[EDLING:2206] Can We Learn the Hard Languages?

[Francis M Hult]

Via lgpolicy...

>  Jan. 16, 2006 Reality Check
> 
> Can We Learn the Hard Languages?
> By John V. Lombardi
> 
> To: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Education Margaret
> Spellings
> 
> Re: University Presidents Summit on International Education
> 
> A week or so ago, at the University Presidents Summit on International
> Education, you honored us with an event delivered with class and style
> uncommon in executive branch engagements with university presidents and
> chancellors. As Im sure you noticed, we enjoyed the attention, respected
> the intent, and appreciated your personal and effective participation, as
> well as your mobilization of key actors including the President and First
> Lady. As we all returned to our campuses to reflect on the messages,
> themes, and programs discussed, and you return to the critical business of
> government, a reality check on our conversation seems in order.
> International education in all its many forms has been a major agenda item
> in American higher education forever, and over the most recent 30 years or
> so, colleges and universities have conducted a constant conversation about
> internationalizing the curriculum and improving the campuses ability to
> bring the world home.
> 
> This agenda, which reappeared in many of the comments by the university
> and college presidents in attendance, is really not a federal obligation.
> The task of internationalizing or globalizing our campuses belongs to the
> institutions. If internationalizing is a major campus concern, like
> teaching chemistry, the campus will find a way to do it because it will be
> central to the campuss academic and student programs. If a campus requires
> federal money to support a major change to its curriculum or to rethink
> its purposes, the campus is not likely to be effective anyway. I would
> recommend that you thank us for such insights, and return to the main
> purpose of the summit: language skills.
> 
> Success in this proposed joint venture requires that both the federal
> government and the universities speak clearly and precisely about what you
> want and what we can do. We in the universities and colleges have much
> experience in taking tightly focused government programs and diffusing
> their intent to flow money into activities more central to our interests.
> If you fund language and area studies, we will leverage the language
> effort to get more resources for area studies, literature studies and
> culture studies. These are good things, but they do not address the
> national need you articulated at the summit, learning language.
> 
> Further, we in the colleges and universities are expert at avoiding
> effective performance measurement. If the nation needs college educated
> graduates functionally literate in a number of less commonly taught
> languages, the only way to get this result is to fund programs that will
> test the graduates. If you want us to graduate students with a command of
> spoken and written Arabic, Urdu or Mandarin, you need to fund a program
> that delivers money to institutions that demonstrate the functional
> literacy of its graduates in these languages through standardized tests.
> Otherwise, we will train people for you who can read some things in some
> languages, have traveled and lived in the countries where some of these
> languages are spoken, but who may or may not have functional usable
> literacy.
> 
> We are good at redefining objectives. If the federal government wants to
> help create college graduates who have high quality skills related to
> living and working within other languages, it must fund specific programs
> in specific countries focused on the acquisition of testable specific
> language skills. If we go to India, and live primarily with English
> speaking communities, we will return with cultural awareness and many good
> stories to tell about our experiences, but we will not have acquired
> functional competency in a foreign language or culture. You must be
> specific about what you want, specific about how you will know when you
> get it, and specific about the test you will apply to validate the
> learning accomplished. This is difficult in cultural studies, but it is
> not at all hard in language acquisition.
> 
> If we struggle with clarity and effectiveness in our international
> objectives and programs, our counterparts in the federal government
> especially the State Department, the Defense Department, and some of the
> intelligence agencies  send conflicting messages about the importance of
> language and area studies expertise. While we hear that in-depth knowledge
> of countries and languages is essential to the defense and prosperity of
> the nation, we also know that the State Department and the Defense
> establishment tend to rotate their employees from place to place, country
> to country, language region to language region, devaluing in the process
> true expertise in either language or culture.
> 
> We also know that the career track to high level assignments in both State
> and Defense place a premium on generalist experience and knowledge and
> little emphasis on high levels of expertise in any particular language or
> culture. We are also unsure whether language competency is of any
> particular advantage for positions within the Department of Education.
> 
> You could do some things to improve the incentives for students to think
> of language related skills as major assets for careers in State, Education
> or Defense. For example, you might institute a language competency premium
> for mid to high level employees in the executive branch, a bonus addition
> to salary for those capable of maintaining a high level of language
> competency throughout their careers (tested on a periodic basis). You
> might consider longer term assignments overseas or in region specific
> offices or agencies as premium assignments with enhancements to salary or
> other benefits that would demonstrate that the enthusiasm for functional
> language skills is highly valued, much in the same way combat duty and
> other difficult assignments carry a premium.
> 
> These comments speak to the task of making the skills associated with
> uncommonly taught languages valued in the real world that our students
> watch with clear-eyed intensity. They know that in the great American
> Midwest, for example, the daily need to know someone elses language is
> minimal. We can travel for days without needing to speak anything but
> English. We see corporations hire language experts and culture brokers
> from among the nationals of countries where they trade and work, not from
> among the language fluent American college graduates.
> 
> Students see that only a few individuals in high government positions
> speak another language fluently, and almost none speak uncommonly taught
> languages. They see no premium for acquiring and maintaining a competency
> in difficulty to learn languages, and so they leave the language skills to
> native speakers, language and literature experts, and some area studies
> specialists.
> 
> To achieve your goals, you will need to help us focus on testable language
> skills, incentives for careers that use functional language skills, and
> support for overseas experiences that produce high levels of language
> performance.
> 
> We had a wonderful time at your summit, and the two of you are to be
> congratulated for what you are doing to improve education in the K-12
> arena, facilitate the visa process, and address the constant challenge of
> encouraging the exchange of scholars without compromising national
> security. We are grateful for the respect reflected in the quality of our
> treatment during the Summit, and we are all eager to work with you.
> 
> John V. Lombardi, chancellor and a professor of history at the University
> of Massachusetts Amherst, writes Reality Check occasionally.
> 
> http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/01/16/lombardi