30, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 41-42
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The Imperative of Integrating Language Instruction with Instruction in Other
Fields
Richard J. Wood
THE future of both college-level foreign language instruction and the traditional liberal arts is uncertain. Both are under attack; the relevance of both is questioned. Since the best defense is good offense, we might respond by reasserting the traditional arguments for learning foreign languages; first, that to know only one language is to be culturally deficient and, second, that such a limitation is a weakness in dealing with the global business world—that a second or third language, learned to sufficient competency, changes the way one approaches unfamiliar languages and cultures. The Schlumberger corporation has institutionalized a model we might wish more corporations used; it asks that every employee whose native language is English master at least one other language and that every employee whose native language is not English master English. The corporation wants all its executives to demonstrate that they can live and work anywhere in the world. (More detail on Schlumberger's program can be found in Educational Exchange and Global Competence , published by the Council for International Educational Exchange and available from ERIC).
To make this offense more convincing, and to strengthen the case for both sides, we need fuller integration of language learning with the liberal arts. We need more experiments with language-across-the-curriculum approaches, such as those at Earlham, Connecticut, and Saint Olaf Colleges, and with language-intensive study-abroad programs that quickly get students to advanced intermediate or advanced levels of competency. We need to evaluate programs and instructors, at least in part, on the basis of the percentage of students who go on to higher levels of proficiency. There are signs of change; at Yale we now have a task force rethinking language instruction.
To achieve our goals, we also need to rethink the relationship between language competency and the study of belles lettres. I am not satisfied with either the traditional, still too-often institutionalized, assumption that appropriate collegiate instruction beyond the elementary stage should focus on imaginative literature or the contrary assumption that we should focus on business Japanese to the neglect of literature and high culture. We learned at Earlham that an anthropological approach—teaching basic ethnography and implementing it in study-abroad programs—accelerated the move from elementary- to intermediate-level comprehension and enhanced cultural learning. We also learned that intermediate-level courses are most effective if they build on the students' other academic and professional interests, not only because students are better motivated but also because such focus ameliorates the frustrating vocabulary hunt that characterizes traditional literature-based intermediate courses. In my ideal curriculum, students who do not learn a second language in elementary and secondary school would receive an intensive course of a maximum of one year in their first year of undergraduate study and then do a language- and culture-intensive study-abroad program of at least eight months, so that all intermediate instruction at the college level would lead to study abroad.
Literature in the target language should be studied at the advanced level, where the basic communicative skill and vocabulary can be assumed. I use as an example my own Japanese experience. To be fairly fluent in Japanese without knowing a good bit of Japanese literature, history, and religious and philosophical thought is in fact not to be very fluent in the subtleties of the language. One phrase learned early by every student of Japanese is shikata ga nai ‘nothing can be done.’ But that phrase has deep Buddhist overtones and is rooted in other expressions that link perception and sensitivity to a kind of resignation—as in the term kannen , which can mean either apprehension or resignation.
A global future has to be a multilingual future, especially as English becomes the universal language of commerce and the Internet. Recognizing that there are, and will continue to be, many Englishes—such is the fate of a lingua franca—we in the United States need to integrate the study of languages other than English into the study of other disciplines—and to do so at the advanced levels, to include in the mastery of languages other than English competence in literature, broadly understood. Language departments that build curricula to achieve these goals, working in cooperation with colleagues in the humanities, engineering, the arts, and the natural and social sciences, will thrive.
The author is Dean of the Yale Divinity School. This article is based on his presentation at the 1997 MLA convention in Toronto, Ontario.
© 1999 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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