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FOREIGN language study in higher education has historically been defined by literature scholars in language and literature departments; it has had little contact with other areas of inquiry. Although in recent years foreign language teaching has broadened the field's scope and stimulated interdisciplinary research, the special quality of American educational institutions has not enabled foreign languages to play a global role in higher education. The decentralization that has strengthened American universities has ironically worked against the internationalization of their foreign language programs.
However, under internal and external pressures, language study is redefining itself and seeking new alliances within academia. This paper surveys recent shifts in the language learning paradigm and reviews the intellectual realignments that follow from these shifts. It then takes a fresh look at the role that foreign languages can play in the internationalization of higher education at all levels.
Although humanists have always claimed that to learn a foreign language is to gain access to another people's culture, it has never been clear from observing traditional language instruction what that claim means. How do learners gain cultural insights from sentence-to-sentence translations or grammatical pattern drills or even from exquisite exegeses of literary texts? It has been argued that such activities give learners access to a form of literate commerce with written texts in which educated native speakers themselves are likely to engage. Thus, humanists could claim that they offered learners an international discourse shared by the educated elites of different countries.
But the role of the educated elite has changed. In the United States, the concept of a stable, consensual world of belletristically inclined students has given way to recognition of a diverse population of learners with changing needs who not only know little about the world beyond their national borders but also cannot agree on a definition of their own national identity. Learning a foreign language, then, has become not a way of celebrating a recognized cultural canon but a way of discovering another people's multifaceted culture and the multiple voices that constitute one's own. No longer limited to a corpus of literary texts, the model now includes the ethnographic variability of language as it is used by native speakers in everyday life.
The emergence in the seventies of the field of applied linguistics, and along with it second language acquisition research, reflects the veritable revolution that has taken place in language studies over the last twenty years. Janet K. Swaffar, Katherine Arens, and Heidi Byrnes cogently describe this “new paradigm in language learning.” The learner, not the text, becomes the center of attention. Learning a language no longer means merely internalizing a closed system of formal rules and structural paradigms; rather, it means acquiring a mode of communication, a way of expressing, interpreting, and negotiating socially encoded meanings in varied contexts (Savignon). It is no longer enough to be able to construct grammatically correct sentences; one must know when to say what to whom for which purpose to convey which meaning and which register to use. Texts have their place in this new paradigm as expressions of a people's culture, that is, its beliefs and traditions, myths and social conventions. Daily conversations, newspaper articles, and works of literature are to be viewed on a continuum of socially constructed realities that are expressed through language (Kramsch and McConnell-Ginet).
A foreign language, then, is much more than a grammar and a vocabulary. It is what educational linguist M. A. K. Halliday calls “a social semiotic,” and it is linked to a variety of fields of scholarship, which Halliday summarizes in figure 1 under four headings: language as a system, language as art, language as behavior, and language as knowledge.
In the central triangle are those aspects of the linguistic system generally studied by linguists and identified by language teachers as the core of their subject matter: pronunciation and alphabet, grammar and vocabulary. The projections from the triangle, in particular the study of language varieties, don't usually concern language teachers, who teach mostly standard, contemporary forms of language. Outside the triangle are all the fields on which language impinges: literature as a way of looking at language from a particular point of view, sociolinguistics as the study of language in its social context, and psycholinguistics as the study of the biological and psychological foundations of language acquisition and use. Halliday insists that none of these fields exists without the others. Because he is ultimately interested in language education, Halliday emphasizes the relation between language and society, focusing on the language processes through which learners become socialized into a certain discourse community.
The recent changes in the way language teachers and linguists view language have occurred just as old administrative structures in the humanities are being questioned. Language learning, like other performance-oriented subjects (dance, instrumental music, physical education, drama) has not traditionally been a recognized intellectual pursuit. It is generally viewed as a service component of departments of language and literature that provides the skills necessary for subsequent access to real intellectual content (Kramsch, “Debate”). This view has created a hierarchy between literature and language teaching that has locked these activities into an exclusively vertical relation.
In recent years, this vertical structure has been supplemented by multiple lateral allegiances that are shifting the old disciplinary boundaries and making administrative structures that correspond to these boundaries less defensible. For example, the intellectual core of language and literature departments has long ceased to lie exclusively in philology and literary history. “Literature” faculty members are variously engaged in film and media studies, women's studies, cultural studies, rhetoric, critical theory, and comparative literature—fields that enable them to relate to other academic units on campus and to engage in cross-disciplinary research. Many “language” faculty and staff members are professionalized specialists of language methodology or full-fledged scholars in applied linguistics who conduct second language acquisition research. While the bulk of language teaching at research universities is still done by graduate student instructors and non-faculty staff members, a growing cadre of broadly defined language studies scholars is now joining language and literature departments and directing language programs in these institutions. These scholars seek intellectual partners in schools of education, in English as a second language (ESL) and writing programs, and in departments of linguistics and applied linguistics. Those who are interested in the links between language and culture look in addition to American studies, sociology, and anthropology to understand the cultural presuppositions language learners bring with them to the foreign language classroom (Kramsch, “Boundaries,” Context , “Directions”; Galloway; Byrnes). Those who study reading and writing in a foreign language look to research on rhetoric and composition to understand the native language literacy on which language learners build foreign language literacy (Bernhardt; Swaffar). The expanded notion of language as social signifying practice currently espoused by researchers and teachers in the field of second language acquisition offers the possibility of professional and intellectual links with a wide variety of academic fields. Figure 2 attempts to delineate these links.
In the center of figure 2 are the undergraduate courses typically offered under foreign language catalog headings (e.g., French, German, Russian): language courses, culture and civilization courses, literature courses organized by period or genre, film courses, and thematic courses. Undergraduate courses are discrete institutional entities designed to familiarize students with canonical and noncanonical objects of inquiry within a general educational framework. They deliver knowledge or subject matter that is mostly derivative.
The teaching of these courses is directly informed by the instructor's intimate knowledge of the larger academic discipline in which he or she has received a degree. Each discipline has its own interpretive procedures, research methods, ethics, intellectual style, and inclusionary and exclusionary practices. Over the years, the instructor usually adds further knowledge to this disciplinary base through personal study and research. Thus the instructor of a course called German Culture and Society may have studied German literature, but he or she has had to acquire knowledge of German political, social, and art history, in addition to familiarity with anthropology, sociology, or mythology. Similarly, the instructor of French 101 might have studied French literature or linguistics, but to fully realize the role of language educator, he or she has to get acquainted with language teaching methodology and with such disciplines as psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, education, and French history and sociology.
Each discipline is, in turn, informed by theoretical fields that often overlap. Scholars in literary studies, for example, draw on the insights offered by historical, feminist, psychoanalytic, sociological, and linguistic literary theories; scholars in cultural studies take inspiration from social theory, cultural theory, and philosophy; applied linguists use theoretical insights not only from linguistics but also from cognitive science, educational philosophy, theories of human behavior, and literary theory. The attractiveness and academic prestige of theory are now bringing scholars separated by departmental and disciplinary boundaries closer to one another and enabling them to view their fields more globally. Indeed, scholars in search of theoretical absolutes easily fall prey to the illusion that theory is universal and that the realm of theory provides understanding that is beyond language. Yet it is precisely in the realm of theory that language can be most treacherous, because language is used in that context to label and define global realities. In the euphoria of interdisciplinary research, scholars often uncritically transfer the metaphors of one discipline to another. For example, a text or a discourse means something different for a linguist, a cultural anthropologist, and a literary scholar (Teraoka). Each one reads, that is, analyzes and interprets, texts with different disciplinary tools.
The study of a foreign language and culture has not only a transdisciplinary but also a potential transnational dimension. One could argue that every community of scholars is international, because intellectual inquiry is universal. But this argument is only partly true. Just as American engineers are trained in a tradition that differs from that of French or German engineering (Baumgratz-Gangl), American sociologists, educators, or literature scholars have intellectual styles unlike those of their French and German counterparts: they ask different questions and search for answers in different ways. Although scholars do not often deconstruct the discourse of their discipline, those who work in foreign languages have the opportunity to view their field from a cross-cultural perspective, with all the intellectual enrichment that such a perspective can bring. Thus, for example, American teachers of German are naturally informed by insights from the American tradition in education, which is steeped in behaviorist and psychological theories of learning; but they can also draw on German educational traditions, either directly, through contact with the German field of language teaching and learning research, Sprachlehr- und Sprachlernforschung (see Bausch et al.), or indirectly, through materials prepared by German educators for the teaching of German as a second language. German educational thought owes a great deal to Soviet action psychology and to hermeneutic approaches to knowledge (Kramsch, Context ). Second language acquisition research in Europe is more qualitative, more ethnographic in its approach than quantitative American-style research (Valdman; Stutterheim). An American teacher of German may draw professional sustenance from both American and German traditions.
Current economic and political changes in the world have put the teaching and learning of foreign languages in the spotlight. As Europe is crafting its language policy to meet international and national needs, the American public is relying on language teachers to open the minds of tongue-tied Americans to other peoples and cultures. Shifts in the language-learning paradigm and intellectual realignments within academia make the present seem propitious for rethinking the role that foreign language study can play in the internationalization of higher education.
Language studied as a social signifying practice can internationalize general education in three major ways:
1. Teaching language as social practice means linking linguistic forms and social meanings. The three goals of foreign language education—communicative competence, cultural knowledge, and cognitive growth—are inseparable. Even though the curriculum may include courses that focus on one purpose of language (e.g., conversation or composition courses, German oral survival or French business courses), understanding a foreign language and making oneself understood in that language require more than the acquisition of formal skills; learners must be willing to see the world from another perspective. Furthermore, learning a foreign language or going abroad is the first time that many American students are confronted with their “Americanness.” Especially if they define themselves as, say, engineers, scientists, or economists, their expertise often overrides in their view their membership in a given national culture. In the language class and, a fortiori, in conversations in a foreign language with native speakers, students have to assume a self different from the one they present when they speak their native tongue. Students thereby become aware of a social identity they have always taken for granted. Through the image they project to speakers of other languages and through those speakers' reactions, students may realize how American their own perspective is. Understanding one's place in the world starts with understanding one's uses of language.
2. Teaching language as social practice means explicitly teaching difference and change. The study of a foreign language can open learners' minds not only to national differences but also to differences based on regional identity, age, gender, class, and race. Instructors can explore both the diversity among native speakers and the diverse backgrounds of the learners in the classroom. Foreign language learners can be encouraged to study other peoples' attitudes and beliefs in a spirit of ethnographic inquiry rather than in a normative or judgmental way. To illustrate concretely, I describe an experience familiar to many language teachers: American students in a French class were recently discussing ways in which people can “improve their lives.” The students made suggestions that fit their experience of American society, such as returning to school and gaining additional education in order to get a better job. However, a French woman who was visiting the class that day found the students' idea absolutely preposterous. She maintained that in France, once you have gained a degree in a certain field of studies, you don't need to go back to school because society provides you with an opportunity to practice your profession. Furthermore, she claimed that there is no way anyone can “improve his or her life.” Both sides became quite passionate. The French visitor found American society wasteful and disorganized, and the American students found French society regimented and inflexible. The two sides were locked in a confrontational discussion. The teacher had to help the students suspend judgment for a while in order to put each position in its proper social and historical context. She asked each side to explain the meaning of “improving one's life” and to use other societal phenomena to contextualize that meaning. She led the Americans to link their view of continuing education with social mobility, entrepreneurial spirit, and public indicators of success; she helped the French woman explain her reaction in the light of the French concern for social stability, professional quality, and private indicators of happiness. Yet even those views had to be relativized, for both sides represented mainstream perspectives that didn't reflect the views of all social classes, ethnic groups, or age groups. 1
Such contextualization ultimately allows for a revision of one's own stance. As American students learn to understand, rather than to judge, other peoples' ways of viewing the world, they can better appreciate their own perspective in its global, historical, and social context and accept that perspective as one among many possible expressions of modern society. To be sure, such a pedagogy has implications for teacher training. Language teachers need to be more than just good drill masters; they need to be aware of their own culture as well as that of the target language and to understand their role as cultural intermediaries.
3. Finally, teaching language as social practice requires distinguishing the voices of society from the particular voice of the individual. This kind of teaching calls for a critical pedagogy that pays attention not only to words and sentences but to discourse practices as well. Learning to retrieve information from texts or to exchange information in conversation and learning to behave in a pragmatically appropriate manner constitute only the first step in language learning as social practice. The second step is critical reflection on the information received or the behavior adopted. How do people's ways of speaking and writing reflect dominant ideologies? How do people flout societal conventions and expectations? Teachers can best prepare for their role as critical educators through the study of literature or applied linguistics, which trains them in the critical reading of texts.
These three aspects of language as social signifying practice—form as carrier of meaning, difference in the attribution of meaning, and critical reflection on discourse processes—can make the critical study of foreign language and discourse central to a globally conceived international education. American higher education need not adopt another culture's intellectual style and disciplinary discourse, but confrontation with other languages and cultures makes it possible for us to realize precisely how our intellectual traditions differ from, and how they resemble, other traditions. In the last section of this paper, I consider a few curricular implications of a critical foreign language pedagogy for the internationalization of the American university.
The most visible changes in curricular thought have taken place in the first area mentioned above, the links between language forms and social meanings. Sending students overseas to experience a foreign language in its social context and giving them transfer credit for study abroad seem to be obvious ways of internationalizing college education. In Europe, for example, internationalization of higher education focuses on the exchange of students and scholars between countries. Indeed, member nations of the European Community are committed to sending ten percent of their university students to study abroad. As evidenced by the new transitional programs ERASMUS (Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students), COMETT (Community Program for Cooperation between Universities and Enterprises regarding Training and Technology), and TEMPUS (Trans-European Mobility Program for University Students), “Europe is on the move” (Rivers, “Internationalization”). These programs are open to all students, but they target nonhumanists, such as students from business and engineering schools. The programs strive to integrate the study of foreign languages as instruments of professional training into the core of European professional schools (see Baumgratz and Stephan; Baumgratz-Gangl; Lambert; Picht; Schärer and North).
It is interesting to contrast these European efforts with efforts made at some American universities to open overseas study to nonhumanists. While any attempt to send social science, business, and engineering majors to study abroad must be applauded, it seems that language study is not always the core of the experience. American universities often seem caught between the wish to diversify the students' intellectual experience and the desire to uphold what they perceive as the superior quality of American instruction. For example, Stanford's overseas studies program requires only two quarters of foreign language instruction before study abroad; most Stanford courses in Florence, Paris, Berlin, and Tokyo are taught in English. The message is clear: knowledge of the local language is strongly recommended to enhance the social experience, but the language of serious academic pursuit is English. Because most American students are relatively isolated from the world scene, attempts to internationalize American higher education should not only provide students with the linguistic tools to travel abroad and attend foreign universities but also give them the opportunity to participate in the daily lives of native speakers from various social classes and ethnic groups. Instructions should also make some provision for helping students analyze and reflect on their overseas experience when they return to the United States.
Most other attempts to internationalize American higher education have aimed at diversifying the home curriculum to foster cross-national and cross-disciplinary connections within and between courses: diversifying the academic discourse by teaching content courses (e.g., history, sociology) totally or partially in the foreign language (Kramsch, “Foreign Languages”); shifting the humanists' traditional focus on high culture by introducing and critically analyzing foreign language texts from a variety of sources including film, the media, and popular culture; diversifying the concept of essayist literacy to include the foreign culture's oral traditions of folktales, mythology, and poetry reading; and designing new interdisciplinary majors that allow students to cut across departmental boundaries in the spirit of the new paradigm shifts mentioned earlier (see Kramsch, “Foreign Languages”; Rivers, Teaching Languages ).
On several campuses the greatest innovation in recent years has been the creation of foreign language centers, institutes, or programs that liberate foreign languages from the exclusive tutelage of the literature faculty and give them a more global role to play within the institution. The centers at Brown, Ohio State, San Diego State, Penn, and the University of Hawaii vary in mission, resources, and activities, but all try to bring together various provinces of academia that have historically ignored one another but may form the core of efforts to internationalize higher education: the humanities, the social sciences, and international and area studies programs. Foreign language centers have both a teacher training and a research agenda; for example, they may sponsor research on the use of technology for language learning and teaching, on proficiency testing, and on the development of cultural competence. Some centers also evaluate students' and teachers' performance, thereby helping set appropriate goals for all language study on campus that are congruent with the avowed international mission of the institution (for the first comprehensive description of such centers see Phillips).
Foreign language centers are not immune to the internecine conflicts between academic units, but since they report directly to the higher levels of administration, they can, with proper leadership, not only bring all foreign language teachers on campus into contact with one another but also build bridges between foreign language teachers and their colleagues in ESL, writing, and education programs. It is too early to tell what lasting effect such centers will have on the international character of American education or how they might either lead or reflect developments at colleges and universities where teachers of all foreign languages and literatures are now housed together in comprehensive language departments. However, the emergence of such centers is a sign that foreign language educators and administrators are searching for ways to circumvent old academic structures and to enable foreign language study to meet the global demands of the times.
Finally, efforts to internationalize American education seem to be consistent with current pleas for a more critical pedagogy in all domains, specifically in foreign language instruction. Because many students know little about the world, it is tempting to take internationalization to mean only the transmission of facts about other peoples and cultures. However, as I mentioned earlier, if these facts are not evaluated critically and put in relation to the students' own cultural experience, students run the risk of “nationalizing” the other rather than becoming international themselves (Kramsch, Context ). As current trends in foreign language pedagogy emphasize the need to develop not only the students' oral proficiency but their cultural literacy as well, it would be inappropriate to return to the narrow views of literacy of earlier times. Literacy in a global age is more than functional literacy, but it is also more than blind respect for the authority of canonical texts. Literacy requires critical understanding and deep appreciation of the conditions of production and reception of texts in a variety of contexts.
The implementation of the suggestions made above requires two major changes in attitude at institutions of higher learning. As I stated, the decentralization of the American university has been both its strength on the national level and its weakness on the international scene. Academic laissez-faire has fostered remarkable initiatives; for example, some of the most original methods for teaching foreign languages have been initiated in this country and so has most of the research in second language acquisition. Yet these efforts have remained scattered across institutions and departments and have therefore failed to counteract the Anglocentric forces at work in the academy. More and more colleges and universities claim to educate students with an international outlook for the twenty-first century, and such claims must be followed through at the departmental and program level. While such statements can emanate from any part of the institution, general policy statements of mission must also be formally endorsed by the president and trustees. Just as institutions invest resources in science and engineering in response to national needs and imperatives, administrators must recognize, and give top institutional priority to, the central place of foreign languages in the United States' international needs. Cost considerations have to be viewed not at the local level of individual staff or language courses but within the total budget expenditures of institutions.
The second change concerns the perception of the role of undergraduate education. Although college education is in principle still general education, over the years the undergraduate major has become more an initiation to a discipline or field of graduate studies than an area of major interest. Such a practice unnecessarily narrows the epistemological options open to undergraduates, who should, instead, be given a sense of the unity of knowledge and encouraged to seek new links among various areas of learning.
The global changes that have prompted the American university, like its European counterpart, to seek to internationalize its mission and its curriculum are too fundamental to be taken lightly. Internationalization of higher education is not a catchphrase soon to be replaced. It is the next step in American education. The new view of language as social practice and the emerging shifts in disciplinary boundaries are creating a propitious environment for taking that step. Foreign language instruction, study abroad, and a global view of the undergraduate curriculum are all part of a larger picture that calls for the collaboration of the humanities, the social sciences, and international studies within a strong institution-wide policy of international education.
The author is Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley. This article is based on a paper presented at ADFL Seminar West, 4–6 June1992, in Berkeley, California.
1 I am grateful to Celeste Kinginger for this example from her classroom.
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Figure 1:
Nature of language studies.Source: Halliday11
Figure 2:
Foreign language education as global practice
© 1993 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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