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While literary history and criticism have always dominated language departments, especially those offering graduate work, the need to integrate advanced and graduate courses and faculty in linguistics and language pedagogy (both in the broadest sense) can hardly be questioned.
Raymond Gay-Crosier
DURING the last ten years it appears that this supposedly unquestionable statement about the organization of foreign language programs has not only been repeatedly challenged but also been contradicted by the evolution of many language programs. Ten years ago no one could have guessed the difficult times ahead for foreign language programs in many American institutions of higher education. Since then many departments of foreign languages and literatures have been eliminated or have fallen victim to budgetary retrenchments imposed by university administrations forced to curtail academic offerings as a result of reduced revenues or grants. When the budgetary cuts are less radical, it is often the linguistic section of a foreign languages and literatures departments that is eliminated. It may also be the department of linguistics that is dismantled, the very department that was formerly the privileged partner of the foreign languages department in offering introductory courses on phonetics, syntax, morphology, semantics, pragmatics, or second language acquisition to graduate and undergraduate students.
Academic units devoted to linguistics have been a favorite target for budget cutters mostly because linguistics as a discipline has no natural constituency to lobby against cuts. Linguistics belongs to everyone and thus appears to be no one's particular parish. It is therefore even easier to eliminate linguistics offerings than to trim less frequently taught languages in a foreign languages department. An Italian community or a university community of scholars interested, for example, in medieval and Renaissance studies will argue against suppressing Italian on campus, Latin American specialists will argue against the elimination of Portuguese, and so on. Mostly for these reasons linguistics has recently been condemned to a slow death on American campuses. Often faculty members in departments of foreign languages and literatures have been the objective accomplices of this academic cleansing when one would have expected instead that they would have been choice advocates for maintaining linguistics on campus and would have been best able to argue the centrality of linguistics (cognitive, formal, and applied) to the entire educational enterprise.
Articulated language is unique to the human race, and language is the unique means by which human knowledge is stored and transmitted. Whether language is a humble tool or a magic wand, one would therefore expect that knowledge about it (knowledge of its nature, function, use, etc.) would be the premier domain studied by any human being, before any physical or social science. Since language is at the core of the human experience, common sense dictates that to be more human, we cultivate and develop our knowledge of language. In terms of educational philosophy, it also dictates that rather than eliminate departments of linguistics, we construct a strong curriculum in linguistics mandatory for all students. Such a curriculum would help students better understand verbal presentations on all other cognitive disciplines and would also help them as citizens to recognize when they are verbally manipulated by a new Gorgias. I know that this curricular suggestion is probably idealistic, and I will not pursue it further in an abstract manner, because the purpose of this essay is, rather, to assess the ambiguous relation between linguistics and the teaching of foreign languages and to chronicle the unfortunate demise of linguistics in the field of foreign language teaching.
At one time—still, in a few institutions of higher education—future high school or university teachers had to take courses in phonetics, syntax, morphology, semantics, pragmatics, and sometimes stylistics to earn teaching credentials or a research university degree. Long hours were devoted to acquiring a descriptive vocabulary and defining linguistic components (verb, auxiliary, adjective, verb phrase, prepositional phrase, etc.). Unfortunately this distributional knowledge was often an end in itself, and the descriptive knowledge was not translated into functional knowledge. As a result, students' verbal capacity in manipulating foreign languages did not improve. Consequently, a student whose linguistic description was perfect could earn an excellent grade on a foreign language exam without demonstrating performative ability in the foreign language. Because methods based on formal linguistic knowledge often had disappointing results in teaching practical use of a foreign language, distrust arose between linguists and language teachers. Linguistically superior textbooks, such as the one Alex Hull et al. published in 1967 for the intermediate and advanced levels of French, were resounding publishing flops. In the early 1960s, the United States' growing involvement in world affairs increased the need for Americans with working knowledge of a foreign language. Through civilian and military grants, the American government supported many projects proposed by linguists. Most of this research had applied goals (automatic translation, performative ability, speed learning, etc.). In these programs, description and competence (i.e., formal grammar) were deemed less important than performance and speaking ability.
Fueled by Chomsky's work, which started within the framework of this movement (automatic translation principles), the field of linguistics became more complex and more specialized. Strangely, then, as the French linguist Claude Hagège (professor at the prestigious Collège de France) has demonstrated, the linguistic research of the 1960s and 1970s, which aimed to make foreign languages more accessible, produced an extremely specialized body of knowledge and created an arcane vocabulary that was difficult to transfer to the basic linguistic training of future foreign language and literature teachers. Generative phonetics and generative semantics can certainly be considered the gravediggers of general linguistics as it was taught in departments of foreign languages and literatures. As a result of the specialization of the field of linguistics in the United States, linguistic instruction in departments of foreign languages and literatures diverged from the teaching of linguistics in departments of linguistics. Thus, it became difficult for departments of foreign languages and literatures to hire linguists trained in departments of linguistics. Reciprocally, for linguists trained in departments of linguistics, working in a department of foreign languages and literatures often meant directing few or no theses, teaching mostly repetitive and introductory courses, and having no real possibility for research in the field of specialization. At the same time, graduate programs in foreign languages and literatures, often having lost their linguistic section during the mid or late 1970s, were no longer capable of producing PhDs with a specialization in general linguistics, who could have been the ideal candidates for linguist positions in those departments. This attrition, combined with the perceived irrelevance of linguists trained in departments of linguistics, led in the early 1980s to a disastrous situation. Departments of foreign languages and literatures that felt the need to maintain linguistics as a component of graduate and undergraduate curricula were confronted with the impossibility of recruiting new specialists to replace retiring linguists who had been hired in the 1950s or 1960s.
The disappearance of linguists trained to teach linguistics in departments of foreign languages and literatures is of dramatic importance to the way foreign languages are taught at the university level. It is, however, not only this demographic condition that has accelerated the progressive disaffection toward (and thus lack of support for) linguistics in departments of foreign languages and literatures; other potent factors are also at work in the elimination of linguistics as a necessary component of foreign language and literature curricula.
In the mid and late 1960s the theoretical avant-garde movement in the humanities known as structuralism was established on a linguistically scientific base. The founding principles—Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of the sign and Emile Benveniste's theory of discourse—were borrowed from linguistic works. Critical vocabulary in the field of literary studies first metaphorized linguistic technical terms ( syntagm, paradigm, signifier, seme, connotation , etc.) to produce a specialized critical vocabulary. Literature specialists gratefully relied on their linguist colleagues to provide the necessary lexical and theoretical background to this new critical trend. Other disciplines in the social sciences, such as anthropology, psychoanalysis, sociology, economics, and so on also borrowed many operative concepts from linguistics to revitalize themselves and to add a functional component to overwhelmingly descriptive works. Linguistics unfortunately found its destiny inextricably linked, for better or for worse, to that of structuralism. Thus, when this approach began to be criticized and when an era of theoretical doubt known as poststructuralism followed, it was mainly the linguistic model that was blamed. Fredric Jameson's The Prison-House of Language exemplifies this dissatisfaction with linguistics as a model for literary and social studies. Although one may say that only one type of linguistics (then already discarded by most linguists) should have been blamed, not the whole field, linguistics nevertheless lost its leading status and the direct interest of literature faculties. Other disciplines such as psycho-analysis and anthropology, which had naturalized linguistic components and operations in their conceptual vocabularies, filled the vacuum left by the collapse of linguistics as a model for analytical discourse.
Certainly, there are positive ways to counter any exaggerated gap that might exist between linguistics and literature in a department of foreign languages and literatures. One way to reconcile these two modes of textual analysis is to approach any text as a type of verbal expression. For example, although the formal teaching of phonetics and phonology has often disappeared as a requirement for the undergraduate major or for graduate degrees, it should not be too difficult to include in any literary class the reading aloud of important passages. This exercise would allow verification and correction of oral competence, text reconstitution, semantic analysis of words and sentences, and so on and should also provide helpful ways for the literary teacher to ensure better comprehension of literary discourse.
In the early 1960s linguists were commonly in charge of training and supervising teaching assistants in departments of foreign languages and literatures that had graduate programs. In large departments it was usual even to have a colleague in linguistics whose sole responsibility was the training of teaching assistants as teachers of foreign languages and whose research competence was based on producing successful language textbooks for undergraduates or high school students. Examples included French linguists such as Genevieve Delattre (Univ. of Colorado; Univ. of California, Santa Barbara), Alex Hull (Duke Univ.), Robert Politzer (Columbia Univ., Stanford Univ.), and Michio Peter Hagiwara (Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor), all of whom had been trained in departments of linguistics or in departments of foreign languages and literatures and had, like the graduate students they trained, received a PhD. Thus they were familiar with the goals of graduate programs and with the nature of scholarly research. Because of the recent disappearance of linguists from foreign languages and literatures departments, it is now rarely a linguist who is in charge of training and supervising teaching assistants or teaching fellows.
Increasingly, in my opinion, since the mid 1980s personnel in charge of the language programs in departments of foreign languages and literatures have been trained not in departments of foreign languages but in foreign language teaching programs in schools of education and have received PhEds or MEds. When a director of this new type is hired, the position is often transformed. The tenure-track line disappears, and, often with the dean's benediction, the position becomes contractual. In these years of budgetary restrictions, most tenure-track faculty members agree to such changes, because the liberated tenure line can be opened for a specialist in literature or in cultural studies.
Such changes automatically reduce the centrality of the linguist in the language program. There is no longer a linguist involved in the selection of undergraduate textbooks and no longer a linguist who can recommend his or her own courses as a necessary basis for strengthening graduate students' linguistic competence.
In addition, linguists cannot count on the support of new directors, whose training is based more on specialized and applied disciplines such as teaching methodology, pedagogy, second language acquisition, communication methods, statistics, and so on than on linguistics. Also, as this new personnel has little knowledge of formal and cognitive linguistics, they are less likely to stress to teaching assistants the importance of a solid formation in this discipline. Because linguistics is absent from the formal training of teaching assistants, it appears superfluous in the domain of language teaching as well.
Worse yet, training in schools of education has taught these new coordinators of language programs that a department of foreign languages and literatures has long been the worst place to learn a foreign language and that the culprit is too great a reliance, pedagogically speaking, on the formal training provided by linguistics, which emphasizes the elements of the language system itself. Thus, any linguist, as the most likely agent of this type of approach and as the incarnation of a failed tradition, should be distanced as much as possible from the training of teaching assistants. This type of initial opposition seems to render the possibility of desirable intradepartmental collaboration between the linguist, if there still is one, and the coordinator of languages courses almost impossible. In a program in foreign language and literature seeking excellence, neither can function alone; they should collaborate in creating a specialized track in foreign language studies involving training in linguistics, methodology, and second language acquisition. Such a track would entice undergraduate students eager to improve their language competence and should be mandatory for graduate students, who likely will start a university career in a department of foreign languages and literatures by teaching language courses and who, despite the current restrictions, could thus apply for positions involving language course coordination and teaching assistant supervision.
In certain institutions, faculty members in departments of foreign languages and literatures have for years been treated as second-class citizens by colleagues in other disciplines who considered them to be teaching not content courses but skill courses. Thus, to reinforce our image as full-fledged faculty members, we have constantly emphasized the teaching of literature among our departmental activities. In so doing, departments of foreign languages and literatures, whose primary legitimacy as a separate domain in the educational system is grounded in the teaching of foreign languages , have placed everyone involved in language teaching in a subaltern position, especially linguists. This subaltern relation has existed, nevertheless, only for the sake of institutional appearance, since the literature faculty needs a solid language program to produce students capable of entering upper-level literature courses with solid linguistic skills, including some, such as reading competence—in an analytical sense—that must be built up in the language curriculum early on, no later than at the intermediate level. Now, however, from high schools to research universities, the importance of literature as the cornerstone of teaching foreign languages is challenged, and many colleagues no longer affirm that language programs should be conceived teleologically, so that the capacity to read L'étranger or Cien años de solidad is the ultimate goal of the educational process. The goal, today, is increasingly presented as a result of the interest in cultural studies. The notion is vague and can cover a variety of enterprises such as a course on French cuisine (with dégustation! ) or a study of the historical conditions and modalities of the Spanish Civil War. Literature, then, finds itself part of the general cultural framework, and the goal of the program is establishing language proficiency or language competency, that allows a nonnative speaker to function adequately in a foreign cultural context, to “transact business,” as Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Preparing for the Twenty-First Century would put it. This newly defined goal favors communication and cultural studies rather than knowledge of the nature and function of a language, since it emphasizes the functionality of skills. It treats language not as a complex domain that is central to all types of exchanges (cultural or other) but as an assortment of tools that can be called on according to the communicative task at hand. Characteristically, for example, in discussing the language system—the term system is, however, correct— Standards for Foreign Language Learning mentions only reference books on proficiency (what does it mean to know a language?) and proposes only a detailed schema of all the communicative modes followed by a short note: “knowledge of the linguistic system: The use of grammatical, lexical, phonological, semantic, pragmatic, and discourse features necessary for participation in the Communicative Modes” (33, fig. 4). A vast project, indeed, but no mention is made of how and when this language system is to be taught.
For the reasons mentioned above, we have seen the progressive disappearance of linguistics as a central component in the domain of language teaching. Many global and local factors explain why departments of foreign languages and literatures considered the most distinguished in the United States no longer offer a formal plan of study in linguistics to their undergraduate and graduate students. Without further reflection on the educational consequences of such a loss, many university foreign language faculty members have simply dispassionately accepted the conditions that shape the conventional thinking leading to the slow death of formal and cognitive linguistics. Even if these colleagues are actively involved in the drastic changes that are shaping curricula, they have failed to provide leadership in establishing the means to integrate the teaching of the language system into the recommended new communicative and cultural framework.
One may be philosophical about this situation and consider it another manifestation of the general rule Tout passe, tout casse, et tout lasse , which suggests that something else will fill the void left by linguistics in our programs. When philology started to disappear, there must have been a stray philologist somewhere who, like me today, tried to signal the impending death of another discipline, and when Napoléon decided in 1802 to abolish speculative “hypersciences” such as semiotics, he immediately created political science, economics, and so on.
However, the situation today is more serious. Philology was replaced by linguistics, and the introduction of political science and economics was not detrimental to rhetoric. In modern times there has always been a sense that to train better scholars, to train better citizens, any curriculum must include a study of the exceptional capacity on which our entire species has built up its physiologic specificity. Regardless of the natural or artificial nature of what has become the principle resource in our human experience, it seems that our educational system should devote a central place to the common understanding of the nature and function of language.
This situation, however, is potentially lethal for foreign language and literature programs where more than mere expert command of language is required. Language study is a necessary component of the training, at every level, of those who teach or will teach in departments of foreign languages and literatures.
After the precipitous unchallenged changes of the last ten years, it is time to determine how a specific and specialized study of the language system, both as cognitive and cultural vehicle, can be reestablished in the curricula of our departments of foreign languages and literatures, more particularly in the training of our graduate students. For our own sake, as Raymond Gay-Crosier recommended twelve years ago, we need to develop new ways to integrate linguistic studies in our core undergraduate and graduate curricula. Furthermore, our departments, which should include both a formal and descriptive linguist and a specialist in applied linguistics and foreign language pedagogy, should seek collaborative projects with other programs or schools. The goal should be to detail the conditions, the methods, and the type of responsible curriculum needed to reintroduce a working knowledge of the linguistic system as a basis of our global educational enterprise. If we do not make this effort to enhance our specificity and our legitimacy on campus, the word language will become meaningless in the titles of our departments. Thus, departments of foreign languages and literatures, if they still exist, will be known on campuses only for their entertaining, exotic, and picturesque interactive cultural activities—an image that unfortunately is already taking shape in the minds of too many university administrators.
The author is Professor of Romance Studies, Literature, and Linguistics in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University.
Gay-Crosier, Raymond. “Reshaping Foreign Language Programs: Implications for Department Chairs.” ADFL Bulletin 19.1 (1987): 3–7. [Show Article]
Hagège, Claude. La grammaire générative: Réflexions critiques. Paris: PUF, 1976.
Hull, Alex, et al. Le français: Langue écrite et langue parlée. New York: McGraw, 1967.
Jameson, Fredric. The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972.
National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project. Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Preparing for the Twenty-First Century. Yonkers: Natl. Standards in Foreign Lang. Educ. Project, 1996.
© 1998 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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