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The City University of New York (CUNY) Task Force on Languages other than English has published its final report, World Languages at the City University of New York: Meeting the Needs of the Twenty-First Century (A Blueprint for Short-Term Survival and Long-Term Growth). The report is the result of a year (1995–96) of intensive study and deliberation focused on devising an effective system-wide plan to make better use of the university's increasingly limited resources and to extend the discipline beyond the familiar language and literature sequence still in place in most departments. The task force was headed by John Grandin, the chair of modern and classical languages and professor of German at the University of Rhode Island, and it comprised members of the CUNY faculty and administration; representatives of area high schools, businesses, and professional groups; and community leaders. The report was drafted by the CUNY faculty members Dorothy James (Hunter Coil.), Joyce Miller (Kingsborough Community Coll.), Carolyn Richmond (Brooklyn Coll.), Francisco Soto (Coll. of Staten Island), and Gloria Waldman (York Coll.).
The task force interpreted its mandate as identifying realistic steps for fulfilling a vision of a university in a multicultural urban community: providing heritage and nonheritage language students alike the opportunity not only to study but also to achieve advanced knowledge of an appropriate variety of world languages, both traditionally taught and less commonly taught. The task force offers both a vision and a timetable for moving toward that vision. The report complements practical suggestions for making the most of limited resources with an emphasis on strengthening and expanding the university's existing programs through consortia, developing articulation between its colleges and city high schools, sequencing language offerings variously to meet the needs of a diverse student population, using new technology to achieve curricular goals, improving of the teaching of language in traditional literature classes, linking of language study with fields outside of the liberal arts, and adapting the CUNY faculty reward structure to support the proposed innovations.
Through consortial arrangements, the task force contends, colleges can strengthen their language programs without new expenditures by sharing faculty and technological resources; they can also use collaborative curricular planning and scheduling to enhance students' options and improve students' progress. Consortial arrangements can facilitate smooth and logical transfers between institutions, such as a two-year and a four-year college. They provide students with expanded lower- and upper-level course options by allowing student and faculty travel among campuses and distance learning, for example; thus faculty members unable to utilize their expertise in their home departments (e.g., those in community colleges) can do so in other institutions. Weakened departments in consortia can maintain majors or programs that lack the on-site staffing and enrollments needed to justify their continuation. Eliminating unnecessary duplications of upper-level course offerings free faculty members to teach a greater variety of courses and lets departments offer courses that might otherwise be canceled because of low enrollments.
Central to departmental cooperation is a university-wide system of assessment within a fully articulated curriculum. The task force calls for a twelve-month program of system-wide sample proficiency testing that would lead to the creation of standardized assessment instruments, including a significant oral component, for placing students at appropriate levels in all CUNY colleges. The report's proposed performance standards 1,2, and 3 will define the stages of progress through the elementary and intermediate sequence to the threshold of upper-level courses; performance standards 4, 5, and 6 will define the stages of progress through the upper levels. The CUNY Council on Foreign Language Study, which is to supervise the sample proficiency testing, will invite New York high schools to collaborate in coordinating standards 1, 2, and 3 with the statewide outcome goals already proposed for secondary education in New York State: checkpoints A, B, and C of the New York State Framework for Languages Other Than English. The CUNY task force's plan also recommends credit incentives to encourage students to go into the higher levels of language learning, thus reducing elementary-level enrollments: for instance, students placing beyond the first-level course would be eligible to receive credit for the previous course in the sequence, providing that they take and pass the course they place into—be it in a heritage or a nonheritage language. The report calls on each university consortium to create distinct course sequences for heritage speakers according to demographic need, so that students can maintain, develop, and utilize the home languages to which they have access as first-, second-, or third-generation bilinguals. The report recommends that CUNY utilize the “virtually inexhaustible pool of linguistic talents” in New York (18), a much-neglected resource available to the urban multicultural university.
The report also calls for substantive changes in the MA, MAT, MS, and PhD programs at the university. Most master's students at CUNY either are secondary school teachers or plan to become teachers; a minority go on to the doctoral level. The task force report concludes that at CUNY, as in other graduate institutions across the country, “faculty tend to view their mission as preparing students for traditional scholarship, [even though] urgent pleas are being heard from undergraduate language and literature programs of all kinds, from public community colleges to elite liberal arts colleges, that graduate schools should better prepare their students to teach and to teach a wide variety of learners in a wide variety of subject areas” (16). The task force therefore calls for changes in the approach to master's programs at CUNY, as well as coordination between the undergraduate and master's levels and between the master's and doctoral levels, to minimize what the report characterizes as misunderstandings regarding expectations at each level. The report also urges doctoral programs to further emphasize linguistic and cultural literacy and to offer credit-bearing course sequences in second language acquisition and second language pedagogy, along with training in skills assessment and the use of technology in teaching.
The task-force report recommends a broad program of faculty development. The report establishes the following desiderata if the proposals are to be implemented. Testers must be chosen and trained to create a nucleus of faculty members across the university who are expert in performance-based assessment and who will in turn train testers in their own colleges and consortia. Senior faculty members who specialize in literature must be involved in revising curricula to integrate the teaching of language and literature at all levels. There must be full-time language program coordinators (LPCs) on all campuses to coordinate the full- and part-time language faculties and to work closely with teachers of graduate pedagogy courses and with LPCs within consortia and at other university campuses. Hiring in languages other than English at the university must reflect the new vision of language faculties reflected in the report. And, finally, the faculty reward system must place a new, real emphasis on language teaching at all levels, on assessment, and on the extension of language departments. The university must provide genuine, tangible support for pedagogical innovation and excellence, language acquisition research, and the development of instructional materials and computer software. The report concludes with a proposed implementation schedule, materials on articulation, CUNY enrollment and staffing data, a description of credit incentives at the University of Minnesota, and a reprint of the policy statements of the ADFL. To request copies of the report, write or call Robert Picken at the CUNY Office of Academic Affairs, 535 East 80th St., New York, NY 10021 (212 794-5681; rpibh@cunyvm.cuny.edu).
During the past academic year the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG) has conducted three regional invitational forums and a session at the MLA Annual Convention in Chicago on the topic The Future of German in American Education. The meetings highlighted two premises: (1) the student is a transforming force in education (education is now valued for its ability to produce desired outcomes rather than for being a self-evident good) and (2) major structural changes are under way in education, including reliance on distance learning, reconsideration of tenure, and new models of governance, and they cannot be addressed by minor, incremental changes. The following summary of the discussions is based on a report prepared for the Bulletin by Heidi Byrnes (Georgetown Univ.).
The report notes that the shift to competency-based education has brought an emphasis on individualized learning and measurable outcomes and an insistence on access to educational opportunities for all students. Competency-based education gains additional force from technology, which dissolves the once-dominant practice of institutionalizing a single, standard learning environment through seat-time requirements for students and through teaching-load requirements, defined in terms of classroom hours, for college faculty members. Reconsidering the process of learning and teaching also may affect the status of areas and types of knowledge. Fiscal constraints and a declining public willingness to support educational expenditures exacerbate the effect of the changes.
The discussion further highlighted the following changes, many of them specific to the field of German:
These factors appear to call for two seemingly opposite courses of actions and attitudes: reaching out—intellectually, programmatically, and administratively—beyond normal boundaries and reflecting critically and honestly on the German field's identity and unique contributions to American education and about realistic and effective ways to strengthen its presence in academia.
Participants in the meetings recommended that five interrelated areas demand critical attention if German is to flourish:
Curricular reform. Reforming curricula at all levels of instruction is the most important task for the German profession in the United States. The need for such reform is greatest at the graduate and undergraduate levels. The key element in reform is articulation: vertical articulation to ensure integrated sequences of study and horizontal articulation to link German study to other areas of the curriculum. The profession must replace the mastery-oriented, additive model of language learning with a holistic model that integrates linguistic and cultural knowledge from the beginning in a fashion appropriate to the educational level and age of the learner. It must explicitly connect the faculty's specialties with the language learning and teaching enterprise to help students at all levels acquire academic literacy in German. Curricular reform must ensure that all graduate students acquire high levels of German language ability and differentiated cultural knowledge and insights; reform must also diversify the training of MAs, reconsider the near-exclusive focus on PhD studies, and include nonacademic career paths as options in graduate education. Reformers must also develop model articulated curricula for students of German collegiate instruction, take account of institutional practices that help or hinder enrollment, determine realistic goals for students of German at the end of K-12 instruction, and develop assessment instruments that reflect students' language abilities in various modalities. The objectives of curricular change must inform collegiate language programs so that postsecondary education can benefit from and build on students' accomplishments in high school programs.
Inclusive and active outreach and student recruitment. Student recruitment was identified as the profession's second most important task. The field needs to seek students who are nontraditional in age, educational path, income level, academic profile, and career goals. Comprehensive advising that informs students how they can apply German to various professional objectives is crucial.
New approaches to accountability. A revitalized curriculum may address some of the demands for accountability, but accountability in assessment requires that the profession continually enhance programs. That effort will necessitate guidelines for the development, evaluation, and use of student portfolios at all levels.
Teacher education and faculty development. The German profession's ability to implement curriculum reform successfully can only be as good as the preparation teachers and faculty members receive. The suggestions include considering a proficiency requirement for German teachers in order to ensure that they have adequate language abilities, fostering a mentoring culture, coordinating TA training across multiple-language departments, developing teacher education programs, and supporting teachers who are interested in broadening their expertise to include such specialties as assessment or technology.
Governance, structures, and leadership. Departmental leadership that places the benefit of the student at the center of any plan was identified as a central area for action. The creation of a leadership seminar emerged as the AATG's top agenda item. The AATG believes that strong leadership can guide faculty members to act in the interest of program viability and substance.
The AATG has developed the following action plan for the profession:
Detailed summaries of the meetings are posted on the AATG Web site (http://www.stolaf.edu/stolaf/depts/ aatg/). A shortened summary is in the Fall 1996 AATG Newsletter, and a full report will appear in the Winter 1996 Unterrichtspraxis.
© 1996 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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