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FOREIGN language teachers are aware by now of the nationwide movement to implement a relatively new type of curricular design: languages across the curriculum. 1 The concept is related to other movements in language education, including content-based instruction in foreign language departments and language for special purposes (such as business French). 2 Its defining feature is the use of a second language in disciplinary settings outside the foreign language department. Selected courses ordinarily taught in English in fields as diverse as art history, Latin American politics, anthropology, and philosophy are taught entirely or partly in another language.
The LAC movement has encountered some skepticism. Those who hear of it for the first time may dismiss it as a copycat sequel to writing across the curriculum and other across-the-curriculum movements. Within and without the foreign language profession, doubters fear that LAC students will fall between two stools: they will learn less as they stumble through their courses with a language handicap, and, lacking systematic coaching and correction on grammar and usage by a professional language teacher, they will mangle whatever foreign language they are attempting to use. 3 Against such criticism, those who have experimented with methods of LAC have testified eloquently to its benefits for all involved, its workability, and its contribution to revitalizing curriculum and teaching. 4 Administrators and policy leaders have also taken an interest in LAC or related developments as a promising strategy for genuine internationalizing of the curriculum (Moline; Weidner; Lambert).
In this essay I draw on what I have learned (mostly at second hand, to be sure) about the development of a considerable variety of LAC efforts supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Most recently I have had a unique vantage point as program officer for a national NEH-supported project, Next Steps: A Project to Strengthen Foreign Languages across the Curriculum. The American Council on Education (ACE) undertook the project to focus on the strengths and weaknesses of existing LAC programs and give new direction to program development in the field. The ACE had conducted two earlier projects (also supported by the NEH Division of Education), both titled Spreading the Word, in which mentor institutions provided assistance to others in strengthening foreign language education.
My intention here is to offer an outsider's perspective: I have listened a great deal to discussions about LAC within the foreign language teaching profession, but my disciplinary background is in history (although I have some adjunct teaching experience in French). As a program officer, I consider the LAC movement a significant contribution to improving undergraduate education. As a historian, I also see a need to explain the values of LAC more effectively outside the foreign language community—to historians in particular, so that they will join with their foreign language colleagues in devising a new generation of LAC courses, programs, and approaches.
The most critical issues facing the movement may be summed up in the following questions:
These questions do not cover all the symmetries and reciprocities of LAC instruction—my aim here is to focus on the issues that are more problematic or less fully discussed elsewhere. What the LAC movement means for teachers of foreign languages is not treated as a distinct question; it is bound up with the others.
If students do not benefit, LAC is not worth doing. In particular, if LAC hampers effective foreign language teaching, it is not a wise investment of institutional resources. In this section I focus particularly on the foreign language perspective. Later I discuss the implications for others fields from the point of view of instructors in other departments.
Many LAC practitioners follow the lead of their colleagues at Saint Olaf College in abjuring any claim that LAC advances the student's language capability. They contend instead that LAC enhances teaching in disciplines outside departments of foreign languages and literatures. Students derive expanded insight through reading about the subject matter, hearing it discussed, talking about it, and writing about it in the second language. Such benefits have indeed been the draw for students and faculty members outside foreign languages. It is no accident, for example, that the LAC program at the University of Minnesota began as an expansion of a course in international studies focused on the foreign press (Klee and Metcalf). For an example of enriched perspectives, take any issue of the Puerto Rican newspaper El nuevo dia. On 11 March 1996, while English language newspapers in the United States reported Clinton's decertification of Colombia's fight against the drug traffic, articles in the Spanish language daily reported criticism of the move, particularly in the context of actions at the eighth regional summit of the Grupo Andino at Trujillo, Peru, to formalize the relation among the countries of the Andes in the new Communidad Andina. The same paper also published extensive comment on the recent election in Spain, hardly noted in most United States newspapers.
Even according to the minimalist Saint Olaf rationale, LAC programs benefit language teachers and students indirectly. The varied opportunities for language use give beginning and intermediate students new reasons to apply themselves to language study. What language teachers learn meanwhile by working with colleagues in various disciplines enlarges their cultural repertoire for teaching at all levels. And they can anticipate in beginning classes how their students may eventually want to use languages in numerous academic settings.
There is relatively little research in the fields of language acquisition and “peda-linguistics” on how students may or may not learn language in a variety of LAC environments. Such research is one component of the ACE project. Any research in this area must measure language learning within the context of the courses being taught. A student who has just taken a LAC course called France in the New Europe might do poorly commenting on a passage from Balzac but might handle a speech by Jacques Delors quite well. The literature student who handles a text from Balzac with assurance might have trouble with a text on Romanesque statuary, but this text might pose no difficulty for a student who took a LAC course on medieval art.
Research on students' language learning in LAC courses must take into account language maintenance as well as mastery of incrementally more advanced linguistic forms. Garrison Keillor recently captured the maintenance issue in a skit on A Prairie Home Companion in which an up-to-date and cosmopolitan “Jim” observes to “Huck” that learning a language is a lot like picking cotton, “except that you get to keep the cotton.”
There is also a process that I might call, if I were to barge into the field of language acquisition, “consolidation”—a process that is a precondition for maintaining an active repertoire of language behavior (receptive and productive). In LAC, the second language becomes the theater for reflection on experiences and learning in the student's academic and personal life. Would it not be useful to test the hypothesis that students who undertake academic study in a second language (including, of course, language and literature study) can consolidate their language skills in ways that lay a good foundation for the improvement of their language proficiencies? As it is now, we know that the experience of far too many students is like that of the novice bicycle rider who discovers equilibrium only to fall in a heap the next moment. If one does not get back on the bicycle and recapture that fleeting moment of control, the hours of elementary observation, trial, and reflection are not likely to lead to knowing how to ride a bicycle.
One of the most troubling critiques of LAC is based on the contention that learners at the level of proficiency typically reached after two years of college study cannot benefit from much more than “illustrative” work with short snippets. David Sudermann and Mary Cisar argue that only students who have attained an Advanced level of proficiency (2+ on the FSI scale) can benefit from any sustained exposure to materials in a foreign language. From what I have heard and observed, I suspect that the good LAC course in fact helps students make the transition from learning about language and performing deeply sheltered authentic tasks to utilizing the language in a progressively unsheltered environment. If my suspicion proves true, LAC can help students move from upper-intermediate courses to advanced courses, where no more formal language instruction is presumed necessary but in fact much remains to be learned.
Another suspicion I would like to see tested as a research hypothesis is that the most promising approach to reading combines the bottom-up slow-reading strategy of the Earlham College model with the top-down rapid-reading strategy outlined by Janet Swaffar, Katherine Arens, and Heidi Byrnes. While holistic, top-down strategies have great utility, LAC proponents of the proficiency-based instruction movement (e.g., Hoffman and James; Barry and Lazarte), have reminded teachers that the obstacles to comprehension can easily overwhelm a student, especially when coupled with complex speaking and writing tasks. They rightly criticize traditional third-year college courses that plunge students into literary texts and set interpretive tasks beyond students' ability to articulate in the target language.
Much of the reading assigned in the typical LAC course is easier formally (even if it is challenging and rich in substance) than the reading in the typical advanced course in a language and literature department. I have been warned not to imply that texts by historians or political scientists are straightforward and guileless, but I hold to my view that creative writers are far more apt to manipulate deliberately the subtle linguistic and cultural expectations of a sophisticated native speaker. This is of course what makes literature valuable for teaching culture. But the main difficulty in reading a great deal of nonliterary authentic materials is contextual—and this context is, in a LAC course, the constructed common ground for discourse. The students' background knowledge and motivation come into play, of course, and students who are interested in probing complex issues in discussion discover one of the most important skills of foreign language use—how to employ simpler forms than one would ordinarily use in L1 to express complex ideas in L2. Prereading exercises and glossing of the most arcane difficulties can then help close the gap (Brinton, Snow, and Wesche). While some forms of testing would not show that a student knows a great deal more about the language at the end of a LAC course than at the beginning, the student may have become a language user in the interim and may have laid the foundation for continuing to develop a more sophisticated mastery of vocabulary, grammar, and usage.
Whatever we may learn about learners' behavior in specific situations, it is important to acknowledge that language facility is a skill so complex and so thoroughly interconnected with forms of cultural knowledge that it is probably best taught in a variety of modes in sequences adapted to the needs of learners (Moody). Language faculties have reason to be concerned if college administrators see LAC courses as replacements for the advanced offerings in language, literature, and linguistics, but if departments handle the issue adroitly, it is likely that students immersed in language use through other professional fields will be drawn to the study of literature and will develop abiding cultural interests in their own good time. John Grandin at the University of Rhode Island has described such a development at this institution, where the thorough integration of German language study with the engineering curriculum has generated a broad interest in all aspects of German culture and literature enrollments have expanded handsomely.
LAC programs build on specific institutional strengths and flourish only through energetic collegial cooperation. Eclecticism in design poses no problem if the approach taken fits local needs, resources, and intellectual styles. The important thing is that faculty members and students know what to expect in the courses their institution offers. If more than one variant of LAC is to be offered, then these variants need to be clearly labeled. Institutions seeking to transplant successful programs in new ground must spell out the costs, benefits, and institutional prerequisites of any given model.
Offering a course or a section entirely in a language other than English might appear to be the simplest way to implement LAC. Minnesota has employed this approach boldly with “immersion semesters” in which students enroll during one quarter for a block of courses entirely in Spanish, French, or German (Klee and Metcalf). Typically, the courses treat broad themes on a fairly advanced level. A Latin American block was offered in 1993 with three four-credit courses entirely in Spanish: one in international relations (on the Ibero-American community), one in history (1900 to the present), and one in Spanish literature (a survey). In addition, students took a two-credit course on foreign language news coverage in Spanish. Subsequent offerings have added more options, and have included an advanced conversation course keyed to readings in the immersion courses. The advantage of teaching a course entirely in one language is that it involves no special staffing or scheduling requirements. The limitations of such an approach are less obvious but no less real. Few schools can afford to offer a course in a second language that does not accommodate English speakers as well. Few students will have the courage to enroll in a course taught fully in a second language unless there are curricular stepping-stones to this challenging opportunity.
The freestanding course in a foreign language is not likely to succeed at most American universities except in conjunction with a well-developed LAC program that offers various language options or components within the English-language-based curriculum. That is the approach the University of Minnesota has taken. With the right program support, courses taught entirely in a foreign language can offer superb learning opportunities for students who have returned from a junior year abroad, and, with suitable orientation for visiting faculty members, they can provide an excellent means of using fluent speakers to introduce students to resources in a language other than English, drawing in often unforeseen ways on the native speakers' broad cultural repertoires.
One of the most successful models for LAC has been Saint Olaf's applied foreign language component of courses offered in English (Allen, Anderson, and Narváez). To lectures and sections offered in English, Saint Olaf adds a section for credit in a second language. That section is generally team-taught by a foreign language faculty member and the teacher of the main course. Saint Olaf places a high value on their teamwork; the foreign language instructor, who is familiar with the content of the course, works with the course instructor to develop prereading materials and exercises appropriate to the typical language ability of the students in the class. This section allows students to practice all skills, and the course instructor offers students a role model of the foreign language user who is not trained as a foreign language teacher. Saint Olaf has devised an incentive structure that compensates foreign language teachers substantially for a first-time team effort and at a reduced level for repeat participation in the same course.
In large state universities, where sections are taught by teaching assistants, a variant of this model gives primary responsibility for the second language section to a teaching assistant, who works closely with the professor in a multisection class. At the University of Minnesota, graduate students from language and linguistics programs teach in courses in a variety of fields. At the 1991 annual meeting of ACTFL in Washington, DC, Sylvia Lopez spoke of the benefits she gained as an advanced student in linguistics working with a professor or political science, Kathryn Sikkink, in teaching sections of a course on contemporary Latin American politics. Sikkink has since taught the course as an immersion-semester offering in which lectures, sections, readings, and written assignments, including tests, have all been conducted in Spanish.
A quite different model for the large state university was implemented by the State University of New York, Binghamton (supported by a grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education). The course professor does not necessarily know the languages being used in the foreign language sections, but graduate students proficient in a language other than English conduct sections in which they guide student research and discussion in that language. Such a design depends on the availability of native or expert speakers. Here, it is not so critical that the student pool be identified in advance. The special language interests of students are identified at the beginning of a semester and groups are matched with a graduate student who may or may not be expert in the subject matter. While the main course instructor may not model the use of any one language, he or she coordinates the efforts of students who conduct research projects and a program of study in one of several different languages. Thomas Dublin, a United States history professor at SUNY, Binghamton, provides one of the most exciting reports on the results the approach produced in the newsletter sent to members of the American Historical Association.
While taking part in a four-century survey of United States immigration history, self-selected groups of students in Dublin's class examined the particular experiences of Chinese, Korean, French, and Spanish immigrant communities. Working in these four languages, they “explored the oral testimony of French Canadian mill operatives in New England, Korean-black tensions expressed by the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Puerto Rican migration to New York City and Nuyorican literature, and short stories written by Chinese Americans.” While Dublin compares managing the course to running “a three-ring circus” (18), he notes that students benefited by being able to relate the experience of the community studied in depth to the broader canvas of immigration history.
The model of LAC that has perhaps the longest track record was developed by Earlham College nearly two decades ago. It was based on preparing faculty members to guide students in the study of foreign language texts that were particularly pertinent to the discipline at hand. For example, a German teacher would work with a philosophy teacher on selected texts, annotating difficulties in them so that students would have access to the linguistic dimension of the subject matter. One text used, for example, was Immanuel Kant's essay “What Is Enlightenment?” Students begin by glossing the significance of key vocabulary in a second language, then further levels introduce them to the cultural dimensions of longer texts. Over the years, faculty members at Earlham have found that the continued LAC emphasis on reading has tended to diverge from the increasing emphasis in oral language proficiency in the basic language sequences. The NEH is now supporting Earlham in a project to reexamine the teaching of reading in the foreign language curriculum, particularly with a view to strengthening the LAC program. Since the early 1980s, when the LAC program was developed, the basic language sequence at the college has placed a growing emphasis on oral fluency, with less attention to the reading skills required of a substantive LAC program.
A second generation of models for LAC seems to be emerging. The University of Connecticut, for example, has emphasized the reciprocal relation between the departmental curricula of foreign languages and those of other disciplines by referring to “import” and “export” models. It seems likely that the partnership of foreign language faculty members with colleagues will be most fully sustained if it works both ways, as it does in this arrangement. Foreign language faculty members assist their colleagues in designing effective foreign language components for courses; their colleagues help them enrich their sequences of language courses by offering guidance on importing linguistic material and topical discourse from disciplines pertinent to the academic careers of their language students. The University of Connecticut has also demonstrated the effective use of specially created instructional units in a foreign language to enhance the educational value of museum and library exhibits. Materials developed to accompany an art exhibit on Käthe Kollwitz drew students into reading an ample array of biographical, literary, and political texts in German, including selections from Kollwitz's diaries and letters, statistics of World War I casualties, and an account of a working-class woman on trial for negligence in the death of her child. 5
No LAC program has taken hold without a personally established partnership among foreign language teachers and colleagues who were enthusiastic about the benefits of using a language other than English in their teaching. This pattern of success may obscure one of the current structural limitations on the expansion and improvement of LAC programs.
Some testing of the waters at meetings of historians indicates that many college faculty members who do not teach languages are surprised to find that LAC even exists. Much as I would like to see historians initiate LAC programs, I think the language teaching profession will continue to take the lead in building and maintaining them. A key challenge for members of the profession who wish to promote LAC is to catch the attention of greater numbers of historians (and political scientists, philosophers, sociologists, etc.). When designing new LAC programs or expanding existing ones, they must enlist colleagues in other disciplines from the outset as codesigners who fully share liability and credit for the outcome. When they bring in consultants from other campuses to conduct workshops in support of new LAC initiatives, they should identify consultant teams who can offer living testimony to the benefits of collaboration. In short, if the gospel is teamwork, the preaching must also be a team effort. With cooperation from the beginning, the work of maintaining LAC will be evenly shared.
For those advocating LAC programs to colleagues outside the foreign language field, two lines of argument are critical. The first and more easily grasped stresses the advantage of using a second language in courses where the subject matter obviously relates to the language and where the language would allow undergraduates to use otherwise inaccessible materials. One such course might be a survey of German history, which offers opportunities at every turn: reading the correspondence of participants in the Frankfurt Assembly of 1848; examining how Bismarck edited the famous “Ems dispatch” that became the casus belli for the Franco-Prussian War; or contemplating the bureaucratic use of language in the proceedings of the Wansee Conference, where the “Final Solution” was made official, or in captured SS documents describing how railroad cars should be prepared for transporting Jews to concentration camps. 6
The “gateway courses” students typically enroll in at the beginning of their majors are those most likely to provide a healthy enrollment base for LAC. In fact, the German history course tends to be somewhat beyond the gateway, since a general European history course is likely to precede it. However, national history courses, as well as various topical courses (Russian political discourse at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for example) may serve a general purpose for a substantial number of students, so one might also characterize them as “cross-roads” courses. Latin American politics, a course found practically everywhere in some form, serves not only political science majors but also students from many different disciplines who have an academic interest in the subject. In a crossroads course, the instructor can make interdisciplinary connections that engage a diverse group of students in a highly productive dialogue and introduce students not only to a generic notion of culture in the second language but also to the cultural dimensions of various disciplines and fields of study as they are conceived and practiced in other countries. 7
The second line of argument offers the specialist the lure of a larger audience for discussing cherished research interests. The language barrier is one of the most important reasons for the disjunction of specialized research from undergraduate teaching. Specialized research in history, for example, often builds on a combination of topics and disciplines in a historical context. Although such research may appear inaccessible to undergraduates, a LAC curriculum may turn some of these obstacles into pathways—into what Claire Kramsch refers to in another context as “associative networks” (202).
Few would recognize my scholarly specialty, comparative social welfare history, as either gateway or crossroads, but like many such fields it nonetheless has remarkably rich possibilities for linking up with a variety of undergraduate courses, including beginning and intermediate language courses. By focusing on this single theme, I hope to show how a LAC program and its attendant pedagogical approaches not only make students users of languages but also make them “users of history” in unexpected domains.
Of course, if faculty members in other disciplines are to make their research interests more integral to their teaching through LAC courses, they will have to learn some new tricks. The most significant, to my mind, is accepting the idea that a given text may be introduced at more than one point in a curricular sequence. What is important to distinguish at each level is the difficulty of the task that students are asked to perform on reading a text. The same student may return to the text later in his or her career to ask more challenging questions of it. To illustrate the notion that faculty members can use complex material in a spiraling fashion, designing tasks to suit each level of difficulty, I take as a sample text Montesquieu's short chapter (book 23, ch. 29) “On Hospitals,” in The Spirit of the Laws (2,712–13).
A first level of understanding for the undergraduate is a simple appreciation that one can understand subject matter of broad significance more fully by engaging it in a second language. In a Western civilization course, for example, a unit on the Enlightenment could include Montesquieu's text in French, “Des hôpitaux.” The word hôpitaux (in its singular form, hôpital ) could become a historical exercise in itself, since it was used in France in 1784 much more broadly than hospital is used now in English. Then it meant any place of voluntary refuge or involuntary confinement, primarily of the poor. Its use in various European languages could be explored, as could the Latin derivation it share with hôtel . Then one might introduce the concept of the Hôtel-Dieu .
One could examine key sentences in the chapter to focus discussion on the range of thinking about the individual and the state in the Enlightenment. At Pacific Lutheran University, where students are exposed (in the “illustrative” mode, to be sure) to sentences in a foreign language before they even study the language, teachers in Western civilization courses have made use of Pascal's Pensées. One could perform a similar exercise with the aphoristic sentences of the Montesquieu. 8 The meaning of this chapter—or of others on slavery or education or forms of government—can be unpacked word by word through the examination of cognates and words that have some resonance or association in English, with a teacher providing the linguistic structure and noncognate vocabulary.
More typically, beginning language courses aimed at preparing students for later LAC offerings can engage them in discussion of topics that anticipate sustained inquiry in history at a later point. To return to “Des hôpitaux,” students who are beginning to use negative contrastive statements can read the opening line of the chapter: “Un homme n'est pas pauvre parce qu'il n'a rien, mais parce qu'il ne travaille pas” ‘A man is poor not because he has nothing but because he is not working” (2,712). Once comprehended, the sentence can lead to a discussion in French drawing on students’ interpretations of the next and on their points of view rooted in the present.
Historical materials related to this subject can be introduced even in the first semester of a language course or as primary sources in an LAC history course. For example, a teacher might present a facsimile of the royal Declaration du roi contre les mendians et gens sans aveu of 1764, evoking imagined encounters between police and beggars as the students work through its official commands, prohibitions, and penalties relating to beggars and “shiftless persons” (and why, they will ask, are such people termed sans aveu ?). Those in search of more imaginative “cloze” exercises could supplement this material with a printed form for information on arrested beggars and vagabonds, and students could create the imaginary characters to fill in the description required.
In an intermediate French language or civilization course, or in a LAC section of a standard French history course, the chapter could be the focus of a substantive exercise responding to a diversity of student interests. A student interested in world history might want to research why Montesquieu refers to the Mogul emperor Aurengzeb and what Montesquieu would have known about India. A student interested in political economy might ask what economic presuppositions underlie Montesquieu's explanations of poverty and might wish to offer a theoretical critique. A history major might inquire into the typical situation of artisans in preindustrial Europe. A political science student might be interested in the role of the early modern state in policing the marketplace and heading off food riots (and were there widespread revolts?)
The spiraling approach offers students multiple opportunities to reflect on a given topic or text. Each exposure presents the work in a new context and thereby provides students with fresh opportunities to link what they have learned on different occasions. I can perhaps indicate how the simple thematic linkages indicated so far come to form a denser web of knowledge and interpretation by sketching a few elements of an advanced-level French LAC section I might teach on social welfare history.
At this level I would link Montesquieu's chapter with the debates of eighteenth-century policy makers. As simple way to do that would be to have students read (using facsimile of a very legible royal manuscript) a paragraph from a review of policy on welfare and assistance ( mendicité ) undertaken at the beginning of Louis XVI's reign. The committee chairman put a twist on Montesquieu's opening maxim, noting, “Un homme peut être pauvre, non seulement parce qu'il manque du travail, mais encore parce que ce travail ne suffit pas à son besoin” ‘A man may be poor not only because he lacks work but because this work is not sufficient to his need’ (Loménie de Brienne 257 verso). Where Montesquieu emphasized the connection between poverty and employment, this writer also stresses the importance of a living wage. In a time of dearth, bread prices may outstrip wages. Using such archival sources introduces undergraduates to a domain of scholarship to which rarely have access. Of course, I would also direct students to the historical literature on poverty and social welfare in French, not only for the eighteenth century but for earlier and later periods. At this advanced level I would still need to pay attention to language pedagogy. A composite glossary would carry students a long way, but I would undoubtedly seek advice from a language teacher on dealing with some more difficult texts—essays by Pierre Goubert, for example.
There is a vast bibliography on this subject in French, from manuscripts of the early Middle Ages through current debates on the welfare state (or, as it is now often called, l'état providence ). I would deliberately assign texts that provide linkages among disciplines and that highlight the variety of motivations for historical inquiry. For the Middle Ages, I might use an excerpt on poverty and marginality in medieval times and the present from the conversations between the great French medievalist Georges Duby and the Polish historian and statesman Bronislaw Geremek (Duby and Geremek 94). This text, representative of much ephemeral publication not available in English, could frame further study in more typical academic sources.
For a contemporary perspective, I would have students read the extraordinary speech by President François Mitterand of France at the United Nations summit on social development at Copenhagen in March 1995, in which he urged the development nations to make a stronger commitment to reducing poverty in other countries and in their own midst. It is as much a personal profession of faith as declaration of policy. Students of French civilization who have been taught that the revolution of 1789 is a part of the French cultural legacy will find a compelling if highly condensed instance of its centrality at the end of this brief speech. Mitterand's text could equally well be used in other LAC courses that touch on the European Community, international development, or French politics. Mitterand couples an argument for a generously policy of aid and trade with the Third World with a caveat that the rights of workers in all countries need to be protected according to the standards of the International Labor Organization. 9
Ideally, I would like to offer a course on comparative social welfare history with sections in all the European languages, but in languages other than French I could offer only limited guidance. 10 Here I run up against one of the current challenges facing LAC practitioners: how to adapt LAC to courses that call for augmentation in several languages. Privileging one language in these contexts may limit the pool of students and lead to a sense of imbalance in the comparative treatment of themes that cut across nations and cultures. Courses on any general European topic, such as the European Community, could benefit from a multilingual approach. The movement in Europe away from strictly national histories toward the teaching of the new European history described by John R. Gillis allows us to share these new perspectives with American students, adapting materials from the new curricula developed in each of the major European languages.
The SUNY, Binghamton, model is the only one that meets this particular challenge, although its success depends on the availability of graduate student assistants in each language. 11 There is room, no doubt, for experimentation and for eclectic approaches. A LAC section in French à la Saint Olaf might be offered in conjunction with sections taught by graduate students à la SUNY, Binghamton. Another option would be to create a cluster of courses with colleagues more proficient in other languages. But clustering adds an element of complexity that is not easily managed. Here, technology may come to the rescue, offering faculty members new ways to articulate and fine-tune combinations on a campus and allowing them to share materials and approaches through a nationally organized network. Where such approaches succeed, it will be because of what groups of faculty members and students decide they can and will do at a given institution.
My general point in offering these thematically specialized perpectives and examples is this: In talking with colleagues outside the foreign language field, it is well to keep in mind not only the potential of LAC for articulating and enriching well-organized, standard curricular offerings such as Latin American politics or Russian history but also its potential for enriching newly popular offerings (e.g., courses on francophone Africa) and informing new approaches to traditional subject matter (e.g., the new European history). Finally, LAC can facilitate the creation of unique course designs: some courses that in the current economy of the curriculum seem specialized luxuries might become, through embedding in the curricular sequences and linkages of LAC, useful interdisciplinary crossroads at the upper level of the undergraduate curriculum.
Many of the institutions that have developed LAC programs have received grant support; it is often assumed that a LAC program cannot be mounted without such support. Yet it is probably easier to start a LAC program now than it was before there was so much experience to draw on. Sustaining and developing the program beyond an initial stage is the hard part. In a time of increasingly embattled budgets, any additional program cost is vulnerable and bodies are counted.
Faculty members who have participated in LAC testify to the excitement of seeing their students open new worlds for themselves, using their often fledgling language abilities to achieve greater mastery of a field they have chosen. I have heard Jeanne Delaney and Gwen Barnes speak (at the American Historical Association annual meeting in January 1994) about their section linked with a Latin American history course at Saint Olaf, in which students read (among other texts in Spanish) the writings of Domingo Sarmiento as they studied late-nineteenth-century Argentina. I also sat in on a class on Latin American politics at the University of Kansas, where Marcos Ramos-Reyes, a visiting lecturer from Paraguay, described the impressions of European democracy captured in an article that Eduardo Frei wrote after witnessing the Stavisky Riots in France in 1934: “Le democracía es algo difficil, requiere mucho educación, un pueblo culto, una larga experiencia de convivencia social. Apenas lo ha lograda Inglaterra. Los franceses aun no parecen entenderlo bien. La verdad tiene su hora” Democracy is something difficult—it requires much education, civilized people, a broad experience of living together in society. England has barely achieved it. The French, however, do not seem to understand it very well. The truth has its time.’ Ramos very thoughtfully interrupted his otherwise rapid delivery to write this statement (from the Chilean newspaper El diario illustrado ) on the blackboard.
Faculty members also value the collegial experience of working with one another across disciplinary lines. Non-foreign-language faculty members who have a long experience with a language through their own discipline naturally find common ground with colleagues who teach that language, and they often find their own cultural horizons expanded in surprising ways. Foreign language faculty members are likewise pleasantly surprised.
At the same time, LAC demands a considerable effort from those involved. Commonly, foreign language teachers find themselves having to go back to school to learn subject matter that is often entirely new, even in subjects they thought they were familiar with. Non-foreign-language teachers discover they must discard old stereotypes about how language is taught, and they find themselves reeling as the foreign language teachers attempt to explain the methodological foundations of their pedagogy. Both experience moments of vulnerability and irritation. When the novelty wears off, some decide LAC is an interesting idea that they do not have time for. Building an esprit de corps among those who teach LAC requires that participating faculty members feel well supported in their effort, that these efforts are recognized as academically serious, and that over the long term one can continue to contribute to the LAC program without selling body and soul to it.
Institutionally, this means that the responsibility for maintaining LAC needs to be solidly established. A foreign language department can serve as an initial base for the enterprise, but sooner or later the commitment of resources and energies by other departments needs to be institutionalized. If an interdepartmental committee takes charge of the program, the committee needs to have clout in the organizational structure. The challenge is similar to that of any program or activity that is not entirely contained within the mission and structure of existing departments. International studies programs have in several cases provided the necessary support structure for LAC, especially at large institutions.
At the same time, it is important to have a home for the pedagogically focused work of LAC. In particular, there should be periodic workshops, training, and updating of experienced faculty members on the challenges and techniques of teaching LAC courses, including especially those standards and procedures established for LAC teaching by students and the faculty at the institution. The Center for Applied Research in Language Acquisition at the University of Minnesota performs such faculty development and quality-control functions and conducts educational research. At Brown University, the Center for Language Studies plays a similar role and has taken a lead in the recent ACE project in exploring how new computer technology can help strengthen the LAC effort nationwide.
An institutional culture that supports interdisciplinary teaching is propitious for LAC. This is evident at institutions as diverse in size and mission as the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. 12 At these institutions, intellectual flexibility is a part of the culture; so tool is the working assumption that one of the normal functions of academic units is to organize the work of teachers trained in various disciplines.
Support structures and faculty development cost money. Ideally, the continual strain of justifying the special program costs of LAC can be relieved by the special program endowment, as at Dickinson College, which used an NEH challenge grant to create an endowment for funding periodic faculty workshops held at overseas centers where Dickinson sent its students. These opportunities helped workshop participants prepare to use foreign language materials in upper-level courses geared to the needs of students returning from overseas study; they also provided faculty members with recognition and incentive.
But institutional structures and endowments can only do so much. If LAC is to be viable, the faculty, the administrators, and the students must agree that the game is worth the candle. Why then is LAC so important for institutions of higher education?
Languages themselves embed culture. What better vehicle than language to learn about specific cultures and culture itself? Traditionally, study of the literary high culture of a language has been the ultimate goal of foreign language curricula. The value of literary study has been questioned with increasing vigor in recent years, but usually in a rather silly zero-sum game in which one side champions real-world practicality and the other defends the autonomy of high culture. Literature still offers a marvelous educational experience for any student who wishes to understand life, and it must surely remain a mainstay of any self-respecting language program. But why should literature be the enemy of engineering, business, anthropology, economics, geography, political science, philosophy, history, or the arts? The true place of foreign language teaching is to inform all areas of academic life while reserving a place for the study of language itself as central to the experience of being human. The implications of LAC are that the teaching of language within language departments will become increasingly pertinent to the academic interests of students and that it will work its effects, to borrow a phrase from Miriam Ellis at Santa Cruz, “in expanded domains.”
The objection of the traditionalist is that the language department cannot be all things at once. The answer is that LAC proposes a new division of labor, new ways of working together, and new ways for students to learn that supplement the old ways. By helping the foreign language profession realize its larger educational goals, LAC will strengthen the position of language teaching as a support for serious literary study. To hold on to the grail of literary study without answering students’ other academic needs is the way to oblivion.
The new division of labor promoted by LAC recognizes the futility of expecting language teachers to be the universal experts in all the areas where foreign languages are used. At the same time, cooperation with other colleagues can help pinpoint the motivating connections between their own pedagogical strategies and the various intellectual and professional interests their students bring from other contexts. 13 By working in the “export” mode, language teachers learn from the colleagues whom they assist pedagogically. Subsequently they can “import” the knowledge they gain into language classes. Both partners can continue to use each other as resources in their areas of expertise. Some language teachers may fear that LAC partnerships will cast them in a subordinate “service” role. Although we need to address this issue, I think language teachers will shine as leading brokers of interdisciplinary study (Melton).
While LAC responds to the call of the student, the general public, and colleagues throughout the university that language teaching match more effectively the practical needs of students, it also provides a framework in which language teaching is most likely to preserve and enlarge its substantially humanistic educative functions. The partnership with colleagues on the basis of a common interest in language gives a starting advantage to a holistic understanding of culture and human expression. The colleague in business who wants to teach a course on the economics of NAFTA in Spanish is not simply asking for pat phrases that students can use while on business in Guadalajara. Usually this sort of partnership leads to discussions of history, cultural attitudes, geography and ways of life, and literary and artistic expressions. A student who experiences such a course is likely to integrate career aspirations with a broader understanding of culture. This broad and inclusive perspective on foreign language teaching, supported materially by the LAC movement, can begin to address the core issues in Dale Lange's formulation of the crisis in the foreign language curriculum, heeding Wilga Rivers's call for genuinely international education and responding to the increasingly multicultural environment of our educational institutions (Tsunoda). 14
Finally, although LAC is not a panacea for all the challenges of foreign language teaching, those who have taught in successful LAC programs can make a valuable contribution to general discussions of pedagogy and pre-service teacher education. Without attempting to survey the range of issues that the profession is grappling with (and, it must be said, grappling with creatively and productively), I might best illustrate the relevance of LAC by focusing on issues that Claire Kramsch raises in her chapter on “authentic texts and contexts” in Context and Culture in Language Teaching. She summarizes lucidly the potential of the new technology to encourage learners “to make connections between items, discover patterns, and make inferences,” giving teachers “opportunities for varying the contextual frame in which knowledge is organized and presented” (201). This technology, she notes, also supports an explanatory mode of learning, enabling students to “construct meaning using the associative network of the database … to direct their own learning, to develop their own interpretations of events, [and] to set their own educational priorities” (202).
But for each potential advance, Kramsch sees challenges that may be unanswerable under current teaching conditions. How will language teachers gain substantive understanding in the exploding universe of information, and where will they gain the interdisciplinary background to lead students where the technology will take them? How will exploration square with a pedagogical culture that is in Kramsch's words, “quantitative and normative”? Where will the programmers of new media constructs acquire cross-cultural understanding? And how will students learn with and from others if packaged technology offers only “solipsistic playgrounds for the mind” (202)? 15
It is no exaggeration to note that LAC addresses, if it does not provide final answers for, every one of these concerns. Although LAC is a cross-departmental, interdisciplinary enterprise, it conserves and nourishes the rich traditions of the disciplines by reconnecting and applying them in a far greater variety of permutations than individual departments could accomplish. By routinely combining the distinct perspectives of foreign language and non-foreign-language faculty members, the enterprise recognizes that meaning is not unproblematic but must be sifted through various procedures of interpretation. While the technology can bring a national networks of resources to bear on the task at hand in any LAC classroom, any package of materials produced for one LAC program would simply be a tool for further interaction among real-life learners in other programs.
I do not mean to claim that all LAC efforts have succeeded. The pitfalls are real. Predicting enrollment is a particular challenge for LAC sections; professors have sometimes killed student interest by failing to adjust their readings and their teaching strategies to the demands of LAC; students have frittered some sections away by holding conversations in an all-too-fluent pidgin. Overextended faculty members have suffered from burnout, administrators have pulled the rug out from under program commitments, and so on.
Institutions where LAC has nonetheless thrived have achieved a remarkable enhancement of undergraduate education with remarkably little fuss. While many institutions announce intentions to internationalize the curriculum, espousing the objectives of cultural awareness, multiculturalism, and global savoir faire, institutions with LAC programs have breathed life into those phrases by establishing coherent and sustained opportunities for learning. Scaling the language barrier has become a collaborative enterprise that brings faculty members and students together, promoting reflection on good practice in teaching and stimulating a highly creative process of curriculum building with culture and language at its core.
The author is a program officer in the Research and Education Division of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. This article is a considerably expanded and revised version of informal comments offered at a conference sponsored by the American Council of Education in October 1995 as part of Next Steps: A project to Strengthen Languages across the Curriculum, an eighteen-month project that brought together teams from twelve institutions seeking to refine and improve the design of language-across-the-curriculum programs. The institutions participating in the project are Agnes Scott College; Brown University; Dickinson College; Earlham College; Pacific Lutheran College; Saint Olaf College; the State University of New York, Binghamton; Syracuse University; the University of California, Santa Cruz; the University of Connecticut, Storrs; the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; and the University of Rhode Island.
For further information about this NEH-supported project (NEH grant EH-22038-95), please write the project director, Barbara Turlington, at the American Council on Education, 1 Dupont Circle, Washington, DC 20036. LAC projects that received support from NEH are listed in Foreign Language Education: Funded Projects FY91 to FY95: November 1995 (Washington: NEH, 1995). For a photocopy of this brochure, write or call the author (tadams@neh.fed.us; 202 606-8396).
1 I use term foreign language here to mean “language other than English.” I follow ACE project participants in choosing the acronym LAC (pronounced “lack”) standing for “languages (plural) across the curriculum” rather than FLAC or other variants. It is important to emphasize that the LAC movement itself is being shaped by the many students across the country for whom English is a second language and that these native speakers of languages other than English can be an important resource for LAC teaching and learning.
2 Brinton, Snow, and Wesche provide an international perspective on LAC that is based on Canadian and British practice; see Grosse and Voght on language for special purposes.
3 I am here characterizing what might be considered casual “stock skepticism.” A more sophisticated version of these criticisms is formulated in Sudermann and in Sudermann and Cisar.
4 Saint Olaf faculty members have consistently shared their experience through consultations, presentations, and articles (see Achberger; Allen, Anderson, and Narvaez; and Watt). For reports by faculty members involved with LAC at other institutions, see Grandin (Rhode Island); Jurasek and Jurasek (Earlham); Weidner (Kansas); Wieshofer (Agnes Scott); and contributions in Krueger and Ryan and in Straight. A concise summary of four model programs is provided in an ACTFL white paper prepared by Emily Spinelli in consultation with an editorial committee (ACTFL).
5 Information on the exhibit is taken from funded NEH application EH-21788-94, directed by Regina Kecht and Katherina von Hammerstein.
6 These examples come from the syllabus prepared by Christopher Browning at Pacific Lutheran University, with the assistance of Rodney Swenson from the German department, in the course of a project supported by NEH grant EF-20072-92.
7 Such courses, I might add, share certain fundamental features—thematic breadth, interdisciplinary approaches, and the synthesis of many areas of specialized scholarship—with the typical NEH summer institute for college and university teachers. A proposal to offer an NEH institute needs a well-articulated interpretative focus that draws on current research and responds to challenges in the humanities curriculum.
The challenges and opportunities of offering LAC courses on such topics as the survival of indigenous cultures in Latin America, comparisons of postcolonial francophone cultures, and interpretations of nationalism in “the new European history” (Gillis) might provide ideas for institutes that would incorporate discussion of LAC applications, preferably drawing faculty members in pairs from languages and other disciplines. Of course, these topics are only three examples of the countless possibilities.
The University of Rhode Island has already shown the way; there in the summer of 1995 John Grandin directed a national institute for college teachers on German across the curriculum, demonstrating and developing curricular possibilities in a variety of disciplines. Despite NEH budget cuts, the program of national institutes has been maintained. Write or call me for further information (tadams@neh.fed.us; 202 606-8396).
8 I would have them look at Montesquieu's rather startling statement “Quelques aumônes que l'on fait à un homme nu dans les rues, ne remplissent point les obligations de l'État, qui doit à tous les citoyens une subsistance assurée, la nourriture, un vêtement convenable, et un genre de vie qui ne soit point contraire à la santé” ‘A few alms given to a naked man in the street do not fulfill the obligations of the state, which owes to all its citizens a secure subsistence, suitable foods and clothing, and a manner of living that is not contrary to good health’ (2,712).
9 The reference to the ILO would probably be obscure to American students. In my social welfare LAC section, I might borrow (with permission) a reading exercise prepared by Donna Sadler at Agnes Scott College to show how a French medieval historian writing in the 1930s (Philippe-Jean Hesse, in Artistes, artisans et sécurité sociale au Moyen Âge ) cited ILO standards to define concepts of social security.
10 In German, students could read Dieter Jetter on the history of hospitals or selections from Christoph Sachse and Florian Tennstedt's Geschichte der Armenfürsorge in Deutschland , a broad work of synthesis accompanied by documentary readings. The bibliography is rich in most European languages.
11 Thomas Dublin has told me that in the course on United States immigration history, he has been able to provide his students opportunities to do independent study using foreign language materials prepared for an earlier offering of the course. This strategy allows for some expansion of the repertoire of language materials available in a course beyond what the available foreign language resource persons may be able to offer.
12 Both these institutions, incidentally, have experimented with teaching Chinese in connection with offerings in other disciplines. At Pacific Lutheran University, readings in the Chinese language courses have been linked with the subject matter of course offerings in a Chinese studies program; at Santa Cruz, students have taken to the stage in a course on dramatic performance in Chinese.
13 Alice Omaggio and Janet Swaffar elaborate on the general importance of context in language learning. The particular importance of relating language study to the contextualizing frames of literature and culture is also widely discussed (see, e.g., Tesser; Henning; Kempf).
14 Joyce Tsunoda includes examples of LAC using less commonly taught languages.
15 See also Diane Tedick and Constance Walker on the importance of facilitating reflection and interactive learning among students and teacher.
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© 1996 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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