29, no. 3 (Spring 1998): 1-2
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From the Editor
Elizabeth B. Welles
THE field of foreign language study is on a collision course with some of the major national developments in higher education. These developments include the perception of the high cost of a college education in relation to faculty “productivity,” access for larger numbers and more demographically diverse students, the threat to tenure and to tenure-track lines posed by reliance on part-time faculty members, the relation of graduate programs to the job market and to undergraduate education, and the relation of undergraduate education to high school programs. Some of the stress to the system occurs because the large classes many administrations demand in the interest of fiscal responsibility are simply educationally unsound for foreign language teaching. Courses at the higher levels, usually in literature, are particularly vulnerable to cuts because, being staffed by high-ranking professors and enrolling few students, they are expensive. Meanwhile introductory courses in the most commonly taught languages (especially Spanish) are typically overcrowded; thus the need for part-time faculty members is unavoidable. When there are not enough faculty members to staff the classes with the largest enrollments, administrators cannot help questioning what the full-time tenured professors, who are often professors of literature, should be teaching. As foreign language departments, particularly in languages other than Spanish, strive to maintain their position on campus, they revise curricula in the light of student interests, which may be vocational or interdisciplinary, and consider their students' finances, home language, and geographic location. These revisions often mean more courses with a cultural bent, more courses that accommodate preprofessional students, more courses in English, more courses that depend on electronic media. Such changes mean not that the curriculum is watered down but that it must be beefed up, and professors find themselves faced with the need to teach an array of specialties for which they were not prepared in graduate school.
The essays in this issue of the Bulletin touch on various parts of this problem. Guadalupe Valdés investigates the nuances of the way the idea of the near-native speaker is constructed and embedded in departmental culture. Such a notion has a profound effect on how we prepare graduate students for their future teaching responsibilities and on how search committees regard the language proficiency of job candidates. Pennylyn Dykstra-Pruim approaches graduate preparation for the job market by urging departments to help their students think through a career portfolio and to support mentoring programs for new faculty members. Dale Huffman explores the effect of multidisciplinarity on the preparation of PhDs who will seek jobs teaching German.
Daniel Eisenberg, Karen Hardy Cárdenas, and Dave McAlpine have met the challenges of fiscal downsizing and student access through technology and creative restructuring. Eisenberg describes the trials and tribulations of developing a distance-learning system to reach students who would not otherwise have access to language instruction. He reminds us that despite the difficulties, the profession needs to turn the powers of this vast resource to its advantage. In one instance, faced with the possible extinction of postsecondary French programs in South Dakota, three universities worked with a board of regents to deliver instruction among the universities using interactive television. Cárdenas points out that such cooperative programs create a new sense of institutional identity, redefine faculty roles, depend on technological systems that may be inadequate, and necessitate training faculty members to use new technology effectively. While recognizing that the possibility of building strong language programs is preferable to the possibility of having no language programs at all, she cautions that such arrangements are not a quick fix for courses with low enrollments. McAlpine shows how in responding to an administrative directive about downsizing, he came up with a new structure for language teaching and international programs on his campus. His new department is now the sum of ten different parts and has much greater visibility on campus than any of the pieces did before they were put together. In an innovative move, Les Essif explores “the pedagogical benefits of a creative performative approach to the dramatic text within the context of the foreign language theater practicum.” Students gain a vivid appreciation of the creative process of literature through participation in production that combines two texts and exploits theories of reader interpretation and reception.
The rest of this issue is a continuation of the forum of opinion generated by Dorothy Jame's Spring 1997 article “Bypassing Traditional Leadership: Who's Minding the Store?”; it adds five responses to the nineteen published in the Winter 1998 Bulletin . The last “polemical and provocative” contribution is from James herself. She urges members of the MLA, ADFL, and the profession at large to look at the lines of demarcation in the field and in the organizations to which they belong in preparation for long-range planning and structural revisions. What were the expectations we had as editors in soliciting and publishing such a forum? Exactly what James suggests: that “people will sit down in many rooms in many places and be provoked by our comments into speaking their minds.”
It is impossible to leave this column without making some attempt to describe the conference for our project “High School to College in Foreign Language Programs.” Readers of the Bulletin know that the MLA's office of foreign language programs, with the help of the MLA Advisory Committee on Foreign Languages and Literatures, has supported the development of coherent sequences of languages learning, focusing special attention on the transition between secondary and postsecondary course work. The conference was the first step in an initiative intended to create a dialogue among the various stakeholders and to bring together representatives of eight new secondary-postsecondary articulation projects with participants in twelve established articulation efforts, who will mentor the new teams. Each team was represented by a high school teacher, a college teacher, and an administrator. Also present were about twenty representatives of a coalition of foreign language organizations, whose charge is to publicize the enterprise and to promote articulation efforts within their own associations.
One aspect of this conference seemed unique to me and to David Goldberg, the project's codirector, was that it convened in a national forum groups that primarily work locally and professionals from all levels of the educational system—elementary and secondary school teachers, supervisors, and administrators; regional and state language program supervisors; two- and four-year college and university instructors, professors, and administrators; and representatives of ten national language organizations (Arabic, Chinese, East European and Slavic, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Russian, and Spanish and Portuguese). Evaluations suggested that participants valued the opportunity to talk with colleagues from different sectors of the field. Some participants, especially those in the less commonly taught languages, reported relishing contact with other teachers who felt as isolated as they did in their schools; there were also comments about the usefulness of being able to discuss the problems of heritage learners across languages like Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic. Issues highlighted in the various sessions were by no means resolved, but the conversation was by most accounts provocative and edifying.
The three general areas that elicited the most commentary were articulation networks, assessment and placement, and curriculum. One recurring discussion centered on the importance of relationships in articulation projects and the recognition that building trust and maintaining lines of communication take time and patience. Experienced hands often stressed that articulation has qualities of an evolutionary, almost geological, process. The centrality of assessment in articulation efforts was explored from a number of perspectives. Topics discussed included achievements testing as the basis for college placement; the ongoing evaluation of interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational modes of language learning; and assessment as a motivation for curricular and pedagogical reform. The mixed blessings of student self-assessment were also aired. Participants agreed that curricular reform is the most difficult aspect of articulation, the aspect that has thus far eluded most if not all articulation efforts. But curricular issues can be identified, and the group tackled this preliminary task effectively. Among the issues targeted were the need to formalize developmentally appropriate goals for each stage of learning, the importance of creating a curriculum that allows students to build toward future challenges and to capitalized on prior learning; the crucial need for content appropriate to age, institution, and culture; and the necessity of continuous language instruction throughout the curriculum (as Heidi Byrnes said epigrammatically, “content from the beginning and language to the end”). And inextricably tied to the curriculum, the group seemed to agree, is the centrality of improving the rate and extent of language learning at all levels, including teachers-preparation programs. Over the next year the new teams will be working with their mentors to build their own enterprises and will be tackling the challenges that arise as the tectonic plates of high school and college cultures gradually begin to form continents.
© 1998 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 29, no. 3 (Spring 1998): 1-2 |
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