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MY PURPOSE is to look at how we can adapt instruction to accommodate the new generation of students we are encountering in our classrooms. It is increasingly evident that the needs and demands of the students coming to us now and especially of those who will come in the next decade, the decade ushering us into the twenty-first century, differ greatly from the student needs that have been influencing curricular decisions for the past twenty-five years.
A study conducted by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at the Higher Education Research Institute of the University of California, Los Angeles, provides some interesting data on students today (Dey, Astin, and Korn). Most first-time first-year college students were women, and most of these students are less interested in material well-being than were the students of the Reagan years and more interested in developing a meaningful philosophy of life, helping others, promoting racial understanding, and influencing social values. A shift is also apparent in the career aspirations of first-year students. The percentage of freshmen interested in business majors increased from 12% in 1966 to 25% in 1987, then dropped to 18% in 1990. Meanwhile, student interest in education is growing; 9% of first-year students now say they are interested in a teaching career, up from 5% in 1982.
It is interesting to note, however, that of the 382 institutions in the study, 55 were universities, 291 were four-year colleges, and 36, or about nine percent, were two-year colleges. Yet well over 50% of all undergraduate college students in the United States are enrolled in two-year institutions (Texas Association), as are 71% of all first- and second-year students in Texas public higher education (Texas Higher Education). If two-year institutions actually are teaching between 50% and 60% of freshmen and if the representation of two-year colleges in this study is typical, it is likely that the data influencing our curricular decisions are skewed.
This fact points to a compelling argument for not basing all our assumptions about the typical student on the UCLA studies, the yearly statistical profiles published in the Chronicle of Higher Education (“This Year's Freshmen”), or other, similar studies. A significant sector of the student body is not represented through the approach such studies use. Absent from or underrepresented in those statistics but very much present in the classrooms of America are two groups: students at community colleges and the growing number of “mature” students who are flocking to America's classrooms. Members of the second group are rarely classified as entering freshmen since they often have some prior college experience, though they may have acquired it twenty years earlier or perhaps in a different discipline or in a whole host of other scenarios.
Who then, are we going to be seeing in our classrooms in the next decade? What will the profile of the new “traditional” student took like? And what effect will that new generation of students have on our teaching? Perhaps more than ever before, the teaching methods in our classes will be determined not by the instructors but by the students sitting before them. Consider the following letter to the president of Tarrant County Junior College, Northeast Campus, from a sports columnist at an urban newspaper in Texas whose work led him back to the college classroom:
In the summer of 1992, I returned to college. While covering the Winter Olympic Games in Albertville, France, a few months before, I had discovered, with great disappointment and horror, that all that was left of my high school French was a series of grunts, present-tense verbs and one-syllable adjectives. After seventeen years away from a college campus, I was determined to remedy that. I was scared gruntless.
I was worried about what a forty-three-year-old college drop-in might encounter. Tests. Homework. Teenaged students. A snickering professor.
Nearly three years and six French courses later, I would find myself in my French professor's office, trying to juggle my work schedule to fit in more of her classes. In three years, she hadn't snickered once.
In my new classes, the emphasis clearly was on conversation. The textbook was always a guiding ally. But the professor's daily approach was to make us talk and think. We seemed to build our language blocks in class as we made simple conversation—in French—with one another.
Typically for that two-year institution, I was not the only “mature” student in my French classes. But whatever age or cultural barriers existed seemed to melt under the enjoyment of, for example, preparing for a make-believe job interview in French. Regularly assigned causeries forced the students to break off into small groups and prepare short interactive chats on a variety of topics to carry out real-world tasks.
As I said, I went back for more. I savored the class meetings. I was proud when I was able to telephone my friends in France and tell them—in halting, but determined French—all about my family, my new younger friends and my favorite teacher.
(LeBreton)
While the letter writer would be considered a nontraditional student in higher education circles, a more accurate look at changing demographics reveals how close he comes to being a traditional student of the twenty-first century.
A recent article in the College Board News reports that students over twenty-four are becoming the norm at United States colleges (Aslanian). Older students are entering college in record numbers: almost half of all college students today are over twenty-four, up from 30% in the 1970s. Moreover, 70% of these older students are enrolled in degree programs alongside younger students, not in special programs for older learners.Carol Aslanian, of Adult Learning Services at the College Board, comments that “if this trend continues, there will be 15 million adults enrolled in undergraduate and graduate programs by the year 2000.” She adds that “the surge in the adult college population reflects a need for skills and knowledge in order to enter, advance, and change careers.” Aslanian's observation suggests that this new genre of student is consumer-oriented, pragmatic, and goal-directed (1).
This new profile of the “mature” student is based on research conducted for the College Board by Policy Studies in Education, which screened more than 100,000 house-holds in all fifty states to locate persons over twenty-four who have returned to undergraduate or graduate study. More than 1,500 such persons were interviewed.
Their responses indicate that ninety percent are trying to gain new competencies to respond to the changing nature of their work, 30% are going to school full time while working and managing families, and 65% are women. Other findings indicate that older students are equally likely to take day and evening classes. At the undergraduate level, older students study business most often (being somewhat more pragmatic than their younger classmates). At the graduate level, the most popular major among older students is education. Half of older undergraduates attend four-year colleges, and half attend two-year colleges. Of students in the second group, many eventually transfer to four-year institutions (Aslanian 1).
Most “mature” students are looking for one or more of several things: to meet business demands, to upgrade their skills, to advance their careers, to complete a degree, to establish or maintain contact with another culture for business or personal reasons, or to gain personal enrichment. Some already have degrees, and many are not seeking a degree but instead have more specific and immediate needs. Consider a few of the students I had in class this last year:
an employee of a local pharmaceutical firm whose boss sent her to study French because the firm's major suppliers are French companies
a flight attendant with twenty years' experience at a major airline who now plans a new career teaching French and Spanish
an employee of a manufacturing company who needs to communicate daily with French-speaking counterparts at the company's plant in Montreal
a retired vice president for an international insurance company who has lived abroad for many years and wants to maintain the languages and cultural contacts he has acquired
a woman in her late twenties who returned to college ten years after flunking out and subsequently got a job in Monaco working as a nanny for a family that owns and publishes a newspaper
a retired pathologist from Columbia who now has time to refresh the French he studied as a youth
a nineteen-year-old single mother in love with all things French
her father, an emergency room physician and amateur wine maker who is taking French to share an experience with his daughter and to prepare for training at a French vineyard
a music professor with a PhD from the Eastman School of Music
a young part-time teacher in a private elementary school
the teacher's boyfriend, who works at a local gym while preparing for a career in international business
an ESL instructor who spends holidays visiting his son, a computer analyst working in Paris
a housewife and mother with a degree in French who wants to get teaching certification
a graduate teaching assistant in Spanish at a neighboring university who is taking French to satisfy her MA degree requirements
a housewife and mother impassioned with French cinema who is preparing for a career in film editing a consulting engineer who lived and worked in France
for three years, still works abroad extensively, and wants to refine the French he learned on the job in France but never studied formally
the sports columnist who wrote the letter I quote above
Many community college faculty members have found that older students have a favorable effect both on younger students in their classes and on the quality of instruction. William Giezkowski notes that as students in their midthirties and forties enter almost all areas of the curriculum, teachers who have had to adjust to this new audience find that their teaching has improved and that their classes are more dynamic (Giezkowski B3). Since older students tend to be more focused than younger ones on applying their learning and more motivated to complete their education, they serve as excellent role models for their younger classmates. As Giezkowski points out, veteran educators are discovering that older students “bring with them a sobering dose of pragmatism that cannot help but affect the learning environment. Their life experiences enrich classroom discussions and force both students and teachers to test theory against reality in a variety of disciplines, from ethics to business administration.”
Teachers are frequently surprised at how well students of different ages work cooperatively in groups, at how students self-group heterogenously by age, and at how well students of different ages working together take advantage of peer-tutoring opportunities. The career and life experiences of “mature” students can be valuable resources in group projects. Giezkowski advises that teachers who use cooperative learning strategies cast themselves as managers or supervisors of teams of students, transforming themselves, as educators like to say, from the sage on the stage to the guide on the side. Since project management is a format often familiar to older students, who may have encountered it in the workplace, older students are adept at helping the younger students set limited, manageable goals and complete tasks by assigned deadlines.
Along with the pleasures and advantages of having “mature” students in our classes come some new challenges. Giezkowski writes, “Some adult students continue to see professors as traditional authority figures. Others seem to require mentors and guides. A third group sees their instructors as equals whose expertise differs from their own. And sometimes the same student is looking for a little of each of these roles at different times during a course.” Clearly, the range of roles that the teacher assumes for older students is broader than that for traditional-aged college students.
Curriculum and course offerings will also likely be affected by efforts to accommodate the ever-increasing diversity of students' needs. Students of the new generation are consumer-oriented and demand convenience, accessibility, and flexibility for their busy schedules and relevance to their lives, for most see themselves as participants in a global economy and as members of a global community. Older learners have made us recognize the limitations of instructional material that focuses on the traditional notion of university life without taking into account the broader range of day-to-day experiences, such as those that occur in the workplace. In fact, in shifting our focus from the dorm to the workplace, we may reinforce the idea that language studies have realworld relevance and applications.
If instruction stresses the features of a language needed by all learners for everyday communication, the language and contexts might reflect business and social interactions common to the workplace. To further emphasize the real-world usefulness of language and culture study, lessons should be organized around a task-based set of objectives, just as workplace projects are. Rather than suggest that students will learn a collection of discrete, topically related functions, the instructor might present a task that comprises a series of functions, each a step toward accomplishment of the task.
Adult students often cannot afford a leisurely exploration of college courses. Time is the biggest constraint, especially for mid-career professionals, who may have work-related travel obligations or family and social commitments in addition to their course work and full-time jobs. In general, the more professors demonstrate an understanding of the time constraints the older student often faces, the more successful their classes will be.
Giezkowski suggests that professors should accept late assignments within specified limits without penalizing students. We need to be creative yet fair in setting and adjusting deadlines to adapt to the needs of responsible students while helping all students acquire good timemanagement habits. Instructors should emphasize from the beginning the importance of proper time management for achieving satisfactory work, and they can encourage students to come up with options for completing assignments within limits that are fair for all students. Some such options include sending in assignments by mail, on audio or video cassettes, or by e-mail. Those who miss class activities might be asked to prepare an oral presentation or a composition describing the obligation that prevented class attendance, for example, a business trip, a work project, or a child's illness. Accommodated students usually cooperate enthusiastically, often going far beyond the instructor's expectations, and the quality of their work will likely improve.
Teachers of working students need to pay particular attention to the pacing of classes. Many such students are likely to arrive in class after having worked an eight-hour day. (Those of us who teach morning classes are not exempt: I've had students come in after working night shifts as bartenders, security guards, postal workers, and so on.) Straight lecture puts these students to sleep immediately. Engaging, interactive activities keep them alert and assure them of the value of attending class even after long work hours. Because many classes offered especially for working students meet only once or twice a week for three or four hours, instructors may need to prepare several different segments of instruction for each class.
Many of these nontraditional students, who are becoming the norm rather than the exception in our classes, will not be language majors and may not have traditional goals for their language learning. They present us with the challenge of accommodating selective learning, of allowing students to meet personal objectives beyond the objectives of the course syllabus. Learners need to be guided to sources of special interest and encouraged to explore and practice material beyond what can be presented in the classroom.
Creative scheduling and creative adaptations of curriculum to meet the needs and interests of students can invigorate courses with new life and healthier enrollments. Instructors need to learn to color outside the lines when it comes to building a schedule and course offerings. What makes the three-credit course such a magical unit? Many now recognize the effectiveness of offering one-credit courses, both for classes that meet once a week, such as conversation, phonetics, and film courses, and for independent-study courses that entail a carefully designed systematic progression. Students can be given a whole menu of one- and two-unit bridge courses from which to make up a course of study that meets their needs and interests while fulfilling their degree requirements.
Combining convenience with new technologies can augment student interest in language courses, including electives offered as enhancement add-ons to core courses. Certain composition courses lend themselves to independent study, allowing students to send in assignments by e-mail and receive rapid feedback on their computers. For distance learners or for students who travel with their work, new technologies offer great possibilities. Students studying abroad can send their journal entries to their instructor back home by e-mail. Independent-study listening-comprehension courses can he based on video segments broadcast by satellite from countries of the target culture, and Internet pen-pal sites in different languages might prove useful in setting up a correspondence course for students.
A new independent-study one-credit course being offered on our campus called French on the Internet not only teaches students how to surf the Internet in search of sites in French or about French language and culture topics but also guides them in evaluating the sites for interest, effectiveness, and usefulness. The syllabus could be adapted to other languages.
Combining elements in a two- or three-credit course to reduce the required number of on-campus class meetings can make certain courses more accessible to students with time or transportation constraints. The class might meet as a whole one hour a week, then perhaps in small groups (with or without the instructor) for a second hour, and students might work individually (researching on the Internet or viewing satellite broadcasts) for the third hour. For a modified distance-learning course, a class might meet on campus for two hours once a week for the interactive component of the course, then engage in another three hours of television and computer activities. Giezkowski questions whether learning can realistically be measured in Carnegie units of seat time. With today's technology we can be much more creative with time than requiring that it all be clocked in the proverbial classroom seat.
As the twenty-first century approaches, we are headed for a most exciting time in higher education. It is a time that promises new horizons, a time that encourages, even demands, creative approaches to serving new student populations. The resources of new technology offer radically different ways to address student needs, to make our classrooms relevant to contemporary society, and to invigorate instruction.
The author is Associate Professor of French and Spanish and Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages at Tarrant County Junior College, Northeast Campus, Texas. This article is based on her presentation at ADFL Summer Seminar West, 6–9 June 1996, in San Diego, California.
Aslanian, Carol. “Students over Twenty-Four Becoming the Norm at U.S. Colleges.” College Board News May-June 1996: 1.
Dey, Eric L., Alexander W. Astin, and William S. Korn. The American Freshman: Twenty-Five Year Trends . Los Angeles: U of California Cooperative Institutional Research Inst., 1991.
Giezkowski, William. “The Influx of Older Students Can Revitalize Teaching.” Chronicle of Higher Education 25 Mar. 1992: B3–B4. LeBreton, Gil. Letter to Herman Crow. 10 Mar. 1996.
Texas Association of Community Colleges. “Texas Association of Community Colleges Report to College Presidents of Texas.” Unpublished report, 1996.
Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board Community and Technical Colleges Committee. Unpublished report, 1996.
“This Year's Freshmen: A Statistical Profile.” Chronicle of Higher Education 13 Jan. 1993: A30–A31.
© 1997 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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