THE FOREIGN-LANGUAGE CHALLENGE: What America Must Do to Achieve Competence

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the issue dated March 24, 2006
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i29/29b01001.htm

THE FOREIGN-LANGUAGE CHALLENGE
What America Must Do to Achieve Competence
By RONALD D. LIEBOWITZ

At the U.S. University Presidents Summit on International Education, in
January, which I attended, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and
Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings set out to make Americans'
foreign-language competency a central component of U.S. national policy.
If what they proposed comes to fruition, the United States would be more
secure and better able to compete in the global marketplace. Americans
would also engage the world in a fundamentally different way with more
linguistic and cultural competence and, as a result, with greater
confidence.

The summit emphasized, in the words of Karen Hughes, under secretary of
state for public diplomacy and public affairs, the government's and higher
education's common interest in "seeking investment in educating globally
competitive U.S. students to work in fields of international interest."
Concurrently, President Bush launched the National Security Language
Initiative, described as "a plan to further strengthen national security
and prosperity in the 21st century through education, especially in
developing foreign-language skills." Such a plan to develop a far more
linguistically competent American population is unparalleled; working out
the details will not be easy. The program is first and foremost about
national security and positioning the United States to avoid serious
intelligence gaps like those it experienced leading up to September 11,
2001. But it is also about our country's ability to compete globally in
business, diplomacy, scientific research, and other creative endeavors. A
major goal of the program is to produce 2,000 advanced speakers of
critical languages including Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Farsi, Hindi, and
several Central Asian languages by 2009.

As president of Middlebury College, an institution known for its
excellence in language teaching and for preparing so many of our country's
secondary-school language teachers, I naturally support publicizing the
need to increase linguistic competency. However, it is precisely my
institution's expertise in language education that makes me realize that
the new program must ultimately focus on K-12 rather than postsecondary
education if the country is to develop and sustain a significant number of
linguistically competent citizens. Research shows that people must begin
serious language study well before college in order to become competent at
the level sought through the program. However, because the United States
unlike many European and Asian countries has never made it a priority to
encourage its citizens to learn foreign languages, there is an obvious
shortage of Americans who can speak and teach the critical languages that
President Bush has identified.

Middlebury's experience in trying to expand the size of its Arabic school,
an intensive nine-week summer program, is illustrative. Our campus could
easily accommodate 400 students in the program each summer, but because of
the shortage of qualified teachers of Arabic, we have been unable to make
space for more than 120 students. The situation for Chinese, according to
a recent report by the Asia Society, is not much better, nor is it for
Farsi, Hindi, and the increasingly strategic languages of Central Asia. A
major question, then, is who will teach those who are supposed to become
the advanced speakers of the critical languages? The Bush administration
recognizes the challenge: The new program calls for increasing the number
of foreign-language teachers by establishing a National Language Service
Corps. However, the question still remains: Who will teach those who will
eventually make up such a corps?

When the scarcity of teachers was mentioned at the summit, a State
Department representative could say only that developing a national online
clearinghouse would deliver foreign-language distance-education resources
to teachers and students to fill the void. Such resources would be useful
to speakers who have attained a certain level of proficiency, but learning
languages especially the critical languages, whose structure is
particularly complex requires significant face-to-face instruction, beyond
even the best available online resources. The United States cannot produce
a large number of speakers of the critical languages in a short period of
time. Colleges and universities should help to the extent they can, but
because their capacities are limited and distributed over many campuses,
it is important that the Bush administration's program not be a "let a
thousand flowers bloom" sort of program. By distributing the $114-million
proposed for foreign-language education from kindergarten to college to a
large number of institutions, the program would probably yield fewer
results than if larger sums were allocated to a small group of
participants whose expertise and resources can complement one another's
and help create the best road map for the future. Therefore, before
allocating the funds, the appropriate federal agencies should convene a
group of college administratorspresidents, provosts, and deanswhose
institutions specialize in language pedagogy to collaborate on creating
the strongest possible infrastructure to meet the short-term goals of the
program.

Beyond asking colleges and universities to use their collective resources
to produce a new cadre of speakers of critical languages, we must begin
what will be the long process of changing the way Americans view the
teaching and learning of foreign languages. Language programs must begin
before college, preferably in elementary school. Some school systems have
already recognized the strategic significance of critical-language study.
Approximately 3,000 K-12 students in Chicago now study Chinese, and a
growing number of school districts on the West Coast offer classes in
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Such programs, especially because they
challenge the conventional thinking and practice of most Americans, need
support from multiple sources, including private donors, corporations, and
nonprofit foundations.

Federal and state governments should offer assistance as well, at far
greater levels than they currently do. While the West Coast and Chicago
programs are laudable, only about 24,000 students out of more than 50
million American schoolchildren participate in them, according to the
Department of Education. In contrast, hundreds of millions of Chinese
students are required to study English. Studies have repeatedly shown that
children's brains are ripe for language learning at an early age, but
American schools are missing that opportunity: As of 1997, according to
the most recent survey by the Center for Applied Linguistics, less than 15
percent of elementary-school students were studying a foreign language,
compared to almost 52 percent of high-school students. And of course, many
students are lost to attrition before they attain advanced competency in
their language, so to establish the National Language Service Corps, or
meet the goals of the program, we will need many thousands more young
students enrolled in language classes.

We might look to the Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth
as a model for recruiting high-achieving language learners. The center
identifies students of great promise in a wide range of subjects from
grades two through seven. Although it does not offer immersion programs in
foreign language, designing such a curriculum for those talented students
could play an important role in increasing the country's linguistic
competency. The Bush administration has taken a bold first step in
identifying one of the great challenges facing American politics and
society in the 21st century: how to significantly increase Americans'
foreign-language competency. Will it work? The answer depends on whether
the country can plan and create the short-term and long-term structures
necessary to bring about a cultural shift in Americans' view of learning
languages, and on how deep the commitment to that change proves to be
among the multiple sectors of American society.

Ronald D. Liebowitz is president of Middlebury College.

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