Languages Without Language Faculty

[Harold F. Schiffman]

 Feb. 21

Languages Without Language Faculty

Back in 2001, Drake University did what to many language professors was
nothing less than horrific: It announced that foreign language instruction
wasnt working, killed its language departments, and got rid of the
instructors, including those with tenure. Drakes president promised some
sort of new approach, based on study abroad and individualized online
instruction. Language professors at Drake and elsewhere were outraged and,
noting that the university hadnt figured out what it would put in place,
predicted that the university would do terrible harm to language study and
the humanities.

Six years later, Drake still doesnt have language departments or language
professors, but it does have a new approach to language instruction in
place. And Drake  the institution language professors couldnt say enough
bad things about  is being hailed in some quarters as a model. Last week
the W.M. Keck Foundation and the Council of Independent Colleges announced
a new program designed to help small and mid-sized private colleges and
universities transform their language programs based on the Drake
approach. Interest is not limited to the private sector: Portland State
University, in Oregon, is about to start a pilot program using some of the
Drake approach in its Spanish classes.

The interest in Drakes ideas comes at a time of considerable moves to
reform foreign language instruction. The Modern Language Association is
putting the finishing touches on a report that will call for radical
shifts in how undergraduate and graduate programs in foreign languages are
taught, with a shift away from a language/literature model to one that
places much more emphasis on culture, history, economics, politics and
more. Philosophically, there are parts of the Drake program that appear
consistent with the MLA push  both approaches argue that traditional
teaching methods need to change, and that students need a broad
understanding of the cultures whose languages they are studying, not just
vocabulary and literature.

But there are key differences as well. Most notably, the MLA views faculty
members as not only part of, but crucial to, instruction. Drake, as a
university that did away with language departments, takes a different
view, with most of the learning taking place in small student groups of
four  coached not by a professor, but by a native speaker of the language,
typically an international student. Whereas Drake views this as a bold
approach that gives students a more intense education on becoming fluent,
many others view it as a cop-out and a dangerous sidelining of professors.
And its in that context that the move to encourage the Drake approach
elsewhere is attracting both excitement and great concern.

The problem with foreign language teaching in a traditional format is that
an hour a day every other day just doesnt get people to the intensity that
people need. People get discouraged and they drop out after a few years,
said Richard H. Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges.
Drakes method, he said, is a winning approach, in which students have
greater progress and reach a level of functional competency earlier.

Even if there is functional literacy, many say that the definition of
college-level language instruction is being devalued and that the student
experience is being cheapened. Theres more than just the ability to learn
to speak a language, which you could do in Berlitz, said Ginny Lewis, who
lost her job teaching German when Drake eliminated all the language
faculty positions.

Lewis, who is now on the faculty at Northern State University, in South
Dakota, said that the students in my classroom have access to me around
the clock  not only am I an educator with knowledge that goes beyond that
of a 22-year-old native speaker, who doesnt understand the how or why of
language, but I offer students encouragement. I offer students a lot of
background knowledge of why they are learning what they are learning.

Lewis defends an idea that some at Drake consider old-fashioned:
Regardless of what a college student is studying, that student deserves an
expert professor in the classroom.

Of course Jan Marston, the head of Drakes language program, in explaining
its approach, happened to say: You need to let go of the idea that it all
happens in class.

More Languages Than Before

The program Marston leads is called the Drake University Language
Acquisition Program and goes by its acronym, DULAP. Students who want to
study a language take a two-semester course, in English, on language
acquisition skills  this course mixes students studying a range of tongues
and does not focus on any particular language. The actual language
instruction takes place in four-student sections for which the curriculum
is organized by DULAP coordinators and the discussions are led by native
speakers, typically international students at Drake. These four-student
sections range from beginning to advanced and also can be grouped around
student interests. Currently, Drake is offering these sections in Arabic,
Chinese, French, German, Italian, Hindi, Japanese, Russian and Spanish
compared to just French, German and Spanish when the university eliminated
departments.

The coordinators are educators with knowledge of various languages, and
outsiders work remotely with the section leaders when Drakes staff lacks
background in a given language  Russian is led by a professor in Texas,
for example. Blogs are a key way for these staffers to interact with
students and the section leaders. The coordinators have been considered
academic staff, but Drake is currently looking for ways to convert their
slots to faculty. Marston said she expected the conversions to be done
during the next year, but did not expect the positions to be tenure track.
It is these coordinators who also set up outside reviews of student work
through electronic portfolios the students create, showing their progress
at speaking the languages and studying the cultures.

Christen Bain, a junior at Drake who is majoring in international
relations and marketing, has taken both French and Spanish at the
university, and raves about the way the small sections work  with the
e-portfolio tapes of conversations showing growth. You really see how much
youve improved. Im amazed at what Ive learned, she said.

David Maxwell, Drakes president, said that meeting student goals is the
whole point. The primary philosophy is that the learning experience for
each student is tailored to the individual students learning goals, he
said, so we find out what are their goals for the language? (While some of
the anti-Drake comments over the years have assumed that the place must be
run by widget counters who just dont get foreign languages, Maxwell is a
Russian studies scholar who previously directed the National Foreign
Language Center.)

A key part of that philosophy, Marston said, is admitting what language
students do not want to be: professors. Most traditional language
departments are language and literature departments, and most of what they
were doing is focused around their desire to prepare other people  their
best students  to do as they were doing, she said. As a result, she added
many enrollments are declining. The Drake program is based on the idea
that students dont want to become language professors  they want to go out
in the world, so they have to be able to communicate.

Marston, who spent much of her career as more traditional French professor
before coming to Drake, said that she understood that some people would
view this approach as a threat to faculty jobs. But she said faculty jobs
were already changing  and not necessarily the way professors want  as
retiring language professors are replaced by adjuncts on many campuses.
Spanish departments cant fill positions fast enough while many other
professors lack enough students, Marston said, so uncertainty in the
profession shouldnt be blamed on the Drake approach. (The most recent job
data from the MLA actually show a stable market, with improvements in
languages besides Spanish.)

The traditional jobs are facing a shift  were having some kind of a
monumental shift, she said.

Ekman of the Council of Independent Colleges agreed, and he said some of
the blame rests with language faculty members. He said that had Drake done
nothing six years ago, language professors still might have lost their
jobs  due to declining enrollments. Like most colleges, Drake does not
require foreign languages (although some majors have a requirement). If
you take the long-term view with this, the initial view to eliminate
foreign-language requirements came from foreign-language faculty who
couldnt be bothered to teach the basics to short-term conscripts, Ekman
said. They would have been well served by teaching those courses and
building a base of people committed to learning languages, he added.

Drake foreign languages went through a rough period, but Ekman predicted
that the revived program would eventually attract enough interest to
generate positions for more traditional faculty slots, including those
teaching literature. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, he said,
adding that other language programs might go through similar difficult
periods, followed by revivals.

Since Ekmans council and the Keck Foundation announced the grant program
to help other colleges apply the Drake approach, the calls from
institutions suggest that this is pretty popular with colleges, Ekman
said.

A Counterintuitive Approach

Should it be? Many foreign language observers say that there are parts of
the Drake program that impress them a great deal  and other parts that
worry them just as much. Robert Sanders, assistant professor of Spanish
and coordinator of first-year courses at Portland State, said he was
excited about adding the small group sessions on to more traditional
language instruction. He said he viewed this approach as consistent with
the culture and languages across the curriculum in which foreign language
is not viewed through literature alone, but as part of a broader
educational experience.

The literature degrees have their place, he said, but programs all over
the country suffer because of this institutional creep in which everyone
is trying to copy the Ivy League and reproduce specialists in literature,
rather than focusing on globalization or culture or any number of other
topics. We need to break out of the fetish of literature, he said.

Where he was troubled  and wouldnt advocate that his university follow  is
with the elimination of departments and positions.

Many educators are pushing for more expertise about different cultures to
be woven into the curriculum, and that requires professors who have
expertise, and that they work together in departments, Sanders said. By
eliminating the department, they gutted the program  and this is
counterintuitive, he said.

For MLA leaders as well, the question is one of balancing enthusiasm over
some of the innovation at Drake while preserving faculty roles. The MLAs
president, Michael Holquist, a professor of comparative literature and of
Slavic language and literature at Yale University, said he was always
pleased when foundations back foreign language education. But he said it
was important to recognize that language is not merely the exchange of
existing information  it is the means by which cultures think and dream.

The MLA is committed to the idea that departments need to consider new
approaches, he said, but academic programs should rely on professors, he
said. I believe language professors are the logical key players in
formulating any new model of instruction. It is they who have in-depth
knowledge not only of words but the contexts that give those words
meaning, he said. We advocate experiments that incorporate many of the
goals DULAP has set, yet we do so within a structure that honors the
intellectual contexts as well as the communicative competence.

Rosemary G. Feal, the MLAs executive director and a former Spanish
professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, said she viewed
language education and the staffing of language education as both being on
a continuum. The small student groups at Drake could be viewed as a great
way to enhance traditional language instruction, especially at certain
stages in a students education. The first step in studying a language is
acquiring basic fluency, she said, and the Drake approach is well suited.

But as students advance, its time to ask questions like: Are there courses
offered in the literature of Latin America? Feal noted that she could find
plenty of English courses at Drake teaching foreign authors in
translation, but wondered where the other courses were. And she stressed
that this extends beyond literature.

The question is: What comes next? After the foundational experiences,
colleges and universities need to offer the opportunity to delve into
academic content  in history, economics, popular culture, film, Feal said,
questioning how much of this could be taught without professors. She added
that professors with advanced degrees in languages are uniquely qualified
to offer such instruction.

Maxwell, Drakes president, said that he hoped people would not judge the
ideas about languages coming out of his university based only on the
elimination of traditional faculty slots. This started out as a solution
to a set of Drake-specific problems, he said. But he quickly added that
the universitys model  the basis for the Keck program to help other
colleges  does have significant advantages to other institutions and that
many of the Drake-specific issues he mentioned may be shared by other
colleges.

He said he hoped the Keck grants and the experimentation they would
support at other colleges would answer the question of what parts are
adaptable from Drake to other campuses.

Lewis, the former Drake professor, hopes the answer to that question is
fairly limited. She said that being forced out of a job was quite
devastating, and not only because she had to job hunt. I personally felt a
sense of professional failure because I had not done my job as a young
professor in communicating the urgent need to offer this kind of
high-quality language education, she said.

Six years later, Lewis remains stunned that it is somehow acceptable to
suggest that language professors can be replaced with new systems, and she
wondered what would happen if colleges started to say that historians or
biologists could be replaced. Why would you not want your language
students to have the same chance as the history students  to work with
professors, she said. Why are languages different?

 Scott Jaschik

http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/02/21/language.

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