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AT THE end of an intense debate during one of our recent summer seminars, an excited participant queried, “Why doesn't ADFL or MLA do something about this problem?”; later, a first-time participant asked me, “What do you really do?” The first kind of comment might be a good prod to the ADFL or the MLA to initiate a project related to the associations' aims—to promote scholarship and teaching in modern languages by providing forums for discussion and for the dissemination of information. But when I answered the second question—in which I took “you” to mean the MLA's Office of Foreign Language Programs and the ADFL—I heard myself explaining a series of responsibilities, functions, and structures that begged a simple definition. It occurred to me that the members of the MLA and of the ADFL, and they are not necessarily the same people, might like to know what efforts their associations have undertaken regarding foreign language education and the profession as a whole. Often mentioned piecemeal in the MLA Newsletter and the ADFL Updates section of the Bulletin , these activities, in the aggregate, provide a picture of the concerns facing the profession and a map of the connections among these concerns.
The principal responsibility of the Office of Foreign Language Programs is running the ADFL, an autonomous organization supported by the facilities and the budget of the MLA. As readers of this journal know, it is an association for departments (unlike the MLA, whose members are individual scholars) that concentrates on matters of language program administration; its principal activities are the two summer seminars and the publication of the ADFL Bulletin. There are about 1,000 departmental members. In any year about 250 chairs are actively involved in the association; that is, they attend the seminars and vote to elect the nine-member Executive Committee. Within the MLA, foreign language scholars account for about a third of the more than 30,000 members. The Office of Foreign Language Programs shares resources equally with the Office of English Programs and has equal representation on committees and on the MLA's governing body, the Executive Council. To foster more active participation of the foreign language community within the MLA and develop projects to encourage foreign language teaching nationwide, the council appointed the eight-member Advisory Committee on Foreign Languages and Literatures (ACFLL) in 1990.
As director of the ADFL and the Office of Foreign Language Programs I act as the liaison from the MLA headquarters to the ADFL Executive Committee and the ACFLL. Working closely with David Goldberg, the associate director, I set up their meetings and help implement their ideas. For example, the ADFL Executive Committee decides on the theme and suggests session topics and speakers for the two summer seminars; we in the programs office plan the meetings, arrange for the sites, and discuss with the speakers the themes and issues that the committee hopes to see addressed. We also organize sessions for the MLA convention and other meetings, write grant proposals, and attend conferences of other organizations like the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), and with the Office of English Programs we oversee the MLA Job Information Service. I represent the MLA and the ADFL on the Joint National Committee on Languages—National Council on Languages and International Studies, the advocacy group for foreign language education in Washington; I also serve as a consultant for language departments and funded projects, for example, JALEX, an exchange program for Japanese high school teachers. David and I also answer countless phone calls from foreign language professionals or members of the public seeking information about diverse subjects, from the status of sign language in fulfilling language requirements to enrollments in Serbian and Croatian. And, of course, I edit the Bulletin. In short, what I do is try to keep informed and facilitate talk about the field of foreign language teaching, higher education, and how they work together.
The functions of the Office of Foreign Language Programs and the ADFL often overlap since they involve roughly the same issues and many of the same people, but there is a difference between the ADFL and MLA constituencies. The MLA membership includes foreign language professionals of every stripe; teachers and scholars of language, linguistics, literature, culture, pedagogy, film studies, and gender studies, of many countries and periods. Although a respectable number are not affiliated with academic institutions, most teach in higher education. Their duties usually entail a minimal involvement in the governance of the department. However, when faculty members become chairs, whatever their research interests, they must learn about many aspects of the profession that they had always left to someone else: program design, personnel, professional development, faculty rewards, and the allocation of resources. They must promote foreign language teaching on campus and in their communities. They have to be able to take advantage of the interests and strengths of faculty members to produce educationally rigorous and appealing programs in the midst of many different pressures. And today the pressures come not only from institutional administrators, faculty members, and students but also from external forces that are driving the culture of academe and the way chairs and their faculty members need to act.
The issues departments face on campus are reflected in the programs of the ADFL Seminars. In planning this last summer's seminars, the Executive Committee, concerned about the changing academic landscape, chose to focus on changes that affected departments' capacity to offer sound foreign language programs, and on how chairs could act as campus leaders by meeting today's challenges. The specific external pressures it recognized had to do with the calls for accountability from legislators, trustees, alumni, and parents; reductions in funding; the loss of tenure-track positions and increased reliance on part-time instructors; the development of language centers; new student audiences; and exploding enrollments in Spanish. At the seminars, two of these categories—the economic squeeze, particularly as it affected hiring, and the rapid growth in Spanish—emerged as the most prominent forces behind many curricular and institutional exigencies and thus captured much of the attention.
I look first at the chair's perspectives on the relation of the traditional structure of foreign language teaching to economic pressures. In several sessions and discussion groups, speakers touched on various points exemplified in the following situation: Upper-level literature classes are usually small and taught by full or associate professors, the most expensive faculty members, while lower-level classes have larger enrollments and are taught by the lowest-ranking and thus cheapest members. Fiscally constrained administrators looking for ways to save money naturally look at the small courses and their highly paid faculty members and decide not to keep those tenure-track lines after retirements. Instead they turn to part-time instructors who produce the greatest number of full-time equivalents for the money. In fact, figures from the National Center for Education Statistics show that the percentage of non-tenure-track faculty members has risen from around 35% in the 1980s to 41% in 1992–93. Colleagues attending the seminars pointed out that reliance on part-time or adjunct faculty members who receive minimal pay and have little time to invest in the department can jeopardize the quality and continuity of a program even if these instructors are highly skilled. They also noted that the expansion of Spanish enrollments, by increasing the number and size of introductory language courses, has contributed significantly to this trend toward quick-fix staffing with part-time help. The salaries, benefits, and conditions for non-tenure-track faculty seemed to vary enormously among the institutions represented at the seminars.
The seminar focused on two parts of the dilemma: the treatment of part-timers and better deployment of full-time faculty members. One idea to improve conditions of part-timers was to merge several part-time slots into one full-time non-tenure-track but renewable position. However, while some institutions have regular positions of this sort, some participants said their administrations would not allow such appointments because the practice might appear to constitute de facto tenure as defined by the guidelines of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and might lead to AAUP censure. The ADFL Executive Committee has been gathering information about different kinds of one-year and part-time contracts, about the use of the AAUP guidelines, and about salaries and benefits. It aims to arrive at a statement of good practice, including recommendations for a reasonable ratio of part-time to full-time faculty members, and models for different kinds of contracts. Another suggestion from the seminar participants was to make use of all full-time department members, if not to teach language and introductory literature and culture courses, then at least to teach in the undergraduate program. Such arrangements were thought to be particularly crucial in departments of German and French, where enrollments are not increasing and where faculty lines have been lost. Ideally, full-time faculty members would provide continuity and coherence in the curriculum, produce a stronger program, and attract more students to the department. Of course, the chair may not find it easy to convince senior faculty members who have long taught only small advanced literature courses to revise their sights. But at this point, the full utilization of regular faculty members is a matter of departmental survival and protection of future jobs. You may be interested to know that the MLA's Offices of English and Foreign Language Programs are working with the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Association of University Professors, and the Council of Graduate Schools to develop a conference where the humanities and science disciplines would begin a discussion of the situation of non-tenure-track faculty members, in particular the increased reliance on part-time instructors.
About one-third of the 1996 Summer Seminar registrants took part in an extra Sunday-morning session on the implications of enrollments in Spanish. Colleagues agreed that the increase was a major issue facing the field and that, while enrollments in Spanish have been growing steadily (112% from 1960 to 1980 and 46% from 1968 to 1990) the phenomenon did not cause concern until other language departments began to lose students at an alarming rate. Participants discussed the implications for the curriculum (the introductory course, heritage speakers), administration (staffing, the allocation of resources), and the diversity of language offerings. The group tried to describe problems and concerns, to raise questions about them, and to suggest solutions. The spirit of generosity and cooperation was striking. Instead of engaging in destructive turf battles, those in Spanish expressed concern about the diminishing number of faculty lines in other languages, particularly French and German, and suggested that it was up to Spanish programs themselves, in some cases, to protect threatened language programs. The sense of the meeting was that we were only at the beginning of a serious system-wide attempt to deal with the problem. The ADFL is considering writing a policy statement on enrollment patterns, and both the executive committee and the ACFLL will discuss at their fall meetings further actions the ADFL and the MLA might take. Meanwhile, we have invited a forum of commentary on this topic for the Winter 1996 ADFL Bulletin, to be published at the same time as the 1995–96 MLA enrollment survey. I invite your statements to continue this discussion on your experiences, perspectives, and recommendations (see p. 6).
All these issues—the loss of tenure lines, the increase in part-time faculty members, and changing enrollment patterns—impinge on the number of teaching positions available. Of particular concern to the MLA is the plight of job seekers in the face of a shrinking market in colleges and universities. The MLA Executive Council established the Committee on Professional Employment to assess factors influencing the employment of modern language PhDs and to identify strategies and projects that will improve professional opportunities. While the problem of too few jobs for too many qualified people cannot easily be solved, the committee can at least focus the profession's attention on the situation in constructive ways. As you all know, the MLA Job Information Service, which produces the Job Information List, has also distributed, since 1985, A Career Guide for PhDs and PhD Candidates in English and Foreign Languages for job seekers and search committees. Now under revision by the Offices of English and Foreign Language Programs, the new MLA Guide to the Job Search has profited from advice from both ADFL and the ACFLL. It will appear late this year and features expanded sections on alternative careers and on teaching in community colleges as well as essays on the national economic context of the academic job market and professional labor.
Within the association there are several other important developments about the promotion of language teaching that concern you. At its May meeting, the Executive Council of the MLA voted to endorse Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Preparing for the Twenty-First Century. Funded by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education and the National Endowment for the Humanities and developed under the auspices of ACTFL and the American Associations of Teachers of French, German, and Spanish and Portuguese, this document provides guidelines for the development of foreign language curricula in grades K-12. Both the ACFLL and the ADFL Executive Committee, along with members of the MLA council, were involved with the review of the project while it was in process. In a letter to the council, the Advisory Committee urged that the MLA endorse the standards because they describe a set of serious and academically based criteria on which to base foreign language education. Further, the committee thought explicit field-wide solidarity could contribute to the articulation of language curricula between college programs and K-12 education and to better coordination of teacher education. The committee believed the standards could be used to convince the public of the need to begin language study early, thus helping place the study of foreign languages at the center of the precollegiate curriculum and helping prepare students better for college-level coursework.
Phyllis Franklin, the executive director of the MLA, in a letter to June Phillips, the chair of the task force that oversaw the development of the standards, recognizes the difficulty of creating the document and the importance of the achievement. She notes that our reviewers agreed the standards call for “higher levels of achievement in language learning than have been required of students in the past” and that “the emphasis on extended sequences of language learning” is particularly significant. It is difficult to assess what effect, if any, the MLA's endorsement of the standards will have, but the endorsement makes clear that the association supports the collaborative effort of foreign language educators at all levels and that it recognizes the need for language teaching of the highest quality. The endorsement is especially important because the MLA represents such a large and diverse group of language educators. The standards were marked by exceptional collaboration among foreign language associations and language teachers at all levels, and there is no reason to doubt that this collaboration can be reproduced in other projects.
Two MLA initiatives recognize the accomplishments and developing research in the field of language teaching. The first is a new book series, Teaching Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, intended to be a significant new venue for the presentation, discussion, and integration of the multiple facets of language teaching and learning and their institutional settings. It is meant to help practitioners at both the postsecondary and secondary levels come to grips with new challenges by examining the ways different languages, literatures, and cultures intersect in theory, research, curricula, and program design. The editorial committee—consisting of Guadalupe Valdés (chair), Michael Holquist, Sumie Jones, Claire Kramsch, and Yvonne Ozzello—has met and is establishing guidelines that it hopes will foster cross-specialty dialogue among members of the profession engaged in what have been considered to be vastly different areas of endeavor. Look for the series guidelines in the MLA Newsletter and the Bulletin in the near future, but if you have a proposal for a book on language, literature, and culture, do not hesitate to send it now. The second initiative involves PMLA. The ACFLL and the ADFL Executive Committee have for a long time echoed the feeling of their constituencies that PMLA could better represent the foreign language field's interests. I'm pleased to say that the Executive Council took the ACFLL's suggestion to make a permanent slot on the PMLA Advisory Committee for a specialist in applied linguistics and foreign language teaching. The position will be occupied by Jean-Jacques Thomas, a specialist in linguistics and the former chair of French at Duke. Meanwhile, the MLA Texts and Translations series continues to publish difficult-to-find but teachable works in both the original languages and English. If you need the series guidelines, get in touch with Martha Evans, the director of MLA Book Publications.
The Office of Foreign Language Programs, with the advice of the Executive Committee and the ACFLL, has turned its attention to the development of a proposal to further articulation, especially between the high school and college levels. Working with a coalition of nineteen other foreign language associations, the office will compile an annotated registry of all articulation projects we can locate. The aim is to give all those involved in such activities access to one another's experience and to provide basic information for those just starting such efforts. The proposed project builds on our previous articulation project, which was the focus of the Spring 1995 special issue of the ADFL Bulletin, and will also include a working conference and a mentoring component.
While articulation between high school and college programs is one of the most crucial prerequisites for creating continuous sequences of language learning, the circle is not complete without attention to the preparation of teachers, which is the subject of another MLA project funded by the NEH. In keeping with the move toward school reform and the introduction of standards into pre-collegiate education, the project aims to make the disciplinary responsibility for teacher preparation more explicit and the necessary connections with teacher educators and the schools more open. A team of six English and foreign language departments has met twice in an effort to identify the essential elements of such programs in the light of Goals 2000. The teams, consisting of teacher educators, high school teachers, and department members, had a safe space in which to air their goals and assumptions, discuss departmental issues, and learn about the Standards for Language Learning. Differences and common ground between the disciplinary departments and schools of education were brought out as participants discussed what teachers actually need to know.
And last but not least the ADFL is particularly pleased to announce that the second Award for Distinguished Service to the Profession, which honors eminent scholar-teachers for exceptional contributions to the field of foreign languages and literatures at the postsecondary level, will be presented to Guadalupe Valdés for her pioneering work on bilingualism and heritage learning in Spanish. Valdés is known for her respect for regional variants of Spanish and her pathbreaking development of new forms of pedagogy that enable heritage speakers to achieve literacy in Spanish and to strengthen dormant native-language skills. She has also sought tirelessly and effectively, through publication and public speaking, to bring the needs of heritage speakers to the attention of the profession. As a member of the task force on the Standards for Language Learning, she put heritage learners on the national foreign language curriculum. As an author and a teacher, she has been a mentor to many professionals who have become leading figures in teaching and research in Spanish and linguistics. A persistent advocate, dedicated researcher, and inspiring teacher, Valdés has changed the way the field regards speakers of all heritage languages. The award will be officially presented at a session in her honor at this year's MLA convention in Washington, DC.
The previous distinguished service award was presented to Dorothy James, who consented to be the keynote speaker at Summer Seminar West in San Diego this year. James made plain that she thinks our greatest weapon for defending the place of foreign language study at the heart of American education is collaboration. We need to concentrate on coordinated language, literature, and culture programs, including practical training where desirable, in order to retain the large numbers of students who take introductory language courses. We need to connect with high school programs and graduate schools so that long sequences of language learning can really make students literate in another culture. Language courses, taught by full-time faculty members, should be considered central to the liberal arts curriculum. I hope what I have written here shows that I agree with her and that the dual personalities of the ADFL and the Office of Foreign Language Programs are ideally suited to connect the various constituencies and achieve some of these goals.
Brod, Richard, and Bettina J. Huber. “Foreign Language Enrollments in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 1990.” ADFL Bulletin 23.3 (1992): 6–10. [Show Article]
National Center for Education Statistics. Digest of Education Statistics 1996. Washington: GPO, forthcoming.
© 1996 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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