27, no. 2 (Winter 1996): 1-2
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
No Works Cited |
|
From the Editor
Elizabeth B. Welles
THE ARTICLES in this issue of the ADFL Bulletin demonstrate the great variety of departmental and institutional concerns that have been percolating through the field of foreign language study for a long time or at least for the twenty-six years that ADFL has been publishing the Bulletin. But the authors view with fresh eyes such perennials as language enrollments and the intermediate transitional course, putting forth new interpretations and suggesting innovative approaches. I first draw your attention to Bettina Huber's comprehensive and detailed analysis of the five enrollment surveys conducted by the MLA Office of Research from 1970 to 1990 (see ADFL Bulletin 23.2 [1992] for a report on the latest survey). We get more requests for information on enrollments than on any other topic because the data are crucial to a range of considerations, from funding decisions to institutional planning to book publishing. The creation of a database of information on institutional characteristics and enrollment patterns now permits a more systematic tracking of trends and a greater understanding of what these trends mean. Huber shows that enrollments are influenced by institutional type and size, the kinds of departments in which languages are housed, geographical location, and the presence or absence of a language requirement. This kind of information can be used for leverage. For example, armed with facts and figures showing that languages taught under the umbrella of a larger unit, such as humanities, may have a difficult time surviving and growing, a faculty member can argue more effectively for maintaining a separate department in the face of threatened reductions. Or the report can be used to maintain or increase already successful programs at very large universities, where strong institutional structure and support can be credited for the large array of languages, high enrollments, and greater growth in registrations than at other types of institutions.
Other findings shed new light on the landscape of college-level foreign language teaching. I mention only the two that seem the most striking. First, in small four-year baccalaureate colleges, a larger proportion of the student body study foreign languages than in other kinds of institutions. It appears that in small colleges, where the focus is exclusively on undergraduate education and where liberal arts define the educational mission, languages are central to the curriculum and are likely to attract and keep more students. Furthermore, these colleges, because of their educational philosophy, often have individual language departments and language requirements for graduation, both of which were found to increase enrollments. Second, among two-year colleges, those in the Pacific Coast states (mostly California) offer the most languages, have the largest share of foreign language enrollments (44%), and experienced the greatest growth in foreign language enrollments (23% in smaller colleges and 161% in large colleges). Huber notes that this unusual emphasis on foreign language instruction is probably due in part to the large number of students who transfer into four-year state institutions with language requirements for entering students. Other readers will find other facts revelatory in this rich array of data; particularly important for our ADFL constituency, the report establishes that institutional support and departmental structures matter and that these factors influence the shape and success of foreign language study.
Most of the rest of the papers in this issue emerged from the 1995 ADFL seminar programs, which comprised a wonderful conglomerate of topics. We are pleased to have in this issue three articles on the teaching of Chinese, two of which resulted from the emphasis on Asian languages at Seminar West in Oregon. While foreign language teaching. by its very “foreignness,” often occupies the margins of a college curriculum, less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) are likely to be isolated even from the mainstream of the foreign language enterprise. Learning about the challenges of teaching LCTLs is illuminating to those of us who teach commonly taught Western languages and vice versa. Seminar evaluations showed this experiment to be worthwhile, and we intend to continue with it in future years. We hope that by focusing on groups of LCTLs—probably those with large numbers of speakers and the largest enrollments—we can show chairs and other administrators in those departments that they have a place in the ADFL seminars, and we can help them avoid isolation.
Jerry Norman gives us an insightful history of the changes in Chinese language and its teaching in this country. The good news, he says, is that there is one standard Chinese language and probably not much need to learn dialects, while the bad news is that to be literate in Chinese the student needs to learn about 3,500 characters. Jiaying Howard discusses the teaching of Chinese in the general social and political context of foreign language education. Her essay points out the fallacy of assuming that the pedagogical approaches used in the more commonly taught languages are appropriate in Chinese as well. Jonathan Pease offers a case study of teaching Chinese at Portland State University, a large urban institution, and describes the difficulties of teaching a very diverse student body with many different levels of preparation and aptitudes. All three authors mention the paucity of good texts and other teaching materials and the need to overcome the vast differences between American and Chinese cultures. Norman's observation at the end of his essay suggests an important similarity between commonly and less commonly taught languages: “I also hope that a few people will view the learning of Chinese as an opportunity to learn more about themselves, even if they have no Chinese ancestors…. I believe that, beyond the many practical considerations, the study of Chinese might help a lot of Americans expand their intellectual horizons, and as they develop a better understanding of China, they may also begin to see their own culture in a clearer light.”
Engendering much seminar discussion were the papers dealing with the limbo of intermediate-level language courses that try to bridge the ever-troubling divide between lower-level, skill-getting language courses and upper-level, skill-using content courses. Richard Jurasek compared curricula covering this stretch of the journey toward competency to the waiting room of a Greyhound bus terminal, a space to be left as soon as possible, but one where the routes to the destination are only obscurely marked. As transitions or passages, intermediate courses are, he points out, often conceived “as learning events on the way to something else,” the something else being the real texts and the real world as opposed to the comfort of the textbook, annotated readings, and prepared videos. And within this gap he finds yet another: the difference between student and teacher goals. Students want to learn a language to communicate with the speakers of that language, while teachers want to teach students something about its literature and culture. Because these courses are crucial—they either attract students to or repel them from further study—Jurasek proposes an intermediate program that serves the interests of both the students and the teacher, covering a range of compelling subject matter to engage students in using the language for intellectual inquiry and exploration.
Erlinda Gonzales-Berry furthers this line of thinking with the example of the new fifth-semester course at the University of New Mexico that has replaced the grammar and composition course, the required gateway (or obstacle) to the foreign language major. Entitled Topics in Hispanic Culture, the course emphasizes content and fosters the development of communicative skills through the study of an intellectually challenging syllabus on culture; individual teachers decide what topics they will teach. George Gutsche points out that the idea of the transitional course is not easily applicable to Russian because the teaching of Russian is characterized by a diversity of methods and materials that becomes more pronounced at more advanced levels. Thus the transition is usually achieved not through a single course but rather through specialized courses on different tracks such as grammar, composition, oral skill, and the reading of various texts. Technology is particularly useful in Russian because materials are hard to come by, students need more extensive exposure and practice than students in the more commonly taught languages do to reach equivalent levels, and instruction needs to be more individualized, particularly for advanced students. A final note: you, our members, have indicated such a pressing need for information about intermediate-level language learning that we have initiated a new service: we are collecting bridge course syllabi, which we will distribute on request for five dollars as soon as enough are available (please send us yours).
Three other enlightening essays in this issue deal with challenges facing the department of foreign languages now and in the future. Steve Loughrin-Sacco and Michael Pincus examine how to deal with financial constraints and their consequences. Pincus describes strategies for coping with budget reductions: chairs should be sure their departments maintain institutional priorities in deciding what kinds of courses to cut and should think of what is absolutely necessary to maintain the quality and vitality of their programs. Loughrin-Sacco urges the chair to take on the new roles of fund-raiser, program developer, and entrepreneur. While he recognizes that many faculty members became college teachers to avoid an entrepreneurial career, he demonstrates with examples from his experience how this approach can benefit a department. While Jörg Roche did not enter the fray of the seminars, his arguments for having a departmental language acquisition specialist to oversee language classes would have fit well there. He advocates a rigorous plan for the interdisciplinary training of such a specialist that takes advantage of new knowledge concerning psycho- and sociolinguistics, intercultural communication, and instructional methodologies. With such professionalization, language instruction can improve not only the level of student competency but also the prestige of the language teacher.
The topics represented here cover as wide a territory as one could hope to find in the foreign language teaching enterprise, and serve as evidence of the intense and creative activity going on in all parts of the field. Yet these essays are held together by a common thread, the desire to know more about foreign language teaching and to make it better—more effective, more interesting, and more encompassing. While the field has been doing a good job of delivering foreign language instruction (Huber's figures show enrollments have been going up in relation to the size of the student population), I believe it is a sign of health that the professionals in the field are willing to look for and are finding ways to improve it.
© 1996 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 27, no. 2 (Winter 1996): 1-2 |
|
|---|
|
|
|
|
No Works Cited |
|
