scholars trained and interested in literary scholarship rather than in language analysis, teaching, and learning? How can that be, when literary research is in many departments more highly rewarded than teaching, pedagogical experimentation, course development, or scholarly writing dealing with applied linguistics, language learning, or methodology?
To support my suspicion that training for language teaching has not yet reached priority status in many graduate programs in our profession, let me relate an experience from recent job interviews conducted to fill a position in my department. The advertisement for the position clearly stated that applicants needed to consider themselves primarily language teachers . Several candidates, however, when asked for their methodological preferences in language teaching, for their perception of the major differences between native and second language acquisition, or for an indication of the professional journals they read regularly to keep abreast of developments in foreign language teaching, could not provide satisfactory answers. Yet they were recent graduates from respectable institutions and claimed to be professional language teachers.
To ensure that language teaching gains priority status, foreign language departments would have to be willing to measure and certify the language proficiency of their graduates. Courses in applied linguistics, language learning, and teaching methodology not only would have to be available but would have to carry equal status with courses in literary history or analysis. College language courses would have to be taught by trained and experienced personnel rather than by inexperienced assistants whose only qualifications often consist of speaking the target language or having sat in a series of language courses themselves.
2. Intensive or immersion language learning opportunities should be made available as regular curricular options . If language competence is a major goal, we need to offer different tracks to students who are willing and able to gain proficiency in a second language and to those who by aptitude, interest, or motivation can benefit only from an introduction to other languages and cultures. The introductory track already exists in most institutions, particularly in those with a language requirement. The other track—that is, intensive or immersion instruction—is not yet widely available, although evidence exists that this curricular option can indeed foster the development of proficiency more easily than can traditional semester programs.
Intensive or immersion instruction is not a method. It presupposes neither a particular linguistic theory nor special materials and facilities. It is a program that offers increased exposure to the language, increased instructional and learning time, usually compressed into a relatively shorter time than the traditional college curriculum allows. Immersion courses, in addition to offering increased instructional time, use the target language as the medium of instruction and preferably also as the medium of personal interaction outside the classroom, either in study abroad settings or in extracurricular activities throughout the day on the home campus. Intensive programs take into account that exposure to language is the most important factor contributing to success in language learning. Many institutions now offer special summer programs utilizing an intensive concept (the best known summer intensive-immersion program is probably that at Middlebury College). More recently, pioneered by Dartmouth College, intensive courses have found their way into the traditional academic school year. 6
3. The profession must develop and use a common measure of oral and written language proficiency . At present, most institutions define proficiency in terms of semesters of language study or credit hours earned—meaningless criteria and, as we know, highly variable from department to department. The development and implementation of common proficiency measures must be seen, in my opinion, as professional priority number one. Ours must be one of the few professions left that have not clearly defined minimal competences for its “specialists,” “practitioners,” teachers, and students.
I realize that my plea calls for a unified national effort and that any one institution alone cannot effect the necessary changes. But what the individual institution or department can do is: (a) support national efforts begun to establish common national standards and procedures for proficiency measurement by ACTFL, ETS, MLA, and TESOL, and (b) until standardized tests are available, either participate in existing national testing programs (such as those offered by ETS, with its oral proficiency test, the achievement testing programs, or other college board tests) or develop its own concrete definition of levels of language competence and institute procedures for testing them. Employers, be they in government, education, or business, are not interested in how many credit hours a job candidate has earned. They want to know what language skills the candidate can perform.
I would like to mention two promising developments in the area of proficiency testing: the Language Proficiency Interview, administered by ETS in several languages, and the Zertifikat Deutsch als Fremdsprache (Certificate of German as a Foreign Language), administered through the Goethe Institute. (In the United States, the latter exam is, unfortunately, available to measure proficiency in German only. In Germany similar proficiency tests exist for Spanish and French.)
The Language Proficiency Interview is an adaptation of the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) Oral Exam, originally developed to measure the oral proficiency (speaking and listening comprehension) of State Department employees scheduled for service abroad. In essence, it is an oral interview of about twenty minutes' duration in which the test administrator leads the examinee to demonstrate his or her level of language proficiency through structured questions of increasing linguistic difficulty. Questions range from simple autobiographical queries to discussions related to a candidate's employment, prospective job assignment, or current events. The interview does not require detailed knowledge of any particular field, only of the target language. The candidate's performance is rated on a numerical scale of 0 to 5.
The advantages of the Language Proficiency Interview are: (a) the exam has high face validity in that candidates are examined in a natural, communicative situation; (b) the ratings, performed by highly trained and experienced evaluators, provide a reliable measure of a candidate's oral proficiency; and (c) the results of the exam (i.e., the rating in terms of the five levels of proficiency described) are clearly and meaningfully defined in terms of actual, real-life competencies. ETS has established several regional testing centers where the exam is administered for a fee of about $30.
The Zertifikat Deutsch als Fremdsprache ( ZDaF ) is an internationally used test of proficiency in German developed by the Goethe Institute in collaboration with the Volkshochschulver-band (Association for Continuing Education) of the Federal Republic of Germany. In contrast to the ETS Language Proficiency Interview, the ZDaF measures proficiency in all four language skill areas separately and has a written (approximately three hours) and an oral part (approximately fifteen minutes). Reading and listening comprehension are measured by multiple choice questions based on written and spoken texts; writing ability is measured by a letter to be written by the student according to specific instructions and by a multiple-choice cloze test; speaking proficiency is evaluated in a short, structured interview on a selected topic and in a number of simulated communicative situations where the student has to make a situationally appropriate response to the cue given by the test administrator. My own institution, the University of Arkansas, has made the ZDaF available for several years now and has had satisfactory results not only in student achievement but also in achieving visibility for the department. For more information on the ZDaF , interested departments should contact one of the regional branches of the Goethe Institute.
4. Interaction and cooperation with other disciplines is needed to foster global understanding and communicative ability in foreign languages .
The major thrust of the President's Commission report and recommendations was toward global understanding and international education. The recent “Survey of Global Understanding” conducted by ETS as part of the Education and the World View project of the Council on Learning, concluded that “there is essentially no relationship between proficiency in a modern foreign language and the overall level of global knowledge of U.S. college freshmen and seniors and two-year college students.” 7 It is necessary to point out, however, that the 101-question survey instrument defined “global understanding” in terms of thirteen issues or topics: environment, food, health, population, international monetary and trade arrangements, energy, race and ethnicity, human rights, war and armaments, arts and culture, religious issues, relations among states, and distribution of natural characteristics (physical geography). Furthermore, the test did not focus on knowledge or understanding of one particular culture but rather “stressed the themes of interdependence among nations, the problems of developing nations, and such historical transformations that the committee members and the ETS staff felt to be important to an understanding of the modern world” (p. 8). In other words, a German major might not necessarily be aware of food problems in developing nations as a result of his or her undergraduate study of the German language.
Given present training and orientation, where does the foreign language teaching profession fit into global education and international studies? First and foremost, we are and must remain language teachers. We belong in global education and international studies because we can provide the language proficiency that enables individuals to keep up-to-date with the events and developments in areas where a particular language is used. No one can consider him- or herself a “specialist” in an area of the world without the ability to gain direct access to developments in that area either through the news media or through interaction with the inhabitants of that area. Second, we belong in global education because we can offer in-depth knowledge about and insights into civilizations—by that I mean the accomplishments of particular nations and language groups in the arts, technology, and sciences, and the historical setting of these accomplishments. And third, we belong in global education because we can provide knowledge and understanding of how the literary and philosophical writings of other cultures reflect the common experience of human-kind and deal with the essential questions of what it means to be human.
Foreign language departments in each institution need to communicate perceived interrelationships, possibilities for interaction or cooperation, and benefits that can be derived by students whose departments share contents, goals, and purposes with foreign language departments.
5. We should seek to provide active assistance and support to secondary school foreign language programs .
In the long run, the fate of university foreign language departments is inextricably linked to the state of foreign language teaching on the secondary level. Particularly if second language competence is a goal for large numbers of individuals, the high schools must lay the foundations for this competence. Carroll's findings of a high positive correlation between length of study and achievement support the importance of foreign language study in high school. 8 Only in relatively rare instances do individuals without prior high school study master a foreign language as adults. Universities can assist secondary programs in three main areas: teacher preparation, in-service training, and the articulation of high school with postsecondary instruction.
The Chronicle of Higher Education (23 March 1981, p. 1) recently predicted a “critical shortage of school teachers … by 1985.” What are we doing to provide these teachers? What are we doing to ensure quality teacher preparation? And what are we doing to guarantee teacher competence in foreign languages?
Here we must focus not only on prospective teachers but also on those currently teaching. Psycholinguistic research constantly provides us with new insights into the language learning process. These insights and their implications for language teaching methodology need to be passed on to practitioners. All teachers need to upgrade their language skills and their knowledge of literary, cultural, political, and social developments in their language area. Far too few universities accept the responsibility to provide this in-service training for teachers. Teachers often take general education courses rather than content-specific courses simply because university departments in their area offer few courses relevant to their needs.
A major communication gap exists between high school and college foreign language instruction. Those who develop university programs generally do not attempt to inform themselves of contents, materials, objectives, or achievement levels in the high schools. Few secondary school teachers have any knowledge of the placement tests and procedures in nearby postsecondary institutions. Yet, for effective articulation, placement instruments and procedures should be developed jointly by secondary and postsecondary foreign language programs. Where joint development is impossible, universities should at least supply foreign language teachers in local secondary schools with samples of the university placement tests and should inform teachers of the minimal entry criteria for each level.
To reduce the time wasted by students who have studied a foreign language in high school but cannot proceed to the next level in the college sequence —either because of a lack of confidence or because of unsatisfactory performance on a placement test —more university departments could provide an intensive review course similar to that offered at the University of Texas at Arlington. 9 Such a course prepares students for the transition from secondary foreign language study to more advanced, college level courses by providing an introduction to the materials used in the sequence and a quick, intensive grammar and vocabulary review. Some institutions avoid the placement dilemma and encourage students with a high school background to continue foreign language study in college by permitting them to enroll without placement testing in courses above the first introductory term. If students pass such a course with a C or above, they will automatically receive credit for the preceding course(s) in the sequence, essentially receiving college credit for high school study. 10
6. We need to reorient instructional methodology and materials to make them congruent with psycho-linguistic research findings .
Admittedly, we still have very little definitive research about how proficiency in a second language is acquired, particularly in an environment where the language is not used for everyday communication. But we have reasonably dependable evidence that:
Yet language is still taught in many college classrooms as a grammatical obstacle course; courses are taught predominantly in English; students are expected to “produce” language from the first day of instruction; and language is practiced as a complex set of interchangeable grammatical patterns rather than as a means of giving and receiving messages, of exchanging information.
Let me admit that I am unashamedly conservative in my pedagogical convictions and methodological practices. It is not that I see no merit in innovations. But whether we individualize, humanize, intensify, personalize, mediate, program, team-teach, or group, whether we practice audiolingualism, cognitive code methodology, suggestopedia, counseling learning, the silent way, the total physical response, or any other method, the two determining factors for success in foreign language learning remain the same: language input and student motivation. Whatever it takes to convince and retrain practicing teachers to adjust their own methodological practices accordingly is in the domain of departmental faculty development. Collegial discussions, classroom visits by peers, and workshops guided by knowledgeable and experienced specialists in language teaching and learning can help in that reorientation. It is up to us to organize them.
The author is on leave from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and is currently Visiting Associate Professor of German at the University of Arizona.
1 “Strength through Wisdom: A Critique of U.S. Capability. A Report to the President from the President's Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies, November 1979,” Modern Language Journal , 64 (1980), 13.
2 See, e.g., Nick Thimmesch, “Our Shocking Illiteracy in Foreign Languages,” Readers' Digest , Feb. 1981, pp. 175–80; U.S. News and World Report , 27 April 1981, pp. 57–58; Paul Simon, The Tongue-Tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis (New York: Continuum, 1980); and MLA Newsletter , 13 (Spring 1981), 3. [Final results of the fall 1980 MLA enrollment survey, which will appear in the next issue of the ADFL Bulletin , show a drop of only 0.9% in foreign language enrollments between 1977 and 1980—Ed.]
3 “The National Council on Foreign Language and International Studies” (informational brochure dated 12/80, available from the council's headquarters at 605 Third Ave., 17th floor, New York, NY 10158).
4 For a provocative discussion on the importance of professional unity see David P. Benseler, “The American Language Association: Toward New Strength, Visibility, and Effectiveness as a Profession,” in Thomas H. Geno, ed., Our Profession: Present Status and Future Directions (Middlebury, Vt.: Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, 1980), pp. 143–56.
5 The report of the Wingspread Conference is available from the Association of American Colleges, 1818 R Street N.W., Washington, DC 20009; in 1981, the ACTFL will publish the proceedings of its national conference.
6 For a detailed description of intensive courses see David P. Benseler and Renate A. Schulz, Intensive Foreign Language Courses . Language in Education: Theory and Practice, No. 18 (Arlington, Va.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1979); for a description of both the Middlebury Summer Program and the Dartmouth Language Program, see Renate A. Schulz, Options for Undergraduate Foreign Language Programs: Four-Year and Two-Year Colleges (New York: MLA, 1979).
7 Thomas S. Barrows, Stephen F. Klein, and John L. D. Clark, What College Students Know and Believe about Their World (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Change Magazine Press, 1981), p. 37.
8 John B. Carroll, “Foreign Language Proficiency Levels Attained by Language Majors near Graduation from College,” Foreign Language Annals , 1 (1967), 131–51.
9 Duane V. Keilstrup, “The Texas Experiment in Coordinating High Schools and College Language Programs,” ADFL Bulletin , 6, No. 2 (1974), 45–46.
10 Schulz makes similar suggestions ( Options , p. 72).
© 1981 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
|
|---|
|
|
|
