27, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 11-12
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Foreign Language Instructors at Two-Year Institutions
Yanick V. Daniel
THOUGH my topic involves the community college, it also concerns the four-year institutions, the MA institutions, and the PhD institutions, because they are solution to our problem: finding qualified instructors with the ability to motivate students to learn a foreign language. Community colleges serve the segments of the population that are in dire need of foreign language education, especially nontraditional learners such as students who take two years of courses at community colleges before transferring to four-year institutions; and those who need foreign language proficiency for their professional, technical, or vocational careers. They also serve adult part-time learners who want to improve their foreign language abilities for personal reasons.
Broward Community College in Florida offers ESL, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and American Sign Language courses to over two thousand students a year. Foreign language courses are integral to the curriculum at Broward, especially since they fulfill the general-education requirements for both the AA and the AS degrees. The State of Florida mandated in 1989 that students entering Florida state universities must pass a proficiency test, have completed two years of high school foreign language study or eight to ten credit-hours of one foreign language at the community college level. Florida universities encourage AA students to complete their four-year college language requirements at the community college. First-year foreign language students register for one section of a beginning language course that meets Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; Tuesdays and Thursdays; or one night a week. Or they may attend Weekend College, which comprises two and a half hours of language instruction a week. Class size varies between twenty-five and thirty students. Eight credits (two semesters) of foreign language course work is required, but this amount of study is sufficient only to help students attain survival-level proficiency and gain insights into the culture. Enrollment drops after the first year of language study; few students get to the second-year, or advanced, level. We encourage students to take at least the third semester, or intermediate level one, to fulfill exit language requirement for the bachelor's degree. The advanced courses only permit students to produced the basic skills and introduce them to the literature and culture of a country.
To teach at a community college in Florida, a faculty member must hold a master's degree with eighteen credits in his or her specialization. To teach foreign languages, the person must almost always be fluent in two languages, have at least three years of teaching experience at a community college, and have good references and letters of recommendation. All faculty members are required to teach five classes a semester and two classes in the summer semester;no research is required. The faculty member receives tenure at the department head's recommendation after three years of successful teaching recognized in student evaluations and classroom visitations. Foreign language positions rarely become available; in four years as department head, I have hired only one full-time faculty member and five adjuncts in modern foreign languages. Most faculty members in the department have been there for at least two decades.
In the hiring procedure, an appointed committee composed mostly of language instructors screens the applicants, selecting approximately eight candidates who are considered to be the qualified. The committee then rigorously questions them on their understanding of the teaching of their discipline. When the applicants are invited for interviews, they are warned of what they will be asked to do and told that the request will be directly connected to the work they will do if hired. This focus on teaching in the interview is relatively new. A few years ago, when I was interviewed for a position as a full-time French instructor, the committee members asked me very few questions about pedagogy. They were instead greatly concerned with my knowledge of the subject are; they asked about grammar structures, influential authors throughout French literature, and French culture. They were from the old school, which believed that the goal of a language program was to teach a national literature and its historical linguistic development.
Most foreign languages faculty members teach levels one and two, which focuses on languages and culture. But in their own studies most if not all of them took principally literature course and just one course on culture and civilization. The modern foreign language faculty members whom I have spoken with truly believe they received little preparation for the new challenges of the community college language classroom. They needed high-quality training in pedagogy. Most of their preparation programs fell within the conventional model, which consists of three components: the study of the language and its literature and civilization; courses in general education; and a language-teaching methods course, followed by student teaching.
I recently interviewed four senior faculty members in the language department to find out if they felt their professional training prepared them to teach at a community college. They said they would have preferred training and special course work that directly prepared them to teach language courses or sequences of language courses. In particular, they would have welcomed learning to do the following:
- involve students in oral fluency activities;
- assess and test second-language skills;
- evaluate and design second-language texts;
- acquire a useful knowledge base for critiquing existing materials;
- review textbooks and assist in their selection and development;
- design syllabi and write materials and teaching units;
- place students in appropriate levels (which is the main problem we face at community colleges);
- use videos, computers, and other technologies in teaching foreign languages; and
- motivate students to learn foreign languages.
They felt that the course work should include activities geared toward creating and evaluating foreign language curricula.
Teacher training poses serious problems at all levels. Researchers find that few, if any, courses offered within the graduate foreign language programs are designed to train. Foreign language departments throughout the United States offer few graduate courses in pedagogy and methodology; most emphasize literature and only a small number grant master's degrees in teaching, let alone doctorates in foreign language education. It is reported that seventy-three percent of course work in foreign language graduate programs is in literature and literary criticism, twelve percent in linguistics, and a mere three percent in pedagogy (Di Pietro, Lantolf, and Labarca 366). The foreign language education curriculum should combine the theory and the practice of language learning and teaching; future teachers need to see a clear relation between the two. Method courses must deal thoroughly with classroom-related matters. Prospective teachers must assimilate an enormous body of theoretical and practical knowledge.
What these teachers feel is needed is a two-semester sequence in methods so that students can cover all the basic elements of language instruction in more than a hasty and superficial manner. Prospective teachers must become familiar with the technologies that have been introduced in the past decade, including computer-assisted instruction and interactive video programs, and they must acquire hands-on experience with some of the software. I would also recommended that graduate curriculum include a period of study, possibly an entire academic year, in one of the countries of the target language. That experience would give prospective teachers an excellent opportunity to master the language and interact with the people of that country.
As job candidates, the language faculty members in community colleges had little pedagogical background. Many of them did not have a genuine interest in the elementary and intermediate language courses they were hired to teach; they simply took the first stable job they could find. Some often dream about moving on and teaching at the university, where the emphasis is on research and where they would teach at least two literature courses a semester. Others don't dream about going anywhere. They content themselves with teaching basic-level courses with no hope of ever offering an advanced-level course in literature, which was after all what they were prepared to teach. Unfortunately, these instructors are the eones who are endangering foreign language programs at the beginning level, where good teaching can influence students to continue their language study.
The author is Associate Professor of French and head of the Department of Communications at Broward Community College, North Campus, Florida. This article is based on her presentation at ADFL Seminar East. 15–17 June 1995, in Charleston, South Carolina.
Work Cited
Di Pietro, Robert, James P. Lantolf, and Angela Labarca. “The Graduate Foreign Language Curriculum.” Modern Language Journal 67 (1983):365–73.
© 1996 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 27, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 11-12 |
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