26, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 1-4
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From the Editor
Elizabeth B. Welles
AS THE ADFL Bulletin heads off into its second quarter-century with volume 26, I am inspired to look back at its evolution as a voice of foreign language teaching in the United States over a particularly complex period. I take as evidence that it has generally reflected the directions of the field, the qualifications of its authors and the extent to which it is cited in the professional literature. First consulting the cumulative indexes, instructive measures of foreign language educators' preoccupations, and then reading Bulletin articles from various periods on a wide variety of subjects, I have been able to gauge how the issues, approaches, and topics have changed—or not—over the years.
The history of the Bulletin has been recounted eloquently in its pages, after ten years by Richard Brod (11.1 [1979]) and on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of ADFL by Brod and by Denise Bourassa Knight (20.1 [1988]). They noted what is striking to the first-time reader of volume 1—that is, the profession's anxiety over the demise of the undergraduate language requirement. The Bulletin actually began publication before the establishment of the association; a broadside in the fall of 1968 invited department chairs to discuss the crisis at the MLA convention. Four hundred department chairs answered this oliphant. Galvanized by the urgency of the situation, they agreed to stand together and thus created the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. In the spring, the MLA Executive Council approved funds for the association, and in September 1969, the first regular issue of the Bulletin appeared. It immediately became, among other things, a vehicle for the expression of a siege mentality. Frank Ryder's editorial in the inaugural issue was entitled “A Call for Action” and began, “Exhortations to action, especially in new undertakings, often use the language of crisis…” (1.1 [1969]: 3). In the first three issues that language appears in titles such as “Attack on the Foreign Language Requirement” (1.1 [1969]: 15) and “The Threat to the College Language Requirement” (1.3 [1970]: 11), while status reports on the requirement documented its loss of ground. The perceived enemy was the student body, whose well-aimed arguments against restrictions of any kind found a prominent target in the foreign language requirement. I scarcely need remind you that this is also the twenty-fifth anniversary of Woodstock, an event that has come to stand for the sense of self-determination and resistance to authority that characterized the Vietnam War era. Students were quoted as saying, “Satisfaction of a foreign language requirement shall not be needed…[I]nevitably, the student is the best, if not the only, possible judge of his own academic needs.…A recent alumni survey has indicated that knowledge of a foreign language is not necessary to a good education…” (1.1 [1969]: 6–7). The study of foreign languages was not perceived as “relevant” to student lives.
The dust from the battle over the language requirement did not, however, blind the eyes of our founding fathers (there were few mothers) 1 to other problems. They understood that their collective energy could be profitably directed toward strengthening the entire field of foreign language teaching rather than merely defending the requirement. Frank Ryder's brief editorial points out the instability of foreign languages in the American educational curriculum, the difficulties of finding jobs, and the lack of federal support. His last paragraph, though, expresses the positive case for creating an association of department chairs and, in so doing, establishes an agenda that is “relevant” even today:
Possibilities of curricular improvement; expanded views of the range and meaning of FL study; ways of management appropriate to new administrative and budgetary contexts, new areas of study, new faculty roles; avenues for responsible student involvement and detours around the newly emerging hazards; development of rational policies for placement, articulation, major concentration, relations with other departments, graduate study, and teacher training; utilization of foreign study centers, staff from abroad, language houses.… (3)
Ryder finishes by saying, “in these and a multitude of other challenges, department chairmen bear responsibility and can profit greatly from exchange of information and views, from mutual support, and from organized action.…” His statement describes well the future mission of ADFL.
The new association was right for the times: by the end of the first year, membership stood at 764, and it has held at somewhere between 900 and 1,000 ever since. At this writing, there are 995 member departments out of a possible 3,169 at two- and four-year colleges. Initially the Bulletin was circulated only among ADFL members, but as of 1985 it has been offered to MLA members as well and it now reaches an additional 1,000 readers. Although an affiliate of the MLA, operating in coordination with the Association of Departments of English, ADFL maintains autonomous control over the content of the Bulletin , as it does over its seminars, meetings, policy statements, and other activities. ADFL has functioned as the MLA's principal vehicle for publications and meetings on professional and pedagogical matters in foreign languages. The Bulletin and the seminars that began in 1971 are the means by which the association carries out its mission. They are mutually beneficial to one another. While the bulletin disseminates seminar papers to a broad audience (two of the five articles in this issue were seminar presentations), it also publishes many other submissions from a wide range of foreign language experts. These, in turn, give rise to seminar topics, and so it goes.
Looking at Frank Ryder's list of areas for attention, one might think that nothing has changed in foreign language education over the last twenty-five years. But, while his topics are still being discussed today—some of them fervently—any reader of this journal will know that much is missing. Research and innovations in teaching methodology have occurred, institutional culture and structures have changed, and gender and minority issues have flooded all parts of the curriculum. What follows is a review of trends in the foreign language teaching profession as I have seen them through the prism of the ADFL Bulletin's first quarter-century.
First, here are some general observations. There are approximately 1,040 entries, an average of about forty-one articles a year. The average per volume during the first ten years, however, is forty-six: there were four issues per year through volume 14 and, as the early Bulletins contained many short reports, index entries were more numerous. Surveys compiling information about enrollments, requirements, curriculum, and the job market have continued to be a noteworthy feature and add a significant dimension to the picture of the profession. News and reports of past and future conferences, publications, and projects, as well as ADFL's policy statements on professional practice are other staples. A review of article titles overall indicates some common categories. Topics are almost evenly divided between questions about the curriculum and concerns about departmental governance. There are only slightly more than a hundred articles that focus on specific languages—twenty-eight on French, nineteen on German, eighteen on Spanish, ten on Russian, ten on classics, six on less commonly taught languages, five on Romance languages, four on Italian, and two on Portuguese. Nearly three times as many titles refer to “foreign languages,” but the proportion changes over time. There are almost twice as many references in titles to “foreign language” as to single languages during the first ten years, but four times as many during the last four years. I can only speculate that, as Bulletin writers have moved away from status reports to more theoretical concerns or from their more particular experiences to broader applications, their thinking tends to be more inclusive. Another interesting phenomenon is the gender switch. In the first year only three of the fifty entries were by women; over the last four years almost half the contributors were women. This development coincides with the greater female visibility at the MLA convention and at ADFL seminars. Further, data presented in this issue, in Bettina Huber's article, “The MLA's 1991–92 Survey of PhD Placement: The Latest Foreign Language Findings and Trends through Time,” show that while women have received a greater number of doctorates than men since 1976, 1991–92 is the first year that more women than men were hired in tenure-track positions.
The first index for volumes 1–10 was published in the May 1979 issue. Although many articles were devoted to the language requirement, by 1972 such articles had largely disappeared, and Bulletin authors began to concentrate on possibilities of curricular improvement and on expanded views of the range and meaning of foreign language study. By far the largest category of articles can loosely be called “Foreign Languages and…”: foreign languages and the liberal arts, the humanities, interdisciplinary study, and—perhaps because of a poor job market—foreign languages and architecture, mass communication, and, most prominently, international studies and business. Volume 8, number 2 (1976), for example, is mostly devoted to aspects of international study, although the definition of it varies: it is construed in its simplest state as knowledge of other cultures, while institutionally it means either an international studies department with a focus on political science and economics or a cluster of courses like Latin American or Asian studies. All the writers recommend, as does Wilga M. Rivers in this issue's “Developing International Competence for a Centripetal, Centrifugal World,” that achieving mastery in the target language be made a priority and that language departments create multidimensional programs through collaborations with other disciplines, departments, and institutions. Rivers, however, goes farther, bringing together a larger combination of strategies—among them, languages across the curriculum, additional courses at the advanced level on diverse subject matter, creation of language teaching and culture specialists, and integration of foreign students into campus life—to internationalize the American campus and the American student.
I was unprepared for the number of articles on language and business. The November 1974 issue, to take a random example, had two articles on preparing students for business careers in German—one by an author from a small college in an urban setting with many multinational companies and another by someone from a graduate school of international management—and two articles about the programs in international business at the University of Cincinnati. Although these essays take their inspiration from declining enrollments and limited job opportunities for students, they demonstrate the foresight of language administrators in combining language study in the humanities with diverse pragmatic subject matter. They do not, however, consider the implications of such combinations as Judith M. Melton does here, in “Foreign Language Interdisciplinary Programs and Alliances: Some Observations.” She pushes beyond the departmental mindset to consider the curriculum of the future and calls for flexibility and diversity to deal with the changing student population and the need for a citizenry both literate and technically competent.
Another strong area of interest during the seventies was the foreign language curriculum in community colleges, as it attended to preparing academically minded students for transfer to four-year colleges and vocationally oriented students for careers in health care, law enforcement, social services, and other fields. One different kind of article, “The Treadmill: Improving Articulation among Schools, Junior Colleges, and Colleges” (5.1 [1973]: 19–22), caught my eye because the topic is central to the foreign language conversation today. The author, Louise H. Allen, is primarily concerned with the isolation of various kinds of institutions and the lack of communication among them; she does mention, however, a 1969 project of the Illinois Superintendent of Public Instruction to redefine levels of instruction and placement for students in which I discerned here the germs of the discussion of coherent sequences of study that goes on today.
Other familiar concerns are in evidence. Quite a number of articles have to do with doctoral programs and the balance between training TAs to teach while teaching them about literature. The appearance of topics like women in the profession, the status of part-time faculty, the use of technology, minorities and foreign languages, pedagogical innovations, and national policy presage trends that are developed in later issues.
The next index (16.3 [1985]: 54–59), covering the period from 1980 through 1985, shows interest continuing in past subjects with several new ones added. Three articles on the Rassias method and one article each on applied linguistics, discourse analysis, and the teaching of reading track the beginnings of shifts in pedagogical thinking. Six articles ushering in the age of proficiency mark a radically different approach to the testing of students and revised expectations about their levels of achievement. More attention is paid to national policy: the warning of the President's Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies (1978–79) about “Americans' scandalous incompetence in foreign languages” (12.3 [1981]: 1), the Congressional resolution endorsing “proficiency in a foreign language and work in international studies as requirements for college graduation” (12.3 [1981]: 3), and the establishment of an office of the Joint National Committee for Languages (JNCL) in Washington to promote the commission's recommendations. Other matters that increased in importance throughout the decade—feminist approaches to texts and teaching, literary theory, and the use of film in teaching language and culture—made their first appearances in the Bulletin during these years, and they resonate in Robert Ponterio's article in the current issue, “Teaching Authorial Point of View: Using Film to Question the Male Perspective in French Literature.” While earlier articles focused on film as a kind of text, Ponterio uses film as a way of introducing students to feminist approaches that can analogously be applied to medieval texts.
While the discussion of proficiency takes up only about five percent of the 1980–85 index, it accounts for ten percent of the one covering the years 1986–90. A special issue, Proficiency and Profession (Sept. 1986), included opinions and explanations about proficiency and communication, teaching, reading, assessment, requirements, departments, and the humanities. Perhaps in reaction to the emphasis that proficiency testing puts on oral competence, eight articles in other issues treat the place of literature in the foreign language curriculum, a debate that has come to have serious ramifications for the structure of departments today. In essays on faculty development, the preparation of teachers, and mentoring, the 1986–90 index also shows a new concern for the status of faculty. As instructional technology such as computers, hypermedia, and satellite-assisted instruction becomes more common, so do the articles about them, which for the first time appear as a recognizable cluster (eight). While some describe ways technology can enrich and strengthen teaching, some also raise questions about how the use of technology can affect the conception of teaching. Discussion of public policy and reports on the work of the JNCL remain conspicuous, along with essays about the need to ensure the profession's impact on educational reform by improving its visibility.
The index for the last four years, published in the special issue Chairing the Foreign Language and Literature Department (25.3 [1994]), includes many of the same topics and some new ones. Since many current readers are likely to be familiar with these years of the Bulletin , I will mention only two kinds of entries. With the explosion of attention to multiculturalism, culture has appeared in our professional discourse in many contexts: intercultural studies, a component of international studies, cultural literacy (1991); cultural diversity; cultural hermeneutics (1992); and culture in relation to language and literature (1993). This continuing discussion is now augmented by Russell Berman's paper, “Global Thinking, Local Teaching: Departments, Curricula, and Culture,” which explores “how the larger theoretical revolution, with its epicenter in the language and literature departments, elicits structural consequences for these departments, for the curricula that are taught, and for the understanding of culture as the topic of teaching” (7). And last but not least, we find three articles by Bettina Huber resulting from the 1987–89 Survey of Foreign Language Programs on institutional contexts, faculty characteristics, compensation, curriculum, enrollments and—lo and behold—the foreign language requirement, now slowly regaining favor. Huber's studies amplify the long tradition of informational reports and surveys with which the Bulletin was initiated. They also represent the MLA's deep concern about the job market, about graduate education, and about the state of the profession as a whole.
And what of ADFL in the future? Does a new cover signify a new era? Indeed, it would be enough to maintain the high standards established by my predecessors: Richard Brod, Cheryl Demharter, Judith Ginsberg, Dorothy James, and John Cross, along with David Goldberg, whose career as managing and associate editor spans four directors. Of course, we can expect new trends. I suspect the pages of the Bulletin will carry information about Goals 2000 and national standards; about articulation, placement, and institutional collaboration; about assessment and accountability; about different kinds of programs at community colleges; about teaching methods and learning styles; about the education of future secondary and college teachers; about minorities in the profession; and about the expansion of the curriculum to include culture in all its manifestations. And there will be many continuing themes: repetition, after all, represents not so much forgetfulness as the awareness of new generations coming of age and coming to grips with old issues in current contexts and times. I suspect there will be more of that standby “Foreign Languages and…”—whether the “and” be business, science, history, or technology—which will, in turn, give rise to essays on new departmental and institutional structures. We will, alas, be reminded about foreign languages under siege and underfunded at all levels. It would be wonderful to publish not only public statements about the necessity of learning foreign languages to maintain the nation's position in the global marketplace but also reports of moneys granted in support of foreign language education. I hope that many submissions will represent the kind of coalition building that ADFL has been encouraging since its inception and will recognize that chairing is both a demanding and a creative task, an opportunity to have an effect on education today. The Bulletin will carry on its tradition of receptivity to ideas, debates, and developments in the field while continuing as a voice for foreign language educators across the country. As always, too, it will aim to provide a sounding board for the interests of its readers. Let us hear from you.
Note
1 The list of ADFL founders is interesting because of the diversity of institutions, a feature that is still one of the strengths of the association. To honor the ADFL founders I name them here. Led by Frank Ryder (Indiana Univ.), those who took part in the first meeting, in New York, were Douglas Alden (Univ. of Virginia), Joe K. Fugate (Kalamazoo Coll.), William Hughes (Michigan State Univ.), Arno Lepke (Univ. of Akron), Seymour Menton (Univ. of California, Irvine), Sanford Newell (Converse Coll.), Karl S. Pond (Miami-Dade Junior Coll.), Edward Sullivan (Princeton Univ.), and Homer Welsh (Kutztown Univ. of Pennsylvania). The ad hoc committee formed at that meeting was chaired by Frank Ryder and consisted of Oliver Andrews (Univ. of Connecticut), Joe Fugate, Edward Mulvihill (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison), and Karl Pond. Members of the organizing committee, which met for the first time at the 1970 MLA convention, were Roger Anton (San Bernardino Valley Coll.), Dirk Baay (Colorado Coll.), Robert Baker (Middlebury Coll.), Rodolfo Cardona (Univ. of Texas), Joe Fugate, Roy Julow (Univ. of Vermont), Edward Mulvihill, Sanford Newell, and Frank Ryder. In March 1969 the MLA Executive Council approved funds for the new association, and in May Richard Brod, then an instructor in the German department of New York University, was appointed its staff coordinator.
© 1994 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 26, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 1-4 |
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