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WHILE foreign languages are experiencing a boom across the country, their academic status in foreign languages and literatures departments is still not clearly defined. The traditional split between tenured and tenure-track faculty members engaged in scholarship of various kinds and nontenured lecturers or preceptors engaged in foreign language pedagogy is still the model at most institutions. This is the situation even in institutions where the faculty teaches both language and literature and where faculty research has expanded beyond literary criticism to include film studies, women's studies, and area studies.
Academia continues to differentiate between professional excellence and discipline-oriented distinction. While the former sometimes is rewarded with salaries commensurate with its usefulness, only the latter results in tenure. Whereas nonfaculty language teachers are reappointed on the basis of their professional activities, within both their institutions and their professional organizations, faculty members are awarded promotion and tenure on the basis of their contribution to the discipline itself: the measurable impact of their work on the field, the intellectual quality of their work, the promise of continued contribution to the advancement of the field of inquiry, and, of course, the need for conducting such work at the institution.
There are three implicit postulates behind this system of governance. The first is that teaching language is teaching received knowledge, while teaching literature, civilization, or film is teaching knowledge that does not exist between the covers of a textbook but reflects different interpretations and original inquiry—albeit pretheoretical. Second, teaching language is teaching a skill, developed through the application of predetermined rules. In the days when language classes taught more about language than how to use it, this skill was viewed as part of general literacy. Now that language learning actually leads to communicative competency, the skill is viewed as preliterate. It is believed that literacy cannot occur until the structures of the language are mastered, at which point the student can at last enter upper-level courses and start reading Goethe, Voltaire, and Pushkin in the original. The third postulate addresses the educational value of teaching. It is not that academia minimizes the work done by foreign language educators to improve language instruction, but it perceives that work as falling under the heading “education,” a field that has not always had a high standing in academia. For scholars intent on improving the minds of learners, dedication to the learners themselves is seen as a professional, not an intellectual, activity. Conceptualization of education, by contrast, is an intellectual activity that should not be left to nonfaculty members.
The current push for foreign languages around the country is shaking the foundations of this curricular and administrative structure. The signs of this movement appear in three areas. (1) The MLA job list shows a drastic increase in openings for language coordinators and supervisors at colleges and universities, for teacher trainers and curriculum designers; the reinstatement of language requirements is swelling enrollments in language classes and increasing the need for experienced and competent language teachers. The inability of the system to retain precisely the people it needs the most is undermining current efforts to upgrade undergraduate education. (2) More than ever, undergraduate students fill the first two years of language classes, where, to the detriment of the upper-level literature classes, most of the departmental instruction is given. The bulk of this responsibility is borne by TAs and temporary or permanent nonfaculty staff. (3) Students, brought up in an age of communication and information processing, evaluate their language learning experience primarily in terms of how well it teaches them to communicate and interact with native speakers of that language and only secondarily according to the pleasure they derive from reading foreign literary works in the original text.
The proficiency movement has aroused the bad consciences of tenured faculty members in foreign language departments, always sensitive to the reproach of elitism and intellectualism. Many institutions have responded by introducing a proficiency-based language curriculum and by having their faculties teach both language and literature. Some, such as Harvard, are trying to keep their foreign language specialists on quasi tenure as senior preceptors or professors of practice. This response has not changed the basic philosophy of these institutions with regard to the teaching of language and literature. The two provinces are still quite separate. Classroom teaching, teacher training, and materials development are professional, nontenurable activities. The proficiency challenge has not yet prompted the faculties of most foreign languages and literatures departments to rethink their goals in any overarching way that would integrate their research and teaching charge.
The present situation represents a dilemma for institutions and foreign language departments alike. The problem is compounded by two major developments: the current push for the internationalization of education and the spread of an information-processing approach to learning. I examine each of these developments with a case history of a language and literature department that was in danger of missing the educational bus.
A dynamic institution with a strong liberal arts tradition, university X has had to rethink its vision and its direction in view of the current trends toward professionalization of education. Financial constraints have increased the competition to obtain and retain students in the educational market and to maintain enrollments within departments. The university has therefore in recent years assumed a new and attractive international orientation, as evidenced by its three international majors (international studies, international management, and international relations), its International Programs Abroad, and a planned International School.
However, the modern language and literature department has played only a marginal role in shaping this new vision. Following the educational philosophy of the university, it has devoted all its energies to developing its instructional program and to nurturing its students. The all-tenured faculty teaches both language and literature with remarkable dedication, at the expense of scholarly and professional development. Most of the faculty has not kept abreast of new advances in foreign language teaching. Locked into the traditional role of defender of humanistic education—a role inherited from the graduate schools around the country—it has largely retained a philological approach to teaching and learning. This approach, based on the study of the formal aspects of language and on the analysis of texts, is no longer of urgent relevancy to most of today's undergraduates, who view language primarily in its sociocultural context. They want most of all to be able to acquire communication skills and to understand foreign cultural patterns of thought.
Conflict between the traditional philological view of languages and the recent demands for global awareness and increased professionalism in American education has widened the cultural gap between the modern language and literature department and the rest of the university. Faculty members are on the defensive: they feel that the best they have to give is no longer in demand and that their humanistic efforts are underestimated and misunderstood. Colleagues from other disciplines have no clear idea of what role the modern language and literature department could and should take within the university, aside from continuing to do what it has always done or becoming a Berlitz-type service department to students from other schools and to students going abroad.
Yet nobody at the higher levels of administration wants to do away with humanistic education. On the contrary, those in charge of conceptualizing undergraduate education are concerned about students' short-term, over-professionalized view of education. General education requirements are being rethought to improve the quality of a liberal arts education. Efforts are under way to reduce the proliferation of general education subjects and to ensure the acquisition of cognitive skills like critical and creative thinking and problem framing and solving.
Directors of international programs are also concerned that experience abroad, for all its mind-expanding virtues, might be seen and experienced by students as an easy catchall program, lacking the global-awareness effect that comes from critical reflection about the relation of language and culture, language and thought. Some directors are anxious about possible American ethnocentrism if the compulsory cross-cultural orientation course offered to all students studying abroad is given exclusively from a United States perspective. For these reasons, at all levels of the administration, educators are convinced of the crucial role played by the knowledge of foreign languages in international transactions. They are equally persuaded that learning a foreign language can be a valuable educational experience for all students and that foreign languages and literatures should be part of the undergraduate educational portfolio.
But many doubt that the foreign language and literature curriculum, as it is taught now, can fulfill the general educational goals of the university and the global-awareness goals of an international program. There is real concern that learning a foreign language at the elementary levels is nothing more than the acquisition of mechanical skills and that some of the upper-level courses are not relevant to student needs, since they often focus on what is perceived as elitist “high culture.”
The modern language and literature department at university X is at a crossroads between two educational cultures: the philological and the communicative. Neither has defined itself with respect to the other, neither has measured its philosophy against that of the other. The department has not integrated its objectives into the overall goals of the university. Conversely, the lack of clear and precise demands placed on the department by the rest of the university has disenfranchised the modern language and literature faculty from most of the innovative developments that have taken place at the university over the last five years.
An NEH consultant was called in for advice. It was clear that the department needed help in articulating its mission within the college. If the goals of the university are those of an international education, the faculty should not have to spend its time justifying its discipline; rather, it should be asked to redefine its goals, emphasizing those that best fit the need for cross-cultural awareness, multidimensional thinking, and relativization of language and culture. Language subjects should be rethought and redesigned to make these goals more explicit and evident to the learners. Upper-level subjects would need to be diversified; the chronological sequencing of literature courses might give way to a more multifaceted curriculum featuring different aspects of communication through language in different thematic contexts, for example, film and television, press, business, drama.
Some faculty members have already undertaken a few curricular innovations in this direction, especially using the proficiency model. What is needed is generalizing these initiatives to all languages taught and conceptualizing their educational thrust to make the program attractive to students and administrators alike. A mutual education of the department and the institution should take place concerning the ability of foreign languages to contribute to the international goals of the university.
A major engineering institution is rethinking its undergraduate humanities requirement in part because the school of engineering feels that its undergraduate students are not getting a rigorous enough humanities curriculum, that they have too many humanities subjects to choose from, and that there is not enough control over the quality of the subjects given. In short, the school fears that future engineers will have learned only problem-solving skills and none of the problem-framing abilities necessary for survival in the real world. This fear translates into the concern, mostly on the part of the humanities faculty, that foreign language courses, at least in the first two years, are merely problem-solving, skill-getting, and skill-using courses and thus should not be counted as fulfilling the humanities requirement. Since foreign languages are quite popular at the school, there is concern that students like the mechanical aspects of learning a foreign language because of their experience learning computer languages. But excluding foreign languages from the humanities requirement would make it virtually impossible for any undergraduate to take a foreign language, given the time restrictions.
The success of the foreign languages and literatures department has been largely due to the presence of non-tenure-track lecturers, who through the years have become experts in foreign language pedagogy and who are engaged in a variety of projects, from teacher training to materials development. They have provided the faculty, busy pursuing its scholarly interests, with pedagogical know-how and innovative teaching practices. However, the administration does not want to entertain the idea of keeping such lecturers beyond the limited term of their appointment. Because of restrictions on the number of faculty members in the school and the reluctance to award tenure for excellent, albeit nonrevolutionary, pedagogical work, a language lecturer has no prospect of becoming a senior lecturer.
A team of outside consultants was called in for advice. They noticed the typical lack of philosophical integration of the language and literature teaching, although most tenured and all nontenured faculty members teach both. They also deplored the two-track system: faculty status for those engaged in literary scholarship, nonfaculty status for those in language pedagogy. They suggested creating a Foreign Language Studies Research Group, which would teach any of the foreign language subjects but whose object of research would be identifying and investigating the overarching issues related to the teaching and the acquisition of a foreign language. Such a field of inquiry should be recognized as a valid area of scholarship. The administration has accepted the concept and is ready to make tenure-track appointments in applied linguistics, specifically in second and foreign language acquisition research. The Foreign Language Studies Group now has a small core of faculty members doing individual research and is currently designing a project that could serve as a focus for both language and literature faculties alike. This project draws on the strengths of an engineering education, which sensitizes students to processes and procedures, and it proposes to research ways in which the language program could be systematically infused with the excitement and intellectual stimulation generated by the full range of research in foreign language acquisition and use, in orality and literacy, and in cross-cultural communication and concept development.
Each of the case studies examined above shows a striking mismatch between the educational vision of the institution and its system of governance. On the one hand, institutions of higher education that are in the business of shaping the thoughts, language, and worldview of their students are busy reformulating their visions and casting them in the international and intellectual language of the times. On the other hand, they seem to give up on the teaching of foreign language subjects as if these could not and indeed should not have any intellectual content. In neither case do institutions make any intellectual demands on their foreign language programs. Forced by national trends and students' interests to pay more attention to the language curriculum, either they tend to find foreign language instruction dispensable as an academic subject, advocating instead that students be sent abroad to pick up the language on location, or they bracket languages out of the general education requirement as being mere vocational training. In this regard their attitude parallels that of many literary scholars toward their language colleagues. This is all the more ironic as both are engaged in a common pursuit: teaching the acquisition of foreign discourse or foreign language acquisition.
Foreign language acquisition as a field of research is concerned with the theoretical and practical issues related to socialization into another language and culture and the development of literacy in that language and culture. It is concerned with the learning and teaching of the language of foreign speakers and writers and the language of a foreign literature. If we have higher goals than making our students linguistically proficient; if we want students to understand the way language works and why, how the foreign language conceptualizes and packages foreign reality, how it expresses complex environments and relationships; if we really want them to look critically at their own language and culture through the mirror of the foreign language and question attitudes and values they took for granted—then we need foreign language teachers who are not only excellent professionals but researchers as well. The growing field of second and foreign language acquisition can give foreign language teachers an intellectual and academic home. It is in dire need of data-based research, both theoretical and empirical. Its development can give instruction the intellectual validity it needs to move out of bandwagon methodologies and fashionable quick fixes.
The credentials of such specialists have to be interdisciplinary. With an increase in tenured linguists and applied linguists doing foreign language acquisition research, each language department should be able to have a number of such specialists, who can help build multidisciplinary undergraduate major programs and broaden the theoretical dimensions of graduate programs. If they are not researchers themselves, college foreign language practitioners cannot explore with their students the uncharted complexities of language structure and use or achieve the necessary integration of structure and content, form and function, native and foreign language. For the students, immersion in the foreign culture is valuable, but it needs to be supplemented by thorough reflection and critical self- and other-assessment if it is to rise above the tourist level. Too many efforts to make the curriculum more proficiency-oriented omit that crucial dimension. The essential role of academia, by contrast with Berlitz schools of languages, is to impart knowledge that is both linguistic and metalinguistic, both functional and metafunctional.
Those foreign language instructors who are not engaged in research would have administrative appointments similar to those of lab directors or they would have a limited academic appointment. Preparation of foreign language materials can fall under foreign language acquisition research if it reflects new theoretical insights and helps provide data on how certain materials affect learning. Too much material, however, is subject to publishers' pressure and does not advance our knowledge about the best way to acquire foreign languages. Within a respected and intellectually justified field of foreign language acquisition, foreign language teachers on limited appointments can profit from the system, without feeling only crushed or used by it.
A new paradigm for both vision and governance in foreign language education in academia means a new understanding of what we're in the business of doing. What are we teaching foreign languages for? What do we do when we teach a foreign language? What do our students do when they learn new grammatical structures and new words, when they read a text in a foreign language? What makes a text literary? What does it mean to understand a foreign work of literature? These and related questions form the base for an important field of research that is slowly coming to the fore in applied linguistics: foreign language acquisition research . This research can help integrate language, literature, and culture in foreign language departments because it draws on insights gained from such diverse fields as anthropology, philosophy of language, sociology, psychology, aesthetics, poetics, artificial intelligence, and education. It offers an intellectual and pedagogical rallying point for language and literature departments, at all levels of curriculum and syllabi, all the way down to lesson plans and teacher and student responses in the classroom.
The author is Professor of Foreign Language Acquisition and Head of the Foreign Languages and Literatures Section at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This article is based on a paper presented at the ADFL Seminar East, 19–22 June 1986, in Hanover, New Hampshire.
© 1987 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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