28, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 46-47
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A Hispanist's View of the Boom in Spanish Enrollments
Daniel Eisenberg
THE 1996 ADFL Summer Seminar devoted a session to the challenge the profession faces from growing Spanish enrollments and concomitantly declining enrollments in other languages. In response to the call for comments, I offer my thoughts as someone who has managed Spanish enrollments at a large university in the Southeast for several years. I'm glad to be in Spanish and would not want to change places with anybody. My purpose in writing, however, is to show, for whatever perspective or consolation my comments may bring, that Spanish is no bed of roses either.
Not only is a large program more complex to manage than a small one, excess of demand for classes is at least as problematic as an excess of supply. While there is no shortage of literary scholars with the doctorate, there is a shortage of the part-time, ill-paid faculty members used to staff Spanish language classes in every large program I know of. As a result, we often scramble even for marginally trained instructors to put in front of classes. It is much more common for French or German language classes to be taught by a professor with the terminal degree.
Spanish classes are of course larger than classes in other languages. Typically all sections of basic Spanish classes are full, and we have a line of students asking to be admitted to the full sections. We are not happy to be turning students away.
Teachers of these sections notice the striking difference in size between their classes and those of other languages and wonder why they teach as many as thirty students while a French or German instructor sometimes teaches far fewer. This problem is magnified when, as often happens, a tenured faculty member in French or German teaches basic language courses for a professor's salary, $6,000 or more per course. Yet the Spanish language instructor, teaching material of the same level, is paid $2,500 for a sometimes much larger class. The Spanish teachers understandably want whoever is in charge to do something about this unfair situation, yet one can do little, at least in the short term.
The larger average size of the Spanish class reduces the time the instructor has for interaction with each student. The quality of instruction suffers, and instructors burn out. It follows that the student's experience is poorer and that students are frustrated. Even with the best efforts of everyone involved, the average student in a Spanish language class receives poorer instruction (less attention from the instructor) than the average student in a less-taught language class.
Of course we are not happy or complacent about this state of affairs. We in Spanish want the experience our students have to be every bit as good as that of students studying other languages. We struggle to bring down class sizes, to find well-qualified instructors, and to get fair pay for our instructors. Yet the current situation is a reality we must acknowledge.
The other unhappy facet of the increased demand for Spanish instruction is the students' goals. If students sought to better themselves intellectually, to expand their horizons, and to obtain a liberal education, the boom in Spanish would not have occurred, since study of another major language would also serve. Many students who now take Spanish do not seek self-improvement or learning for its own sake. The goal of the majority is entirely utilitarian: they choose Spanish because it will enhance their career prospects. This does not make for a high-level atmosphere in the classroom. Because those who need Spanish for career purposes are seeking primarily to talk with persons they come in contact with on the job, there follows what I view as an overemphasis on oral skills. My special interest is the teaching of reading proficiency, which is in my view the gateway to knowledge, culture, and self-education. I do not recall a student who has specifically sought instruction in reading Spanish except to satisfy a graduate school language requirement.
The goal of the students I am most familiar with is not usually to communicate with people residing in the Spanish-speaking countries, who speak and write in a standard, educated register. Whether these students can articulate their goal or not, it is to communicate with a heterogeneous body of Hispanics in a predominantly English-speaking country. This further complicates the task of the overworked Spanish instructor. Hispanics in the United States come from an extremely wide variety of geographical, socioeconomic, and educational backgrounds. Those with little or no education may use dialectal or colloquial Spanish. The normative speaker needs special skills to speak with such a target population. This counterintuitive reality is seldom acknowledged in language texts or by the profession. Since the students do not realize how high their goals for Spanish learning really are, they may emerge from their basic classes feeling frustrated and unfulfilled.
The student who studies Italian, Russian, French, or German has made a greater commitment to language study than the typical student of Spanish has. The students who crowd our Spanish classes have the most prosaic of motivations: they value Spanish as a job credential. Many, perhaps most, are not very interested in the Spanish language or in Hispanic culture; some would be just as happy taking Swedish or Pashto, if those languages promised to help their careers. One is therefore typically faced with a class full of students who are not particularly interested in the subject. It is a challenge to maintain one's morale when faced with such a class, and the lack of enthusiasm is a drain on those students who are truly interested.
We who became Hispanists made a commitment not to the language alone but to the culture. Some aspect of it moved us or captivated us or fit so well with some interest of ours that we made a lifelong commitment to Hispanism. Yet the boom in Spanish language courses has not been accompanied by a parallel boom in other kinds of Spanish courses; enrollments in those other kinds of classes have increased at a much slower rate or even declined. The proportion of students in the Spanish classroom who share our enthusiasm for Hispanic culture or even for the beautiful Spanish language itself has thus dropped markedly. Spanish is for many just something one needs to take, like it or not: a chore.
So a final word for those who teach languages with declining enrollments. We understand your anguish over the future of study of your languages and are glad to be spared it. Yet there are at least some aspects of your situation that we envy. You can sometimes participate in university activities that we cannot allow ourselves. You have more opportunities to experiment with new and sometimes expensive technologies and pedagogies, which may enhance your students' learning experiences. You are also freer to expand the scope of your curricula to include courses in literature in translation, cross-disciplinary work, general education courses in culture and literature, honors seminars, and the like. More free time, small classes, committed students, interest in culture—it sounds utopian, viewed from our rough-and-tumble comer of the academy.
Northern Arizona University
© 1997 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 28, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 46-47 |
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