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<p class=MsoNormal>Tis item from last May may be of interest (just came across
it)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>Inside Higher Ed<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><a
href="http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/05/05/straight">http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/05/05/straight</a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>May 5<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>‘But Where Does That Leave French?’<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>By H. Stephen Straight<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>The United Nations General Assembly has proclaimed 2008 the
International Year of Languages. Koïchiro Matsuura, director-general of UNESCO,
has said: “Languages are indeed essential to the identity of groups and
individuals and to their peaceful coexistence. They constitute a strategic
factor of progress towards sustainable development and a harmonious
relationship between the global and the local context.” To achieve these
goals, cultures and languages can and should play a central role at all levels
of education. The United States, in particular, must abandon its exclusive
short-range, 9/11-sparked, tactical emphasis on just-in-time,
emergency-responsive study of specific languages to meet economic challenges
and security crises. In its place, the U.S. needs to establish a longer-range
strategic emphasis on the study of cultures, and widespread educational use of
languages, to prevent such crises from occurring in the first place.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>How do we achieve these goals? Should we restore and expand
upon the pattern of high school and college language instruction that existed
in my youth, when four times as many college students studied “foreign
languages”? Well, yes, but the world has changed since then. The
world’s children, including children in the U.S., need higher levels of
competency and competency in a larger number of “world languages”
than have ever appeared in any country’s standard curriculum.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>The present essay lays out a position to which I have
gradually and grudgingly been arriving over my nearly 50-year career as a
student and teacher of languages and cultures. I was spurred to express this
position publicly by recent global and national initiatives in the area of
language education but also by an e-mail I received nearly a year ago:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>I teach French, Spanish, and an Intro to World Languages
class at a public middle school in a rural community in Virginia. I am eager to
understand the current Foreign Language trends in the U.S. and am puzzled by
the decreasing enrollment in specifically French classes. I am trying to
promote the necessity of French as an essential international language, but is
my thinking back in the dark ages?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>I understand the rise of Spanish in light of the USA’s
changing demographics, and the wave of Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese with
regard to global commerce and homeland security, BUT WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE
FRENCH? Do you believe the need for French in the American classroom will
continue to decline and become obsolete?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>What follows is my latest, fullest response to this
question, which I have been pondering ever since.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>French was the first language I studied and the one I
studied to the highest level academically. My Francophile father spent a year
in Tours after he retired to enhance his fluency in the language; my mother
chose French to fulfill her doctoral-level language requirement; my sister
majored in French; and I have cited and written about French scholarship in my
publications as an academic linguist. Despite having studied a half dozen other
languages since, and lived for nearly a year and half in Mexico using Spanish
(and Yucatec Maya) daily, plus another year using Romanian in Bucharest, French
is still the language other than English in which I am the most literate,
however outdated and rusty my knowledge.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>Despite this deep-seated allegiance, I do regretfully
conclude that the recent and projected continuing decline of French as one of
the most widely studied languages in the U.S. is both inevitable and
appropriate. My late father would be distressed to hear me say this, but, as
director of international admissions at the University of Michigan in the
‘50s and ‘60s, he probably saw it coming himself.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>Last November’s Modern Language Association enrollment
update provides an authoritative overview of where languages currently stand in
U.S. higher education. Although college modern-language course enrollments as a
proportion of total enrollments are still little better than half of what they
were in the 1960’s (8.6 percent in 2006 compared with 16.5 in 1965), they
have grown steadily along with college enrollments overall during the last
decade (from 7.7 percent to 8.6), and world language demographics and increased
global awareness have shifted college-level language enrollments heavily away
from the previous near-monopoly of the Big Three of previous generations
(French, German, Spanish). Although Spanish increased its share from 32 to 52
percent. French went from 34 percent to 13 percent, while German dropped from
19 to 6 percent.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>In the last near-decade (1998-2006), although the Big Three
shared in the overall growth in language enrollments, their shares continued to
decrease: Spanish slipped from 55.0 to 52.2 (a 5 percent decrease), French from
16.7 to 13.1 (a 22 percent decrease), and German from 7.5 to 6.0 (a 20 percent
decrease). Sizeable increases, on the other hand, were experienced by Italian
(from 4.1 to 5.0, a 23 percent increase), Japanese (from 3.6 to 4.2, a 17
percent increase), Chinese (from 2.4 to 3.3, a 38 percent increase), Arabic
(from 0.5 to 1.5, a 200 percent increase), and “Other languages”
(from 1.5 to 2.1, a 40 percent increase). The world’s languages still lag
behind the Big Three, but they are gradually supplanting them in the
postsecondary enrollments.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>These shifts in student demand will almost certainly produce
major shifts in the allocation of resources for the study of specific languages
in the coming years. Indeed, some institutions have already experienced a loss
of “critical mass” in enrollment for German. Most recently the
University of Southern California has announced the elimination of its
department of German, which lost its doctoral program a decade ago and in 2008
has only 10 undergraduate majors and 10 minors taught by three tenured faculty
and three full-time adjuncts.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>We can expect such dislocations to increase in the coming
years as the more populous of the world’s languages take their place in
the college curriculum, but the prospects for achieving college-level
proficiency in any languages will remain small in the absence of the
development of language proficiency in secondary school. In light of these
considerations, the most desirable outcome of the rise in the diversity and
popularity of world languages at the college level would include two major
changes in elementary and secondary education and set the stage for a new level
of importance for languages in all fields of postsecondary education.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>The first K-12 change would be a widespread initiative to
mandate the mastery of English and a language other than English (LOTE), in K-6
education, and the continued meaningful use of that LOTE throughout the 7-12
curriculum. Spanish is the obvious first choice of LOTE for most schools
because the U.S. is the fifth largest Spanish-speaking country in the world.
Languages other than Spanish (LOTS) would present themselves in many locales
and neighborhoods: French in upstate New York, Polish in near-north Chicago,
Mandarin in San Francisco’s Chinatown, etc.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>To get an idea of how numerous such locally-significant
languages might be nationwide, visit the Modern Language Association Language
Map Data Center. Based on official 2000 and 2006 Census figures, this site
provides information regarding the numbers of speakers of literally scores of
languages from location to location across the U.S.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>Regardless of the choice of language, high school students
in the U.S. — or college-bound students, at any rate — ought to
spend at least half an academic year in a school where a LOTE is the primary
language of instruction. In the case of Spanish, the default K-12 LOTE, this
study abroad might best occur in Latin America. Exchange programs for both
students and teachers could make this a win-win bilingual educational effort
for our Latin American neighbors and, for LOTS, visitors from other nations.
Family-to-family home-stay exchanges could bring the Americas and the world
together in a very intimate and mutually rewarding, to say nothing of
cost-saving, way.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>The second desirable change in K-12 education would occur in
grade seven. Having become functionally bilingual in English and Spanish (or
some other language) by the end of elementary school, children should be
encouraged and college-bound students required (and find it relatively easy) to
begin study of a third language. The available choices would rightly vary in
accordance with personal, local, regional, national, and global needs,
resources, and opportunities. The goal would be to have a large majority of
high school graduates functioning at a high level of literacy in English and
another language (typically Spanish) and at an intermediate level in a third
language.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>On this plan, which draws major inspiration from a 1996
proposal for education in France by Claude Hagège, individual learners in
college and the workplace would bring additional languages into their
repertoires as a function of chosen career paths and intellectual interests.
Equally affected by this obviously audacious plan, college and university curricula
would of course need to include a much wider range of course work in world
languages and cultures.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>To reach the full range of fields of study, colleges would
also need to employ the proven methods developed by Cultures and Languages
Across the Curriculum (CLAC) practitioners to enable students to acquire and
make ubiquitous meaningful use of their multilingual skills and international
knowledge. Examples of CLAC methods include non-language courses taught in a
LOTE, add-on LOTE “trailers” or course modules, and study groups in
which students in an otherwise English-only course pursue substitute
assignments employing LOTE materials (see the CLAC Consortium Web site for
details).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>To encourage multilingual educational initiatives of the
above sorts, local, state, and federal agencies, as well as employers of all
kinds, could offer incentives and rewards for the study and meaningful
curricular use of high-need languages at all educational levels in all fields
of study and in all lines of work in the global economy.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>So where does that leave French? Clearly French would
survive the above-described process, but with only a fraction of its current
share of total language-learning enrollments, and with a much broader coverage
of the many dialects, postcolonial cultural traditions, and socioeconomic
circumstances that exist in 21st century Francophonie. The French-speaking
world uses not only European French but also the Frenches of the Canadian
Québecois and of the numerous former French colonies in Africa and on many
islands around the world. Spanish, though instructors also need to recognize
Spanish dialect diversity, is probably the only one of the Big Three that will
remain in the top 10 in U.S. education by the end of the 21st century. Likely
members by then include Arabic, Bengali, Hindi/Urdu, Indonesian, Japanese,
Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, and Turkish.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>Whatever our language choices and their respective global
“ranking”, we can hope that a large number of languages find their
way into our K-21 curricula (and lifelong-learning options) in response to the
twin forces of economic globalization and cultural internationalization.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>Is the above merely the hope-induced pipe dream of an
ivory-tower academic out of touch with political and educational realities? I
hope not. Playing to the catchwords of the day, I can cite the priorities of
global commerce (U.S. economic competitiveness) and homeland security
(monitoring terrorist communications and communicating with
non-English-speaking allies and enemies) in support of the above initiatives.
Especially at the federal level, though states and municipalities have also
expressed support for greater language study in our post-9/11 era, we find many
examples of urgent calls for enhanced linguistic competency in the service of
these priorities.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>In June 2004 the Department of Defense, with cooperation
from the Departments of State and Education, sponsored the first-ever National
Language Policy Conference. Representatives of government at all levels,
industry, and K-16 academe endeavored to define the full range of needs and
describe the resources necessary to meet our society’s needs for greater
intercultural and global knowledge and skills, with a focus on the expansion of
linguistic competencies. This proved to be but the first in a number of
federal, state, and local initiatives, running from the establishment of tens
of two-way immersion elementary schools, mostly in English and Spanish, to the
recent Senator Paul Simon Foundation legislation, aimed to increase the number
of college students studying abroad by a factor of four in the next 10 years.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>Encouraging widespread two-way bilingual K-12 education, in
which native speakers of English and other languages learn to use each
other’s languages, and vastly expanding the range of languages taught in
U.S. schools and colleges may sound preposterous in the face of popular
negativism about increased immigration and the alleged (and largely imaginary)
refusal of immigrants to learn English (when they are in fact giving up their
native languages at least as quickly as previous generations of immigrants).
However, surveys of college-bound high school students and their parents have
increasingly revealed their desire that a college education include language
study and time abroad in order for graduates to compete effectively in the
global economy.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>The recently released UCLA Higher Education Research
Institute Cooperative Institutional Research Program survey data show yet a
further increase in college freshman interest in learning about other world
cultures, rising from 43.2 percent in 2002 to 52.3 percent in 2007. College
students come desirous but ill-prepared to study languages and cultures but
find the current college curriculum unresponsive to, and even incompatible
with, their needs.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>In short, both the population at large and leadership in
virtually all arenas have come to realize that the solution to global problems,
including the establishment of a sustainable “new world order” (do
you remember that benign vision, so quickly displaced by a New American
Imperium?) in which all the world’s peoples can live in peace and attain
prosperity, depends upon increases in international understanding and
coöperation of a sort that only widespread multilingualism and intercultural
interaction can produce.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>Call it public diplomacy or global competency or inclusive
humanism; our goal should be to make everyone in the world safer, healthier,
and better educated about each other’s shared values, diverse lifeways,
and unique cultural achievements. We have had enough of xenophobic
fear-mongering, hypocritical ethnocentrism, and Doomsday rhetoric. If the worst
scenarios do indeed come to pass, it will not be because they are unavoidable
but because we have diverted too many of our resources into preparing for those
pessimistic scenarios and too few into warding them off.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>A competitive, power-driven view of the world’s future
becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that, in the end, no one can survive. A
cooperative, posterity-driven view of the future includes the ubiquitous study
of world cultures and languages, and use of this acquired knowledge and skill
to build international bridges and address global problems. To paraphrase an
aphorism about education penned in 1920 by H.G. Wells, human history has become
more and more a race between catastrophe and international education.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>H. Stephen Straight is professor of anthropology and of
linguistics, and vice provost for undergraduate education and international
affairs, at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He is a member of
the executive committee of the Association of International Education
Administrators.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>© Copyright 2008 Inside Higher Ed<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
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