US: Getting serious about the foreign-language requirement

Tue Apr 1 14:39:18 UTC 2008

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i30/30a03901.htm

  From the issue dated April 4, 2008 A Proposal: Get Serious About the
Foreign-Language Requirement

By EDWARD M. WHITE

The very idea of discussing the foreign-language requirement for graduate
degrees in English is enough to drive us faculty members back to our offices
to grade first-year composition papers. How can we bear to hear yet again
the responsible and powerful arguments in favor of the requirement — and the
practical arguments against it? If we have directed graduate programs, we
have painful memories of struggling to get students through a requirement
that many of them see as pointless, although many of us see it as necessary.

Enough, we want to say. We have heard all the opinions, seen all the
postures. We have repeatedly voted to maintain the requirement. Leave it
alone.

But we cannot let go of it. Our inability to enforce the requirement
rigorously is a wound on most of our graduate programs that refuses to heal,
an itch that some of our students keep scratching beneath the bandage of our
good intentions.

To be sure, many of our students come to us with a working knowledge of one
or more foreign languages, sail through an examination or demonstration of
some sort, and are done. But every program has students who struggle to meet
the requirement. They repeat exams, take beginning courses in one language
after another, yet remain hopelessly monolingual although perfectly
acceptable — sometimes excellent — in their course work, during their
qualifying exams, and even, if they are allowed to progress that far, on
their dissertation proposals. They sit in our offices, glumly thinking of
subjunctives, ablative absolutes, Goethe, Cervantes, Derrida, and the closed
door of words behind which those ideas and authors reside. "What can I do?"
they ask, in various stages of despair. What indeed?

Our usual solutions should embarrass us. Sometimes we manage to persuade a
friendly colleague in the French or Spanish department to offer some kind of
cram course for our students that will allow us to pretend that the
requirement has been met. Occasionally, a kindly soul will teach a
"literature in translation" course that, sadly enough, fails to satisfy the
requirement, or a course on theories and practices of translation that could
be valuable for students with several languages under their belts — but, of
course, the students who actually enroll are precisely the ones unsuited for
such work.

We have become accustomed to the sour looks on normally friendly faces in
foreign-language departments when we ask them to certify linguistic
proficiency after a few months of study by those with no aptitude for
learning languages. They know the job can't be done, but they will sometimes
do their best out of pity for the students. And we feel the irony of asking
a Dante specialist to certify the proficiency of students who know nothing
of past imperfects or future conditionals — what circle of hell must that
colleague feel herself to be in?

While our children were in school, my wife and I played host to about a
dozen foreign-exchange students. They had a favorite riddle, one we heard
every year. "What," one of them would ask at a gathering, "do you call
someone in English who knows three languages?" After a pause, someone would
call out, "Trilingual." But that was just the start of the riddle.

"What is the word for someone who knows two languages?"

"Bilingual."

"And for someone with only one language?"

"Monolingual."

"No, no," the riddler would say, "an American!"

We really need to face the situation that every graduate program in English
confronts. How can we manage a foreign-language requirement with integrity
in a country where an "English only" initiative is a sure winner in any
election?

The first action we should take is to recognize the contradiction in most of
our programs between our reasons for the requirement and our execution of
it. The students we admit who do not already have the required proficiency
have very little chance of gaining it while in graduate school. We should
stop the subterfuges we have come to accept as common practice; stop
bothering the foreign-language faculty members, who have much better things
to do with their time; stop giving trivial exams and credit for trivial
course work.

If we mean what we say about the language requirement — and I am firmly on
the side of those who see it an appropriate requirement for graduate study —
then we need to enforce it with consistency and integrity. If we do not mean
what we say, then we should stop pretending and drop the requirement.

The logic is painfully clear. Because proficiency in a foreign language
takes years of study and reasonably intense work, we need to define the
level of proficiency and the language options with clarity and make them
prerequisites for *admission* to graduate study.

That's all. With that one move, we would sweep away the administrative
hassles, the embarrassing equivocations, and the painful inconsistencies in
our policies, and actually enforce the requirement that we have been
claiming to use for decades. Prospective students would know that they need
to go through advanced language study before they enroll.

Whenever I make that proposal, I hear two significant arguments against it.
The first questions the value of the requirement itself on various grounds —
including the belief, which may or may not be correct, that children of
privilege have many more opportunities to study foreign languages than do
children from less-wealthy families. Because the requirement remains in
place after decades of controversy, that social argument has clearly been
less convincing than the academic one for the value of at least a second
language. (As a graduate student, I managed to satisfy a requirement of two
modern foreign languages and one ancient one, while also demonstrating
mastery of a dialect, the Brooklynese I brought to Harvard from the tenement
of my childhood.)

The second argument seems more persuasive than it actually is. It is that if
we made foreign-language proficiency an admissions requirement, our graduate
enrollments would decline, perhaps sharply. That might happen if some
institutions took the step while many others did not. Then students who
could not meet the admissions requirement at University A would not even
apply there but would instead attend University B, which allows its graduate
students to meet or pretend to meet the requirement after admission.
University A would have to be prepared to lose some less-qualified students,
but its higher standards would surely make it more attractive to some
students and faculty members.

If the Modern Language Association and its Association of Departments of
English, along with key English departments, clearly articulated the
prerequisite to undergraduate advisers and faculty members, we could expect
that in time students would understand the importance of foreign-language
proficiency and routinely attain that goal before applying to graduate
programs. That does not seem a very high price to pay for solving one of the
persistent problems in American graduate education in English.

*Edward M. White is an adjunct professor of English at the University of
Arizona and a professor emeritus of English at California State University
at San Bernardino. His most recent book is* The Promise of America
*(Pearson/Longman,
2007), edited with Shane Borrowman.*
http://chronicle.com
Section: Commentary
Volume 54, Issue 30, Page A39
 ------------------------------

-- 
**************************************
N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its
members
and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner or
sponsor of
the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who disagree
with a
message are encouraged to post a rebuttal. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)
*******************************************
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lgpolicy-list/attachments/20080401/94a2f6af/attachment.htm>