|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
IN A 1991 article, Christine Uber Grosse and Geoffrey M. Voght state that the “field of languages for specific purposes (LSP) in the United States has come of age” and note that courses and programs specializing in LSP were “in place at over 275 institutions of higher education” by the mid-eighties (181). Internal and external pressures have motivated foreign language department members to initiate courses and programs in nontraditional areas of language study. Pragmatic reasons such as falling enrollments in language programs, particularly on the upper level, the needs of different student populations, and the changing mission of institutions of higher education have provided the impetus for LSP. But political, social, technological, and economic factors, both in the United States and worldwide, have also contributed to the expanded focus of foreign language study.
For the past seven years I have been the head of a department at Clemson University that has elected to pursue the teaching of languages for specific purposes. In 1987, the faculty, under the leadership of Pat Wannamaker, implemented a BA degree program, Language and International Trade (L&IT), that now enrolls 190 to 200 students a year. This nontraditional, interdisciplinary program has changed our department significantly; it has also changed our image on campus, in the region, and in the state and created a demand for similar projects. We are currently developing a program involving engineering and languages, which is being funded by the National Science Foundation. This program, called Engineering Program for International Careers (EPIC), is slated to begin in summer 1995. We have also been approached by faculty members from Clemson's MBA program who want to incorporate a strong language component into their curriculum. This rural, southern university has seen more and more students (not just language students) express interest in studying or working abroad.
In the course of the last seven years, I also have had time to consider some of the long-term challenges that these types of programs bring to the profession and that language administrators and language professionals need to identify and address. On the one hand, the programs bring much-needed funding and prestige to language departments; but, on the other, they must of necessity change some of the goals of our profession.
In this paper I discuss our L&IT program and our proposed EPIC program. I include in my discussion a brief overview of our programs and highlight the advantages and disadvantages of integrating such programs into traditional language departments. I also focus on some concerns that these programs raise in our profession, in particular in curriculum and recruitment and credentialing of faculty members. Finally, I suggest that we as language professionals need to recognize how interdisciplinary programs and alliances will change our thinking about our coursework and the degrees we offer.
Language and International Trade involves four colleges on campus but is housed in the Department of Languages. Students complete a significant number of hours in their language tracks (French, German, and Spanish) and a significant number of hours in business and professional courses. There are five specific professional options, from which the student chooses one to supplement the language track and complete the major: applied economics (agriculture), forestry, international trade, textiles, and tourism. Students generally take twenty-four hours of language at the third- and fourth-year levels and thirty to thirty-three hours of courses in the professional options. The largest professional option by enrollment is international trade, which includes business courses required in MBA programs—accounting, economics, finance, management, marketing, business law, and statistics.
Students in the L&IT program must complete an internship, either abroad or in the United States. We urge them to do their internship abroad for the invaluable language experience. Some people consider developing internships a burdensome task, but our experience has been mostly positive. While it would be ideal for every student to have a three- to four-month paid foreign internship, and many students do, we cannot guarantee such arrangements. As a state school, we cannot require that students go abroad, although we do encourage them to do so as many times as is feasible. For this reason, we have found it helpful to have a broad definition of internship. In some sense, each student must have a tailor-made internship. We accept study abroad as partial fulfillment of the internship requirement, particularly if the student takes business courses. The student can also combine study abroad with a short working internship. A few students are more comfortable with domestic internships. For example, students who already have strong language backgrounds, particularly those who grew up in Spanish-, French-, or German-speaking environments, may prefer to have domestic internships because they may help them secure later employment.
During the period between May and December 1993, we had students working or studying in France, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, Spain, Germany, and Austria. In summer 1993, we had 62% of our interns working abroad, only 12% working stateside, and 26% studying abroad. Our goal is to have more students spending time abroad, preferably working.
At the end of the L&IT program's first year we had 112 students enrolled. By fall 1993, the beginning of the eighth year of the program, enrollment leveled off at around 200 students in the three language tracks. In 1992–93 we had approximately 76 majors in French (33%), 48 (21%) in German, and 104 (45%) in Spanish. (We plan to institute a L&IT track in Japanese as soon as funding is available.) Before instituting the L&IT program, the department enrolled 20 to 22 majors in French, about 10 (in the best years) in German, and approximately 30 in Spanish. Although most of our majors are now L&IT students, we still have about 30 majors pursuing traditional or education degrees.
We have been fortunate in placing students after graduation. Most of our students have been able to find jobs but not necessarily the jobs they want or jobs related, at least initially, to their languages. Our most recent follow-up study includes graduates from December 1990 to August 1992. Of the graduates we were able to contact, 48% were employed, 22% were enrolled in graduate school, primarily law school or MBA programs, 26% were temporarily employed, and 4% were unemployed.
Now I want to turn to our proposed interdisciplinary project, the EPIC program, which will be administered by the Engineering College. In this program engineering students will have an opportunity to work in countries including France, Germany, Spain, Mexico, and Japan as a part of a five-year curriculum. In association with sponsoring engineering companies, students will spend one fall semester abroad in a working internship. Before going abroad, they will complete at least the equivalent of two years of college language courses, and just before leaving they will participate in a five-week summer immersion experience. In the five-week program, directed by the Department of Languages, students will attend class for four or five hours a day and will have meals with native speakers (graduate students). The students will live together in dormitories with a coordinator who speaks the target language. Films and cultural events will be scheduled during afternoon and evening hours.
Engineering students who opt for this program will be expected to have an internship or co-op experience in the United States before the overseas internship and will be expected to maintain their language proficiency after going abroad. To help fund this program, engineering faculty members are working with their large network of corporations to find partners to support individual students.
Interdisciplinary programs are exciting and challenging, and they hold some advantages for language departments. These programs are highly visible and change the image of traditional departments significantly. Interdisciplinary programs are unusual in an academic world of rigid departmental lines, bringing together faculties and students from different disciplines. They allow students to use their language in practical and useful ways. It has been rewarding indeed to see L&IT students complete their overseas internships and come back to campus and language classes with much greater language proficiency. The enthusiasm they show after spending time in the target culture helps other students see the advantages of going abroad. In general, our upper-level courses have improved both in numbers and in quality since the inception of the L&IT program. In addition to our L&IT and traditional majors, majors from business and other fields are beginning to enroll in our upper-level skill and culture courses.
But there are some clear disadvantages to such programs. For example, they are very complex. L&IT is administratively intensive: tracking and advising a large number of students and developing and monitoring internships requires a director and administrative staff. We have approximately forty to forty-five interns each summer. When they return, they must complete research papers in the target language, which faculty members must grade.
These programs are also expensive and need strong upper-level administrative support as well as a sufficient budget, particularly for hiring and travel. Because the programs draw many new students into language study and may cause periods of rapid expansion, maintaining quality in the classrooms can be challenge.
Integrating this type of program with existing major programs can prove difficult if departmental faculty members prefer traditional curricula. It is important to have the backing of every member of the language department.
Sustaining good working relations with other colleges is also a major factor for the success of the program. Business faculty members can have legitimate objections to a language-business interdisciplinary program. They can have accreditation problems if the program is seen as a business program that does not meet the requirements of their college. A name like Language and International Trade avoids such confusion. The good will of business faculty members is important, because they will be teaching language majors. If business classes become overcrowded, these instructors and the business majors will object to the new students.
Interdisciplinary programs also need to be integrated into the mission of the university. The L&IT program and the EPIC program fit well into Clemson's mission and strategic plan. Clemson is a state-supported (some would say now state-assisted) land-grant university. These interdisciplinary programs provide the outreach and service goals of the land-grant university. In addition, the definition of the purpose of the land-grant university is being expanded to meet the needs of the next century. Not just agriculture, as in the past, but all disciplines on our campus are being urged to plan programs that serve the community, the state, and the region.
The proliferation of interdisciplinary programs compels us to question the goals of our profession. What are the ramifications of these programs for language teaching? I would suggest that they are significant, and I focus on them in the remainder of this paper.
Of primary importance are interdisciplinary program curricula. Many students (and faculty members) in professional disciplines like business and engineering see speaking a foreign language as only a skill. In the beginning they believe that they can readily pick up a language to use in their future employment. They quickly learn, however, that it is not so simple, and they begin to understand that learning vocabulary, grammar, and structure is not all that is involved in becoming fluent in a foreign language. They need to be sensitive to cultural differences and to know something about the historical, literary, and artistic heritage of the people whose language they are studying.
But in designing curricula, we are restricted to the number of credit hours that students can feasibly devote to language courses. We must also recognize that students need to learn business, engineering, science, or medical vocabulary as well as to participate in depth in skill courses such as conversation and composition. They furthermore need to understand the cultural protocol of working in a business office or with an engineering firm abroad. What type of curriculum do we create to give these students not only significant training in the practical aspect of language learning but also a wide exposure to humanistic thinking?
We need to be creative in designing courses that can at least begin to accomplish these objectives. We cannot expect students to take large numbers of traditional literature courses, although many students will want to enroll in some. But for some students whose principal interest lies in other areas, taking traditional literature courses is like taking medicine. We need to offer diverse skill-based courses, as Wilga Rivers suggests:
We develop effective methodologies for early levels, but frequently give little thought to the upper intermediate and advanced levels where innovative teaching and imaginative course design are most needed. We must provide choice at the upper levels if students are to remain in our courses long enough to gain that control of language which will remain with them and on which they can build later in life. (40)
Sylvie Debevec Henning also advocates a skill-based curriculum for today's students, who have variable goals in studying languages. She believes that the general objectives of “internationalized education” are “linguistic proficiencies, knowledge, attitudes, and cognitive skills” (52). She suggests curricula that integrate language, literature, and culture in an “overall form that … depends on the needs and interests of the students and faculty members” (53).
All too frequently, upper-level students are one group in our minds, but this group's members vary widely in proficiency—they range from students who have just completed second-year language classes to native and near-native speakers. Our traditional content-based curricula do not address this problem.
Guadalupe Valdés gives us even more to think about in designing our curricula in the nineties. In a recent article, she seeks to provide a “framework for discussing the possible role of the foreign language teaching profession in maintaining ethnic or immigrant languages in this country as part of a broader strategy designed to prepare American citizens to function in a multicultural world” (31). She points out that language professionals have done a poor job in this area.
Like Henning, I do not believe that we want or need to abandon our liberal arts goals in changing our curricular offerings to meet the needs and interests of a rapidly changing population of students. Our challenge lies in designing attractive courses that demand articulated levels of language competency. At the same time, these classes must have a humanistic focus, whether they are centered on literary, cultural, visual, or other documents. Above all, we need to be flexible in our thinking and open to diversifying our curricula.
This brings me to a second area of concern, the recruitment, credentialing, and evaluation of faculty members for interdisciplinary programs. Whom do you hire for a position in language-business or language-engineering programs? To my knowledge, there are no graduate schools helping students focus on nontraditional language teaching. Eastern Michigan University offers a master's degree in language and international business, as do some other schools—the University of South Carolina and the American Graduate School of International Management in Glendale, Arizona, for example. But I know of no language graduate schools offering PhDs with substantial coursework in this area. Indeed, I can imagine most graduate language departments considering this idea unappealing.
Most teachers of business language courses or other nontraditional language courses are largely self-taught. They have attended seminars and possibly completed business courses in France, Germany, Spain, or other countries. Many have added to their credentials by publishing in their areas of expertise. One young man we hired made himself attractive to programs such as L&IT by completing a traditional master's degree at Michigan State, an international business master's degree at Eastern Michigan, and a PhD degree with a specialization in culture at Penn State. Someone who has a PhD but who has also had a career in the business world would also make a good candidate. Of course, any faculty member can develop expertise in LSP areas, but it is important that they want to do so and that there are sufficient funds to pay for their studies.
Evaluating these faculty members can also present problems. Colleagues on peer evaluation committees, who are usually more established and thus more tradition-oriented, may not be familiar with applied language research or give it much credit. At Clemson, we insist that faculty members in all areas publish, but we do not limit their publishing to a particular field. So far, we have not had major problems with evaluation of L&IT faculty members, primarily because our faculty members have published in literature and pedagogy as well as in business languages or applied languages. But it is too easy to faculty reviewers to be indifferent to such endeavors and to give sufficient credit to publications in LSP areas.
In 1983, Robert J. DiPietro, James P. Lantolf, and Angela Labarca surveyed graduate language programs for information on the then-current graduate language curricula. They sought to answer such questions as:
What courses are taught? What specializations are offered to students about to become professionals in the field? How is the curriculum meeting the changing priorities of the nation? What developments should we anticipate and realistically expect to find? (365)
In summarizing past endeavors on this issue they noted that the MLA charged a committee to investigate foreign language departments in the early seventies. This committee recommended that “university language departments should undertake to incorporate programs of study other than literature into their offerings” (365; see also “Doctoral Training”). The authors also note the observation of H. H. Stern in the early eighties that “the university language departments [continued] to focus their attention on the teaching of literature and on research in literary criticism.” In 1983, they stated, “a perusal of almost any undergraduate catalog [revealed] a panoply of courses covering such areas as culture and civilization, language for special purposes, and linguistics.” They pointed out, however, that at the graduate level, the changes were “far less extensive.” Some master's degrees showed changes, “tracks leading to the MEd and the MAT degrees,” for example, but the authors stated categorically that the “doctorate level degree [remained] virtually impervious to change” (365). Without a new, systematic study of the curricula of doctoral and master's degree programs, we will not be able to judge the extent to which graduate programs now teach LSP, but my eight years of recruiting faculty members for the L&IT program have not led me to believe that outstanding and significant change has occurred. 1 DiPietro, Lantolf, and Labarca took graduate departments of languages to task for not focusing on linguistics and applied linguistics in their curricula. Although undoubtedly many programs have now incorporated more offerings in these areas, most have not recognized LSP as a field of specialization. DiPietro, Lantolf, and Labarca also pointed out that traditional programs (those whose curricula were “arranged according to century, genre, etc.”) may not contribute to the “cross-fertilization of ideas” that students need in today's “interdependent world” (371, 370).
It is time for some graduate programs to recognize that interdisciplinary language programs will create viable teaching positions for some of their students. Traditional graduate school curricula do not necessarily prepare students to teach in such programs. In the seventies and the early eighties, we began to recognize that we could not ignore the pedagogy of language teaching. In the nineties, we cannot ignore the interdisciplinary approaches that language departments will find useful in future decades.
External forces are shaping higher education and thus foreign language departments. For several years now, state and federal financial support for higher education has decreased, forcing colleges and universities to reexamine their priorities. Like large businesses, higher education bureaucracies will need to downsize, or “rightsize,” to use the jargon of the moment.
Universities and their departments will also need to become more flexible and less hierarchical. Technological advances and declining budgets are changing university bureaucracies. Online and dial-up student registration and electronic student records accessible by students, advisers, department heads, and registrar personnel are only two examples of how academic operations are changing. Because we need to have more work done by fewer people, other changes will occur.
A look at some emerging trends in technology and society indicates that significant changes in pedagogical practices are ahead. Future educators will need to consider many new issues: the changing needs, demographics, and learning styles of students; the use of distance teaching (employing CD-ROM, satellite, virtual reality, etc.) along with on-campus teaching; and the redesign and redefinition of curricula, to name only a few. At the same time, critics of higher education like David Pearce Snyder and Gregg Edwards make a compelling argument that since we are moving from a “labor-intensive” economy to an “information-intensive” economy, in the future we will need to educate “ all workers—at all levels and in all functions” (2). Snyder and Edwards call for institutions “to create a broadly literate and technically competent citizenry, rather than producing a lesser number of narrowly trained specialists” (8). 2 The authors are exaggerating when they say that
Within 10 years, it should be possible for the average college to electronically integrate its teaching, learning, staff development and research functions among its faculty, students, administrators, and experiential learning partners [business, government] to become a “virtual university,” with activities going on throughout the world and educational services lasting the duration of each students' learning lifetime. (6)
Still, it is clear that external pressures will continue to shape higher education.
What does this situation mean for specialized disciplines, particularly foreign languages? I believe that in the nineties we must focus on flexibility and diversity. We need flexible curricula to meet the needs of a diverse student population and flexible strategies to deliver instruction for undergraduate as well as graduate programs. While not all of us will be teaching with electronic media in the future, many of us probably will, for specific purposes. We should focus on creating language programs for diverse purposes, at both the undergraduate and the graduate level. In the past, this approach has meant adding courses in fields like business to traditional language departments. This strategy is, of course, one way to diversify the curriculum, but in the future university restructuring and strategic planning may require more and more schools to narrow their offerings. I'm not sure that it is feasible, or even desirable, for all schools to offer traditional literature and theoretical programs as well as support pedagogical, linguistic, or LSP emphases.
In many ways, we in academia are limited by disciplinary mindsets. We have become accustomed to, even entrenched behind, the boundaries of our disciplines. In our graduate schools we are primarily focused on literature, theory, and linguistics, and secondarily on pedagogy. While we certainly want to and should preserve the engaging and challenging study of literature, we also need to expand our offerings and redefine what a language degree, undergraduate and graduate, means in the changing environment of the twenty-first century. Our colleagues across campus in business, engineering, and other professional fields have begun to recognize that we now live in a global community. As they begin to internationalize their curricula, they are turning to us, the international experts, for help. They are offering us opportunities to expand our teaching mission, but if we do not respond to their requests, they will look elsewhere. I would hope that we would want to help educate, in the broadest sense, future engineers, architects, scientists, and businessmen and -women as well as our own students.
At Clemson we understand the value of having a language-business interdisciplinary program housed in the Department of Languages. We do not expect our students to graduate with the same training as regular business majors, because they will not have done the same extensive coursework in management, marketing, finance, accounting, and so on. But they will have other qualifications that have proved attractive to employers. Certainly, a degree of competency in a foreign language is valued in business today, but sensitivity to cultural differences is also important to firms beginning to export their products. I also hope our students graduate with a strong understanding of the liberal arts. No doubt they will get more training in business practices on the job. But their humanities background will help them become effective managers, as many CEOs have confirmed. Finally, I hope programs like ours help produce graduates with interdisciplinary backgrounds that will enable them to understand and resolve some of the complex international problems facing us in the twenty-first century.
The author is Associate Professor of German and Head of the Department of Languages at Clemson University. This article is based on her presentation at ADFL Seminar East, 10–12 June 1993, in Montreal, Canada.
1 In a recent survey of dissertation topics, Benseler and Lannoch divide the dissertation titles into the following categories: African languages and literatures; Asian languages and literatures; Celtic languages and literatures; classics; comparative literature; foreign-second language acquisition and teaching; French language and literature; Germanic languages and literatures; Italian language and literature; theoretical linguistics; Near and Middle Eastern languages and literatures; Portuguese language and literature; Scandinavian languages and literatures; Slavic languages and literatures; and Spanish language and literature.
2 Address inquiries about this unpublished paper to David Pearce Snyder, Snyder Family Enterprises, 8628 Garfield St., Bethesda, MD 20817-6704, or Gregg Edwards, Director, Academy for Advanced and Strategic Studies, 1647 Lamont St., NW, Washington, DC 20010-2796.
Benseler, David P., and Martha Calvert Lannoch. “Doctoral Degrees Granted in Foreign Languages in the United States: 1992.” Modern Language Journal 77 (1993): 340–57.
DiPietro, Robert J., James P. Lantolf, and Angela Labarca. “The Graduate Foreign Language Curriculum.” Modern Language Journal 67 (1983): 365–73.
“Doctoral Training for the Expanded Undergraduate Curriculum: Resolutions of the 1975 ADFL Summer Seminar.” ADFL Bulletin 7.1 (1975): 17–20. [Show Article]
Henning, Sylvie Debevec. “The Integration of Language, Literature, and Culture: Goals and Curricular Design.” ADFL Bulletin 24.2 (1993): 51–55. [Show Article]
Rivers, Wilga M. “A New Curriculum for New Purposes.” Foreign Language Annals 18 (1985): 37–43.
Snyder, David Pearce, and Gregg Edwards. “It's Time to Reinvent Higher Education: A Strategic Assessment.” Unpublished paper. 1993.
Uber Grosse, Christine, and Geoffrey M. Voght. “The Evolution of Languages for Specific Purposes in the United States.” Modern Language Journal 75 (1991): 181–95.
Valdés, Guadalupe. “The Role of the Foreign Language Teaching Profession in Maintaining Non-English Languages in the United States.” Languages for a Multicultural World in Transition. Ed. Heidi Byrnes. Lincolnwood: Natl. Textbook, 1992. 29–71.
© 1994 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
|
|---|
|
|
|
