22, no. 1 (Fall 1990): 1-2
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Guest Editorial
David Goldberg
I AM happy to have the opportunity to inaugurate this series of guest editorials by sharing some information and some personal impressions regarding the less commonly taught languages (LCTs). I want to suggest why students of the LCTs are often highly motivated, to call attention to the special financial problems of the LCTs, and to explain how the LCTs and the more commonly taught languages (MCTs) can be useful to each other.
My specialization is Yiddish, which I started teaching when I was sixteen—although I was barely proficient at the time. I taught in what Joshua Fishman and his colleagues have shown us was an “ethnic mother-tongue school,” although to me it was a shule , a Yiddishist after-school school of the kind I had attended since I was six. I have never forgotten my surprise on learning from a college friend that he had gone to a Ukrainian after-school school when he was a child. The surprise—a mild shock of recognition—was that Yiddishists were not the only ones who sent their children to learn about their cultural distinctiveness.
Among Americans, the study of one's familial language and culture is not reserved for children. Although no broad statistics exist concerning who studies LCTs in colleges and universities, it appears that a significant proportion of LCT students are studying to increase native-language skills. Colleagues tell me of appreciable numbers of such students in classes they teach in Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. A professor of Norwegian I spoke with recently calculates that about 90% of her students divide almost equally between those of Norwegian background and those married or engaged to people of Norwegian background. The 1980 census reported that approximately 23 million people over five years of age in the United States—11% of the entire population—spoke a language other than English at home. (About half of these people spoke Spanish.) I was one of those 23 million, but I could not have been included in that statistic in 1970, because I did not become proficient in my parents’ language until graduate school. I began with a basic vocabulary, some songs, and a sense of word order that probably has more to do with Yiddish syntax than it should for a native speaker of English. This was also true of many of the people in the language and literature classes in which I studied, as it has been with many of the post-secondary students I have taught. Richard Brecht, chair of the Steering Committee of the recently constituted National Council of the Less Commonly Taught Languages, suggests that a personal connection often underlies the quality of the motivation of LCT students. 1
I recently met with George Abrams, special assistant to the director of the Museum of the American Indian, past president (1987) of the Board of Education of the Seneca Nation, and a consultant to the MLA's Languages in America exhibit planning board. At one point the conversation turned to language teaching. We talked about the distressing rate of attrition between levels in Seneca language classes, a rate that closely parallels that of Yiddish classes. We spoke of the need for new materials for upper-level study and discussed the problems involved in supplementing (or replacing) untrained native speakers with professionally prepared teachers. We talked about how advanced courses are faculty-intensive rather than cost-effective and about how native speakers in assimiliated environments often need to study the languages their mothers speak to them. The similarity of our experiences was striking to me. The sense of commonality was strengthened by the fact that neither of our languages is “critical”—except to the ethnic communities intent on fostering and preserving them. Our central concerns, however, link us firmly to the “critical” LCTs. And I think it is apparent that our concerns run parallel to those of the MCTs, too.
In addition to the desire to enrich an experience of personal cultural continuity, a second reason we can expect a generally high level of motivation in the LCTs is that many students intend to use these languages as tools for either research or communication in their work. Students of languages like Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic are often training for professional lives in which success may well ride on the strengths and subtleties of linguistic competency. It is uncommon, according to Brecht, for such students simply to be fulfilling a language requirement. And if they are taking LCT courses to facilitate research or to prepare for work abroad, the odds are that they are working hard and doing well.
It is unfortunate that the high motivation of upper-level students cannot be included as a factor in calculating the cost-effectiveness of LCT programs. Many of these programs cannot pay their own bills, and both students and teachers pay a price as a result. In the name of cost-effectiveness, the university system can end up supporting passing interest but discouraging commitment. It is relatively easy for a first-semester course in an LCT to get started, provided that an instructor is available and curiosity-driven students put registration over the magic number at which tuition covers salary and operating costs. It is in the third and fourth semesters that administrators may begin to look askance at LCT registrations, especially if instructors are not full-time. The curious and the nostalgic—though frequently a pleasure to know and teach—have departed, and the students who are able to commit themselves to the amount of work that learning a language takes are often too few to “justify” the course.
The irony of this is that many LCTs are in the Foreign Service Institute's Group III and IV categories, among which we find, for instance, Russian (Group III), and Arabic and Japanese (Group IV)—languages that require, respectively, 720 and 1,320 hours of intensive study to bring students with an average aptitude to a level of“minimal proficiency” on the FSI scale (Galal 136). In institutions where the commitment to a particular LCT is based entirely on cost-effectiveness, the few students who do want to study beyond the initial year may be stopped in their tracks with little to show for their time and effort, unless a department chair is prepared to fight for the salary of an instructor. I hope that chairs faced with this issue will consider what seems to me to be the responsibility of an institution to provide meaningful coverage of a subject. They might also consider the attractiveness of building relationships with special groups in the community.
MCTs and LCTs differ more in degree than in kind: students of both benefit greatly from study abroad and long hours in and out of the classroom; both must face financial problems stemming from decreased enrollments in upper-level courses; both must deal with the paucity of fully qualified instructors and the pedagogic shortcomings of untrained native speakers—but often these problems are intensified in the LCTs. The question of whether to publish in English or in the language in which one works—in other words, choosing the culture to which one will contribute—can be wrenching for scholars of LCTs, although it may not be unique to them. Scholars of French or German who publish in the language in which they do research remain generally within the mainstream of American scholarship, while scholars of an LCT who decide to use research to contribute to the culture they are studying are courting marginalization.
Similarities between more and less commonly taught languages include the growing availability of quality materials, the constant need for improved materials (particularly beyond the elementary level), and the need for funding for technology. Teachers of LCTs and MCTs share a range of problems engendered by having native speakers or the children of native speakers among their students. The complex interplay of literature, area studies, and language, so often discussed in the pages of the ADFL Bulletin , is also very much at issue among LCTs.
MCT chairs may be better able than they realize to provide guidance to LCT instructors in their departments regarding methods and materials. Information is available through the Center for Applied Linguistics, which maintains an LCTs materials database that covers 1,200 languages and contains some 14,000 entries; the ERIC clearinghouse is also an excellent source of LCT materials. The Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning has recently funded the preparation of materials in Burmese, Sinhala, Nepali, Khmer, Yiddish, Yucatec Mayan, Korean, and Classical Chinese. There are also professional associations that can provide materials, suggestions about faculty-evaluation standards, and other information on specific LCTs. The ADFL Bulletin's Directory of Useful Addresses, which appears in this issue, lists many of these associations.
The level of enrollments in the more commonly taught languages may enable MCT programs to underwrite LCTs, since the average MCT registration exceeds the break-even point. Because MCT departments have a traditional role on campus, their chairs are better established and connected than their counterparts in the LCTs and thus may be in a better position to represent the LCTs to college and university administrators. So LCTs need MCTs, and this relationship works both ways. The more commonly taught languages may benefit from the atmosphere of enthusiasm and commitment to language study that derives from a well-supported program for an exotic language. And MCTs can only benefit from forming alliances with the“critical” less commonly taughts. Interest in supporting LCT programs is evident in the halls of government these days, and it seems to fuel the engine driving such federal legislation as Title VI and the NEH Special Opportunity in Foreign Language Education (see News Notes, at the back of this issue). Those of us involved in less and more commonly taught languages have useful things to say to one another. We are generally not, I think, in competition for the same students, considering that registrations in most languages on both sides of the fence (if, indeed, there is a fence) are continuing to rise.
Note
1 In citing Richard Brecht, I am referring to my notes from a telephone conversation I had with him on 13 June 1990. I am grateful to Professor Brecht for his help in orienting some of my impressions in a broader perspective.
Work Cited
Walker, Galal. “The Less Commonly Taught Languages in the Context of American Pedagogy.” Shaping the Future: Challenges and Opportunities . Ed. Helen S. Lepke. Middlebury: Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, 1989. 111–37.
© 1990 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 22, no. 1 (Fall 1990): 1-2 |
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