Sustaining Sputnik Moments

[Harold F. Schiffman]

 Dec. 29

Sustaining Sputnik Moments

Foreign language study in the United States has had many a Sputnik moment,
as H. Jay Siskin, a French instructor at Cabrillo College, in California,
put it that is, a moment that reveals an economic or military weakness and
has been used as a call to arms to strengthen, among other things,
language education. Both World Wars, September 11, the Sputnik launch
itself ... all served to stimulate federal investment in language
instruction, Siskin argued, describing, for instance, an urgent call to
organize the study of Russian language in 1915 before the moment slipped
away. But as Siskin, who is writing a book on language instruction in
higher education in the 20th century, pointed out, Somehow it always seems
that the momentum is lost.

The theme of erratic government investment and the need for a sustained,
coherent approach to support foreign language instruction was a common
thread in panel discussions conducted by language instructors Thursday at
the Modern Language Associations annual convention in Philadelphia. In
many ways, the days discussions served as a juicy prelude to a
much-anticipated session this morning when members of the MLA Ad Hoc
Committee on Foreign Language are expected to highlight their research
into possible solutions to the problems being raised across the board.
This is the riddle; tomorrow is the solution, Michael E. Geisler, of
Middlebury College, said when introducing a panel discussion Thursday on
The Scramble for Languages: What Have We Learned about Readiness. Among
the highlights from panels on foreign language education Thursday:

Sini Prosper Sanou of the State University of New York at Stony Brook
discussed the tension between crisis driven and now-oriented calls for
language acquisition and the need to look at languages as universal tools
in a session titled Language Policy during Globalization. Sanou, an
assistant professor of French, also observed that students on average are
graduating from college with lesser foreign language skills than they have
upon entering, in part a result of the fact that colleges often have
entrance requirements for foreign language learning but lack graduation
requirements. For the rest of their college career, they have all the time
they want to forget it, said Sanou, who argued that language instructors
need to do a better job of integrating their subjects across the
curriculum and team-teaching with professors from other disciplines.

Several panelists also discussed the need for greater cooperation within
disciplines. For instance, Scott G. McGinnis, an academic adviser and
associate professor at the Defense Language Institute, pointed out that in
his rapidly growing discipline, Chinese, There are a lot of players, but
not a lot of cooperation. Offering one model, Laurel Rasplica Rodd, a
professor of Japanese at the University of Colorado at Boulder, described
an effort by Japanese instructors to consistently revisit and redevelop a
strategic plan for instruction of the language every two years. In the
discussion on readiness, panelists offered a number of strategies to
ensure colleges are prepared to adapt to shifting, politically motivated
language needs while at the same time developing sustainable educational
systems that will stay in place after the moment of crisis has passed.
Among the suggestions offered by two Georgetown University faculty members
Sylvia nder, who teaches Turkish, and Karin C. Ryding, who teaches Arabic
are a need to share resources, to create programs with the flexibility
both to absorb increases and drops in enrollment, and to ensure proper
quality-control measures are in place during any time in which foreign
language instruction is suddenly spurred by, for instance, one of those
Sputnik moments.

 Elizabeth Redden

http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/12/29/language.

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