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I BEGIN my discussion with some key questions: What is being taught in foreign language instruction? Is the study of foreign languages an intellectual discipline, like mathematics or physics? a body of cognitive knowledge, like history or literature? a technical skill that requires practical training, like surgery? Of the three—intellectual discipline, cognitive knowledge, and technical skill—which is primary in foreign language instruction? What kind of student do we want to produce? Someone who thinks deeply? Someone who knows a lot? Or someone who speaks the language?
Advocates of proficiency would emphatically choose the last answer, but unlike, say, typing or bicycle riding, learning a language is a highly contextual and structured skill. The study of language involves an intellectual dimension, implicit in at least the grammar; and since language is part of culture, one cannot acquire a language without absorbing knowledge about the culture it inhabits. Still, it is probably reasonable to expect that a student who has taken French studies should at least be able to speak French to the French. That expectation may make teaching a foreign language a matter more of training students in a complex of skills than of challenging their intellects or transmitting a body of material. The implication is that we can accept a student of French who may be ignorant of phonological analysis and of the Carolingian kings, but we cannot accept any definition of a student of French who cannot speak and understand French. Indeed, one could say that, on the contrary, intellectual knowledge of phonemic and morphemic structures may positively impede the production of fluent French in a student speaker. One should not forget that there are uneducated people all over the world who are natively fluent.
The products of foreign language instruction in this country have not always met this basic test of functional fluency. One estimate indicates that “only 17 percent of those who study a foreign language wholly within the United States can speak, write, or read the language with ease” (Simon 5). If foreign language instruction has produced such indifferent results with respect to its primary mission, if the language has not been taught, then one might ask, what has been taught? I contend that, in most instances, what has been taught is the “foreign,” more than the language.
Let us briefly review the history of foreign language teaching in this country. Unlike their counterparts in other countries, say, in Japan or Russia or China, the first teachers of foreign languages in this country were predominantly if not exclusively natives in the foreign culture, immigrants from that culture: they were chosen for their one qualification, their native proficiency in the language. Although they were undoubtedly qualified speakers of the language, no one thought to ask whether they were qualified teachers of the language. Indeed, the availability in the United States of so many foreign nationals, not to mention a diversity of ethnic populations who were native in a host of foreign languages, made this process and these assumptions not only natural but inevitable. These instructors had several advantages: they had indisputable authority (though language ability varies even among natives); they were natively expert in their subject matter; and they were natural exemplars of the language they taught. One experience, however, was lacking: they had never learned the language as a foreigner. These native foreign language teachers combined, anomalously, a signal strength with an unnoticed weakness. They knew their subject like a part of themselves, yet, by that very fact, they were inexperienced in communicating that subject to someone of a different nationality. (That so many native teachers of foreign languages have been effective teachers despite these obstacles is a tribute to their resourcefulness and intuition.)
Native teachers of a foreign language were exponents of a culture that, for one reason or another, students found attractive. But it would be ingenuous to believe that the motivation of students in learning a foreign language has always been pragmatic (or, as Wallace Lambert and Robert Gardner would say, instrumental), the way a decision to learn PASCAL or FORTRAN is pragmatic. The choice of a particular foreign language has not been dictated entirely by functional considerations: elements of personal taste and temperament inevitably enter into the picture. Since most native teachers of foreign languages tended to be chauvinistic about their cultures and lacked training in the objectives of second language learning, they naturally relied on mimicry as the most available technique of instruction. They invited students to copy them, to be replicas of themselves.
But this simple strategy had two crucial flaws, one methodological, one phenomenological. While it is true that as infants we learn our native tongue by imitation, learning by imitation does not come quite so naturally for adolescents or adults. Nor is the experience of an infant learning from its family equivalent to that of a student learning a foreign language: the first is learning language, the second already has language and is learning how to be foreign. The infant is establishing an identity; the student is developing another identity, not to replace but to supplement the first.
The difficulties of learning a foreign language, it is safe to say, are rather psychological than logical. It doesn't make sense that intelligent adults have more difficulty learning a language than an infant does. It doesn't make sense, of course, unless one recognizes that different things are being learned. The infant is acquiring what is to become familiar, even natively familiar; the adult is superimposing the strange onto the familiar. The situation of a foreign language student imitating a native instructor embodies a false phenomenological strategy; it overlooks an unavoidable existential fact: the student can never be a native of the foreign culture. Without having lived in the native culture, the best the student can hope for, in his or her mind, is some degree of parody. And what emerges is often not authentic impersonation but a poor imitation.
The student realizes, subconsciously, that there is an imposture going on, just as children balk when asked by parents to “perform” before doting guests, even though they have no difficulty playing “pretend” by themselves. That is why the most effective learners of foreign language embody the actor's disposition: they are willing to assume any role, to subjugate their own identities, forget their native culture, not so much to speak as to enact a foreign language. The subtle difference might be seen in a fine discrimination between “speaking like a native” and “speaking as a native.” The presumptuousness of a nonnative speaker speaking as a native reflects a condescension, an attitude that (here our words betray us) the student “has mastered” the language.
Leaving aside the question of what this mastery is or how many natives “master” their own language, we may ask whether this concept of “mastery” learning is appropriate for language learning. Can one master French the way one masters typing? We examine students of foreign language to see if they have achieved mastery, yet no one has determined what mastery, even for a native, actually consists of. This concept of mastery also suggests a level of achievement that needs no further development, a static notion of competence. It raises false expectations in the neophyte learner, who asks, meaninglessly, “Can I really learn Chinese (or Arabic or Russian) in such-and-such a period?” What everyone generally has in mind is the ability to sustain a useful and relevant dialogue in the native language, to survive in a foreign culture in the foreign language without recourse to the use of one's native language. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as teaching students a language, as if that language were a body of knowledge to be transferred from one brain to another. Too often, foreign languages have been taught as content, as commodities, as so many items of information to absorb. The formulation “teaching Chinese” (or Arabic or Russian) in ordinary language misconstrues the process and misses the objective. What we should be teaching is not the language but, rather, how the language might be negotiated: we should teach students how to learn a specific language as well as how to learn in that language. These survival skills may be difficult to achieve, and even when achieved, they fall far short of anything that might be characterized as mastery, but they provide the foundation for developing authentic, if not native, participants in that language. Our “products” in foreign language instruction ought to be students who will, in more than one sense, act in that language.
There are books that counsel the student on how to learn a foreign language in which every other word of wisdom reminds the student that “learning languages is fun.” The author's notion of “fun” is never fully defined, but most of what comes across is an adolescent delight in “tricks” and in poses, a complacency about “short-cuts” to learning other languages. While I do not denigrate the achievements of polymaths in learning dozens of languages, I do question the propriety—psychological, cultural, emotional, perhaps even ethical—of the idea of “picking up” another language. Linguists of this stripe do not see the acquisition of language as a lifetime process of self-discovery in a unique culture; they are marketers in the international bazaar of cultural knickknacks—-picked up, if not for a song, then for the price of a phrase book or a grammar. They do not conceive that the sometimes intractable difficulties in learning a foreign language may be caused by something more profound than a restricted phonetic palette or unfamiliar sounds or a vagrant grammar. To regard one person's culture as another person's recreation overlooks the “emic” nature of language, that is, language as a secret code that must be earned as well as learned.
The student of a second language is not psychologically primed to depart from the native language, except for often rather specious motives. There are the exotica hounds—those who, bored with their own ordinariness, acquire a pattern of différance ; there are the esoterica hounds—those who seek out the arcana of a remote subject in a remote language and who value the subject in proportion to its inaccessibility to the general population; and, perhaps most obnoxious of all, the erotica mongers—those whose interest in a foreign language is prurient and pornographic and who focus on what is regarded in their own culture as bizarre and vulgar. Each of these attitudes emphasizes the “foreignness” of a second language. Each makes the student feel more estranged than familiar. Each defines the enterprise of learning foreign languages in terms of what it is not, rather than what it is.
In the United States, an untapped motivational resource is the general need to rediscover one's roots. It is time to overcome the national inferiority complex about language, a complex that is the ironic legacy of earlier immigrant generations who submerged their native language in order to become more quickly acculturated in this country, more quickly Americanized (see Sagarin and Kelly; Glazer and Moynihan; Fishman). That is perhaps the worst consequence of the WASP myth of the all-American perpetrated in this country, to which the English-only movement is a throwback. Americans, especially immigrants, were taught to believe that to be American, one had to speak English and to speak it without accent, as if the make-up of this country were definitively English. This cultural racism was symbolized by the not so benign image of the melting pot, where ethnic constituencies would be eliminated in a hodgepodge of bland Anglo-Saxon, Mayflower pabulum. The myth hides an ambivalent truth: that this country, which sees its linguistic identity monolingually, was also built by people who were native speakers of Italian, French, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, and German.
The predominance of English and of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture in defining the American character may be, in the future, a thing of the past. Demographers tell us that in the decades to come the Hispanic population in this country may be in the majority. That means that, unless we adopt the white-minority-rule policy of South Africa, we will have to face the prospect of Spanish being the majority native language and of English becoming a second language. Some will see this as a threat, but they are only responding to instincts of prejudice and provinciality. The putative monolingualism in the United States is a myth of history, perpetrated by the imperialism of the English language and brought about because the United States established its identity during the nineteenth century, when English logocentrism in the world was at its height.
The notion of a native language, of there being only one native language, is also a chimera. There are many people in the world who are, if not native in more than one language, near native in several. The example of Switzerland comes readily to mind, but one should not overlook the countries of southeast Asia. In Singapore, for example, the national language is English, but the Chinese and Indian populations often speak their native tongues at home. The notion of “native” in “native language” is far more problematic in many parts of the world than is recognized; even the notion of “native speaker” has been both celebrated and criticized (Coulmas; Paikeday). The Irish would prefer to claim Gaelic as their native language, though most if not all the Irish speak English. In India, there are fifteen official languages, but only English is used as the national language: that means that Indians are variously “native” in Bengali, Tamil, and Hindi, as well as in English. In many parts of the world, English is not so much a foreign language as merely another language, whether a first or a second language. Of course, the modification of the term “foreign language” into “second language” helps neutralize subliminally incendiary nuances. There are those viscerally adamant provincials for whom “furrin”is a dirty word, a term of abuse, not very different from “barbarian.”
As someone whose face is conspicuously foreign but who has been hopelessly Americanized by over forty years in this country, I have had the deliciously ambivalent pleasure of teaching English composition to American students. There are times, I confess, that I see myself as a foreigner teaching English as a foreign language to American natives. let me share an anecdote that illustrates the differences between conspicuous and nonconspicuous foreigners. Many of my faculty colleagues would be considered ethnically European and labeled by the Immigration Service as “foreign nationals” or “naturalized citizens.” At one party a faculty member of German descent was speaking in English to a relative of another faculty member who was visiting from Germany. After some minutes, the conversation prompted the faculty member to think of a German proverb, which he first paraphrased in English, then quoted in German, preceding both with the remark, “In my language, there is a saying…” The German interlocutor, after hearing the proverb quoted in German, responded in English with surprised delight, “Why that's my language, too!”
The concept of “foreign” should no longer have currency, least of all in the United States. It is not pedagogically useful, it is not historically accurate, and it is not psychologically valid. When it comes to “foreign” languages, American citizens can be found who would say, “Why, that's my language, too!”
In the last few decades, we have become more and more aware of the inherent tendency in language to subliminally influence our thinking; we have uncovered the heretofore unnoticed ideological bias in English toward the male, toward the white race, and toward Western culture. The phrase “We the people” has not included all the people: it has promised more than it has delivered. There are people—from the black slaves that Thomas Jefferson owned, to the Chinese coolies who were dynamited along with the mountains to clear the way for the very transcontinental railroad they helped to build, to the American citizens of Japanese descent incarcerated in Manzania during World War II, to the American Indians who were relegated by the president of the United States to “preservations” at the Moscow summit in June 1988, to the women whose contributions to history and culture have been blithely ignored by generations of male historians—there are people whose experiences belie the democratic ideal that politicians invoke with such glibness. These are the people who have been short-changed by “We the People.” For the “people” in this country include, among others, the blacks, the women, the Italians, the Hispanics, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Arabs and the Koreans, and, yes, the Vietnamese “fresh off the boat.”
The ancestral languages of “We the People” are Bantu and Mandingo, Italian and Spanish, Japanese and Chinese, Arabic and Korean, Vietnamese and Thai. These are also the current languages of “We the People.” And so to suggest for these people that any language but English is “foreign” is to deny their linguistic patrimonies, to denigrate their origins, to erase their ethnic identities. About these ethnic groups, Joshua Fishman commented, more than twenty years ago, “it would seem that as long as these languages and cultures are truly ‘foreign’ our schools are comfortable with them. But as soon as they are found in our own backyards, the schools deny them” (387). The Anglo-American myth has prevailed too long. Minority populations collectively made this country; immigrants settled this country. Nothing could be more “un-American” than to deny the cultural pluralism at the heart of this nation.
We have failed to compete on the international scene not because we lack a sense of purpose or a national will or because we have run out of human resources; we have failed because we, as Americans, have forgotten our heritage, the source of our strength. We are all foreigners here; except for the Native American, we are all, whether we remember it or not, strangers in a land that is not our own but that we have made our own. We have forgotten that a rainbow coalition made this country—long before Jesse Jackson discovered its existence. If this is a country, more than any other, where dreams have come true, it's because not all those dreams were dreamt in English. This country has been built by Jew and Gentile, by blacks and whites, by men and women.
The United States of America has the unique opportunity to surpass every civilization in history, for no civilization—not the Greeks of the Hellenic period, not the Turks of the Ottoman Empire, not the Chinese of T'ang, not the Romans of Augustus or the Christians of the Holy Roman Empire—can claim an identity as linguistically and culturally diverse. America can realize the fondest ideal of the medieval humanist who characterized the truly civilized person with this quote from Terence's Heauton Timoroumenos (The Self-Tormentor): “nihil humanum ab eo alienum est” ‘nothing human is alien to him.’ In its ethnic diversity, the United States of America holds the riches of the world. It should be—but alas it isn't—the most linguistically diverse and most multilingual country in the world (see Ferguson and Heath).
Consider the following anomalies in America: a Hispanic American who goes to a foreign language department to learn Spanish; a Chinese American who seeks out an East Asian department to learn Chinese; a Jewish American who does not find Hebrew offered, except perhaps as an adjunct of biblical studies, in a “multiversity” that purports to represent all knowledge.
I should like to speculate on the future of the profession and propose a few changes. Institutional inertia will, no doubt, preclude what I propose. Yet I venture these quixotic speculations not as programmatic recommendations but as pricks of conscience, a reminder that things as they are may not be things as they should be.
It has been noticed that while there are departments of French language and literature, departments of Germanic languages and cultures, there are no departments of Arabic science or of Turkish music. The word cultures may purport to include everything in the language, but one looks in vain for French mathematics or Chinese physics. Is the “area studies” paradigm for determining academic divisions as appropriate in our configuration of knowledge as it is for our sense of geography?
We have spawned many pseudo experts who, on the one hand, delve into subjects too esoteric for Americans to challenge and who, on the other, don't—often can't—communicate with the natives of the area under study. While there have been signal successes in this typically American “slicing up” of reality known as area studies, there have been more than a few “ugly Americans” who have made a profession (if not a fortune) exploiting the twilight zone between “expertise” and knowledge. If evidence is needed, one might cite the general bankruptcy of American foreign policy in the last thirty years, despite massive infusions of funds, first from the Ford Foundation and later from the federal government. We have spawned an enclave of experts who remind me of Ernie Kovacs's parody of the old radio show The Answer Man , in which experts provided answers to questions submitted by listeners. These answers often began impressively, and pedantically, with the phrase “That's a common misconception. … ” Kovacs's parody went like this: “A lady submits this question: ‘If the earth is round, then why don't the people in the Southern Hemisphere fall off?’ Well, now, ma'am, that's a common misconception. Actually, they are falling off all the time!” It strikes me that our area studies experts have been telling us that people in other parts of the globe have “been falling off all the time!”
If this seems far-fetched, consider the key “experts” on the Iranian overthrow of the Shah: Morton Kondracke of the New Republic reported, “It turns out that only six of the sixty U.S. Foreign Service officers in Iran during the revolutionary year 1978 were minimally proficient in Farsi. … The political section contained no one who was fluent in the language for much of the year … ” (13; cf. Simon 54). Or consider the expertise of Arabicists. “It has been said,” Bernard Lewis writes, “that the history of the Arabs has been written in the West chiefly by historians who know no Arabic … ”(22). Or contemplate the following “expert” testimony on Chinese literature, as recently as 1940, in the New Standard Encyclopedia:
The Chinese language is monosyllabic and uninflectional. … With a language so incapable of variation, a literature cannot be produced which possesses the qualities we look for and admire in literary works. Elegance, variety, beauty of imagery—these must be lacking. A monotonous and wearisome language must give rise to a forced and formal literature lacking in originality and interesting in its subject matter only. (Brown 127)
The mapping of knowledge in geographic regions is deictically understandable, but intellectually suspect. Unlike other academic subjects, area studies are not a single discipline but a conglomeration of different disciplines focused on one area. As an interdisciplinary enterprise, particularly if firmly based on knowledge of the language, area studies can produce new insights, new and more powerful paradigms of understanding. But when they become congeries of marginal intellects selling intellectual trinkets in an international bazaar, then they hardly deserve serious attention. Some may accuse me of beating dead horses, but I fear the reports of their demise are grossly exaggerated.
One of the prospects of the future is the possibility that departmental lines might follow more rationally along valid disciplinary lines. There are true, and there are specious, boundaries between departments. The discipline of mathematics is clearly different and distinct from the discipline of history, but can one detect a disciplinary difference between a department of French and a department of English? These designations subsume language and literature, as well as “culture” in a somewhat limited sense, since they implicitly exclude the more scientific and mathematical subjects. If the study of literature is a discipline, then that discipline is the same whether French literature or Chinese literature is being studied. Yet we insist on dividing our departments on the basis of content, and from a Europocentric perspective. One might also ask if the very make-up of our departmental structure is very useful, when literature teachers and language teachers are lumped together in an uneasy truce. In English departments, teachers of composition are often relegated to the lower echelons, and the professors of literature occupy the upper reaches. In the foreign language departments, those who teach the language are subordinate to those who teach the literature. These generic tensions have not been salutary either for the teaching of literature or for the teaching of language. It would make more sense if, in the future, three separate departments were established, each with subareas of interest (on the model of, say chemistry, which subsumes organic and inorganic chemistry, quantitative chemistry, molecular chemistry, physical chemistry, and biological chemistry, or physics, which subsumes quantum mechanics, astrophysics, plasma physics, and environmental physics). The logical division for what constitutes the foreign language departments would be a department of linguistics, a department of language, and a department of literature. Linguistics already exists as a separate department, but language and literature are still lumped together and the national distinctions persist, unhelpfully. The inclusion of English literature and American literature in English departments is a significant instance of composite nationalism: the two literatures are seen as mutually reinforcing. The alliance is promoted in the United States because English is considered a progenitor of American English, but in Great Britian, the amalgam is scarcely tolerated, and American studies remains a separate—and often an allegedly inferior—subject.
The divisions of national literature perpetrate an unbalanced view of history: they promote the notion that the subject is as comprehensive as the other disciplines that range through time and space; they neglect the fact that nationhood is a recent concept and that nationalism is, in the history of the world, only a recent phenomenon. Nationalisms are a legacy of the nineteenth century; they are increasingly untenable in the twentieth century. The European Community, OPEC, the Soviet bloc, the Third World—these are becoming the coalitions of the future. In the global village, the global economy, nationalisms are becoming anachronisms. Indeed, one could suggest that the die-hard nationalists, explicitly in Ireland, South Africa, and Israel and implicitly in the United States, Japan, the USSR, and China (both the People's Republic on the mainland and the Republic on Taiwan), are the source of most of the conflicts all over the world. Nationalisms are pseudo-civilized throwbacks to visceral impulses; jingoisms have not evolved very far from atavisms. They have no place in the intellectual framework of the future.
We are not here counseling a reversion to the melting-pot myth: the global village must retain its ethnic diversity, even while it reduces frictions among nations. The nationalist agenda promotes an allegiance to a political concept, a polity, in which identity could be conferred or removed only by the state. “Culturalisms,” not nationalisms, will be the wave of the future.
The irony of my making this point in the Bulletin has not escaped me. My wish to take the “foreign” out of “foreign language instruction” reflects the same irony as the bumper sticker “Help Stamp Out Foreign Languages—Learn One!” I happen to believe that, while there are differences between first- and second-language acquisition, teachers of English and of non-English languages have more in common, both intellectually and pedagogically, than they recognize. Only ethnocentrism keeps them apart. I believe that the existence of the Association of Departments of English separate from the Association of Departments of Foreign Language is a political statement: the distinction has no intellectual bearing, no real academic justification. Only when we define new configurations along truly disciplinary lines—whether of linguistics, language, or literature—can we escape the evil karma of what I call negative identities, those implicit in such locutions as “non-Western,” “foreign,” “un-American.” These labels define entities in terms of what they are not, rather than in terms of what they are. Convenient as these configurations have been in the past, when, in the minds of many, the world was coterminous with the boundaries of their own country, they are the delusions of the past that need to be dispelled before we can approach the future with any confidence.
The author is Professor of Comparative Literature and of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Resident Director of the East Asian Summer Language Institute at Indiana University. This article is based on a paper presented at the ADFL Seminar West, 18–20 June 1988, in Boulder, Colorado.
Brown, H. Douglas. Principles of Language Learning and Teaching . Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1980.
Coulmas, Florian, ed. A Festschrift for Native Speaker . The Hague: Mouton, 1981.
Ferguson, Charles, and Shirley Brice Heath, eds. Language in the USA . Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.
Fishman, Joshua. Language Loyalty in the United States . The Hague: Mouton, 1966.
Glazer, Nahum, and Daniel P. Moynihan. Beyond the Melting Pot . Cambridge: MIT and Harvard UP, 1963.
Kondracke, Morton. “The Ugly American Redux.” New Republic 31 March 1979: 12–15.
Lambert, Wallace, and Robert Gardner. Attitudes and Motivation in Second-Language Learning . Rowley: Newbury, 1972.
Lewis, Bernard. Islam in History . New York: Library, 1973.
Paikeday, Thomas. The Native Speaker Is Dead ! Toronto: Paikeday, 1985.
Sagarin, Edward, and Robert J. Kelly. “Polylingualism in the United States of America: A Multitude of Tones amid a Monolingual Majority.” Language Policy and National Unity . Ed. William R. Beer and James E. Jacob. Totowa: Rowman, 1985. 20–44.
Simon, Paul. The Tongue-Tied American . New York: Continuum, 1980.
© 1989 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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