28, no. 2 (Winter 1997): 1-3
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From the Editor
Elizabeth B. Welles
THE enrollment survey published in this issue of the ADFL Bulletin provides a vivid snapshot of college foreign language teachings—snapshot that will be regarded differently by each group that examines it. For me, the importance lies in the whole picture, and two findings in particular stand out. The first is that despite the small overall decline, enrollments are higher than in any other survey except the last one in 1990. Enrollments have held steady: since 1977 there have been seven to eight registrants in foreign language courses for every one hundred students attending college. Considering that fiscal conditions for higher education worsened significantly over the period since the 1990 survey and that foreign language departments and courses are vulnerable to cuts, these enrollments are evidence of and a tribute to the strength of the field.
But some highly visible changes have taken place, and they lead me to the second point, that enrollment patterns are shifting radically. The popularity of certain languages has in American education always been tied to perceptions of economic and political developments in other countries—witness the suppression of German during the First World War and the surge of interest in foreign languages following the launching of the Sputnik satellite in 1957. To Speculate further, more recently the growth of Japanese in the 1980s was undoubtedly tied to Japan's increasing competition for American markets and to the realization that to compete, Americans needed knowledge of Japanese language and culture. While Japanese is now the fourth most commonly taught language, enrollments have leveled off, perhaps because after the first wave of enthusiasm American students encountered the difficulties discussed in the articles in this issue by Van C. Gessel and Shoji Azuma. The steady growth in Chinese was interrupted by more modest gains between 1986 and 1990, a decline in rate of growth that was probably in response to the repressive actions of Tiananmen Square. Chinese is now continuing its upward trajectory as China's economic possibilities come to the fore. In a similar vein, in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, enrollments in German went up, but for some reason, perhaps disappointed expectations about unified Germany's immediate prosperity, the increases were not sustained. In Russian, historical events have always influenced language registrations, During the 1980s, as the image of the “evil communist empire” was replaced by glasnost, perestroika, and free enterprise, the interest in Russian grew steadily, but with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and as American views of Russia became colored by images of a country in disarray, interest has eroded. Students have turned their backs on the study of Russian, even though knowledge of the language is a greater asset in today's job market than ever before.
Students have certainly recognized the importance and usefulness of learning Spanish: slightly more than half of all registrations in college foreign language study are in Spanish. The popularity of Spanish is undertandable; of all languages taught it offers students the greatest opportunities to practice and use it in everyday life or in a career. Other reasons that Spanish appeals to college students include the many heritage speakers of Spanish who seek literacy in their own language and the many students who have taken it in high school (61% of student foreign language enrollments grades 7–12 are in Spanish [Draper 2]). While enrollments in French and German have been declining and Spanish enrollments increasing since 1970, the situation was not considered critical until financial pressures on higher education called small language classes into question and administrations merged or eliminated departments that were no longer fiscally sustainable.
As one of the main issues facing the profession, the implications of rising enrollments in Spanish was the topic of special Sunday sessions at ADFL Seminars East and West. The urgency of the situation was reflected in the numbers present: at least one third of the attendees from each seminar participated in the discussions, which held their attention for more than two hours without a break.
Session participants considered the management and teaching of the large numbers of students flocking to Spanish courses one of the most dire consequences of the enrollment imbalance. The chief problem for department chairs was staffing. The number of full-time positions in Spanish has not kept up with the number of students; thus chairs who had to rely on part-time teachers with little stake in the department found it difficult to maintain the quality of instruction. While such a problem may be caused by the unwillingness of administrations to provide departments with additional full-time faculty lines, it is also true that there are not proportionally as many graduate to undergraduate registrations in Spanish as there are in French and German. If Spanish enrollments continue to increase, there will probably be a need for a greater number of PhDs to teach the growing number of undergraduate students.
Another issue highlighted at the seminar meetings was the institution-wide economics of foreign language teaching. Because Spanish has large numbers of full-time equivalents, the teaching of Spanish often supports languages with smaller enrollments. While it is easy to see how this could lead to some resentment on the part of those teaching Spanish, who may have more class hours and papers to grade than their colleagues in other languages do, there emerged at both seminar sessions a wide-spread and generous sense that the diversity of foreign language offerings should be preserved and that every effort should be made to maintain access to the currently declining traditionally taught languages as well as to offer increased access to the less commonly taught languages. Spanish teachers did not want to be the only foreign language teachers on campus and wanted to stress not only the utilitarian reasons for teaming the language but, as for all languages, the centrality of Spanish language and cultures to the humanities and the liberal arts.
Solutions? Seminar attendees suggested that departments with declining enrollments might attract students by stepping up recruitment efforts, particularly through high school college advisers, and by creating alliances with other departments and disciplines to organize language across the curriculum and other interdisciplinary programs. Voicing concern about the crowding of the introductory Spanish courses, participants also recognized that a better understanding of high school preparation and of the level of entering students' expertise would enable departments to place the better qualified in more advanced course work instead of allowing the “false beginners” to opt for the easy A in the tower levels. Unfortunately, in the experience of the group it is nearly impossible to persuade students to switch to a different language even when classes in the language they wish to study are filled. Two brief report digests in this issue provide some ideas for maintaining a diverse language pool; the City University of New York has proposed consortial arrangements with a number of its campuses for teaching a wide variety of languages, and the Future of German in American Education, taking into account the changes in American students and education, proposes more flexible and useful programs of study that focus on the learner.
The understanding resulting from the seminar meetings was that we are only at the beginning of a serious system-wide attempt to deal with the problem of shifting enrollment patterns and that we should continue the discussion. Participants decided to initiate a forum consisting of statements representing a variety of perspectives on the issues. The first of these, with opinions from eight respondents, will appear in the Spring 1997 issue; we urge readers (including those who teach languages other than Spanish) to send us comments for the Fall issue. The seminar groups also suggested that ADFL sponsor a session on enrollment patterns at the 1997 convention, which it will surely do.
Closely linked to issues raised by student enrollments, four other essays published here deal with the relation of higher education to the population of its incoming students. While part of the same continuum, the paths of students as they move out of high school into college, and perhaps back into the high schools as teachers, are full of perilous bridges and obstacles. Articulation between levels of instruction that should ensure curricular and methodological coherence is particularly important in foreign language programs and has long been recognized by the field as one of its chief challenges. As readers will remember, articulation has also been a concern of the Coalition of Foreign Language Organizations, which sponsored a conference and a special issue of the ADFL Bulletin (Spring 95) and a statement on articulation. The coalition's underlying assumptions are that good articulation measures will strengthen the effectiveness of teaching foreign languages overall and that students, once assured of coherent connections among institutions, levels, and courses, will be likely to continue their study and to do so with some possibility of success. This office plans to build on the foundations already laid by disseminating information about existing articulation projects in an annotated directory as part of a larger project including other activities (a conference, mentorships, and a publication) that will depend on external funding.
Thus it is particularly timely to publish Dale Lange's article analyzing fifteen ongoing articulation projects that demonstrate what can be accomplished toward establishing coherent sequences, goals, and assessments. I was heartened to learn of these projects; in 1982, when Lange last wrote about articulation, he found no existing articulation programs. The enterprise is young, and the field should be proud that so much good work from so many sectors of education has been done. Lange discovered that most projects had created networks to enable communication among faculty members and administrators at secondary and postsecondary schools and that many had established goals and standards (especially in the states) and were working on the coordination of the curriculum. However, as yet few had paid much attention to instructional approaches or had been able to create assessment measures that clearly reflected student status and that could be easily understood by postsecondary departments. While recognizing the need for dialogue and the advantages of networking, Lange urges further efforts toward the actualization of the planned connections and the implementation of assessment measures so that the effects of the movement can benefit the nation's language learners. Patricia Wetzel's essay on articulation in a single noncognate language, Japanese, dovetails with Lange's more general study. Realizing that people in the field of Japanese knew little about articulation, a task force decided first to conduct a small pilot survey on how students in Japanese were placed in college courses. Wetzel is struck by the number of different kinds of tests (at least three) used by the same institution and in particular by the predominance of an oral test—a predominance that she takes as evidence for the acceptance of teaching for proficiency in colleges and universities. Since the certification of teachers was a great concern of the task force, she asks whether, if proficiency-oriented teaching is widespread in high schools, future teachers can possibly reach in their four years of college the necessary mastery of the language to teach it to the next generation of students. She is also interested in the relation of articulation to the learner's success or failure, retention or attrition, that is, in the need for research about what motiviates students to persevere in the study of a language.
The preparation of future teachers—as we have seen, a key issue in articulation—is of the utmost importance for the future of foreign language teaching in the United States. Teacher education is approached from two different perspectives in articles published here: David Gies writes from the vantage point of department chair and professor of literature, and Joan Kelly Hall from the position of professor in a school of education. Both authors, participants in the MLA's Teacher Education Project, have given much attention to their programs over the past year and are thus able to explicate how the differing discourses among high school, college, and school of education teachers can be reconciled and how those differences can be the source of productive collaborations.
The last two articles are annotated bibliographies; one is on Puerto Rican literature by Maribel Ortiz-Màrquez, and the other is on Chicano literature by Carmen Salazar and Maria Herrera-Sobek. They are part of an effort that has been going on for twenty-seven years, since the founding of the MLA's former Committee on the Education of Minority Groups, to make MLA members aware of the literature emerging from American populations whose roots are often in languages other than English. Growing out of discussions in the Committee on the Literatures and Languages of America, these bibliographies bring up to date the bibliographies published by the ADE Bulletin in the 1980s. Based on expert scholarship, they provide an excellent resource for interested teachers. They also suggest both a problem and its solution. Although a few of the annotated texts are written entirely in Spanish, most are written in English, with some code switching into Spanish, and are usually taught in courses in English departments. However, most scholars in Puerto Rican and Chicano literatures are teachers of Spanish, and thus it is our hope that they will expand their curricula to include some of these works. The ADFL Bulletin is publishing them simultaneously with the ADE Bulletin (where the other bibliographies in Asian American, American Indian, and African American literatures will appear in subsequent issues) in order to encourage the reading and study of this material in Spanish departments, which can provide Latino and Latina literature with a rich cultured context.
Work Cited
Draper, Jamie. Foreign Language Enrollments in Public Secondary Schools, Fall 1989 and Fall 1990. Yonkers: ACTFL, 1991.
© 1997 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 28, no. 2 (Winter 1997): 1-3 |
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