MLA's Recommendations on Transforming Foreign-Language Education Continue to Provoke Debate

[Harold F. Schiffman]

 http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/03/1940n.htm

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

MLA's Recommendations on Transforming Foreign-Language Education Continue
to Provoke Debate

By PAULA WASLEY

Nearly one year after its release, a report on foreign language and higher
education issued by an ad hoc committee of the Modern Language Association
is still provoking discussion--some of it contentious--about possible
reforms in the teaching of foreign languages and the role of the
association in any curricular revamp. That debate continued at a panel
held on Monday at George Washington University, which brought together
several prominent leaders, including Rosemary G. Feal, executive director
of the association.

The session, which at times grew heated, focused on the urgency of
transforming foreign-language departments and curricula, and touched on
the profession's response to the Bush administration's push on "critical"
foreign languages. The committee that produced the 11-page report,
"Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed
World," was formed as a response to the focus, after the 2001 terrorist
attacks on the United States, on a lack of trained linguists and teachers
in less commonly taught languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and
Farsi (The Chronicle, May 24, 2007).

National-security experts have unabashedly spoken of the shortfall in
qualified teachers and linguists in Arabic and other languages now
critical to military, intelligence, and diplomacy as a crisis. Yet,
according to Karin C. Ryding, a professor of Arabic and linguistics at
Georgetown University who was also a member of the MLA's ad hoc committee,
language departments in colleges and universities are woefully short of
the resources to meet sudden and immense demands.

"I have seen our profession hang on by its fingernails for several
decades," said Ms. Ryding. Arabic programs in particular, she said, have
suffered dramatic and long-term problems and could scarcely produce enough
graduates to replenish the ranks of instructors.

Ms. Ryding also noted that public awareness of the post-September 11,
2001, crisis in language preparedness has opened a debate that might help
bridge long-standing divides between language and literature professors,
academic and government language programs, and teaching and research, she
said. But she warned against the temptation offered by "quick-fix
solutions," some of which have already led to the use of outmoded and
inappropriate methods of language instruction, she said. By way of
example, she pointed out that many native Arabic speakers hired by
university and government programs in the past several years taught
literary Arabic and ignored spoken Arabic.


Reforms Past 'Guns and Butter'

Scott G. McGinnis, an associate professor at the Defense Language
Institute and member of the committee, said that the group wanted to deal
both with "guns and butter" issues and the task of language curriculum
reforms beyond a focus on national security. Thus, he said, the
committee's report ranged widely in its reassessment of how foreign
languages are taught across higher education. "The language major,"
concluded the authors of the report, "should be structured to produce a
specific outcome: educated speakers who have deep translingual and
transcultural competence."

Indeed, said Ms. Feal, the MLA's executive director, without dramatic
changes in the structure of language departments and approaches to
teaching foreign languages, the profession may see the language major
disappear entirely within the next decade or two. "We're losing the
language store," said Ms. Feal. The report also offered a pointed critique
of the very structure of language departments, which tend to be rigidly
stratified. Such a structure, Mr. McGinnis said at Monday's panel
discussion, typically set tenured literature professors at odds with
untenured language instructors.  Among the key changes that should be
instituted, he said, was to make specialists in language acquisition full
partners in designing the university's curriculum.

Ms. Feal compared the stratified structure of most foreign language
programs to a disorganized department store, with a top-floor sales
department that can't bring cohesion to the upper tiers of faculty members
in literature, linguistics, and art history. At the mezzanine level, she
said, part-time adjuncts relegated to the food court "serve out the
regular verbs year in and year out with no relation to what's going on on
the other floors."

So what role should the Modern Language Association and other professional
groups have in advocating for changes and putting them in place? Dan E.
Davidson, president of the American Councils for International Education
and a professor of Russian at Bryn Mawr College, argued that such groups
should act as stewards of the discipline. Given the increasing
globalization of knowledge and culture, and the trend toward greater
regulation by university administrators and weaker regulation by
professional associations, he said, it was incumbent on those associations
to take the leading role in lobbying for new approaches to
foreign-language education.

Mr. Davidson advocated the creation of doctoral programs focusing on
research on specific languages and second-language acquisition. The
profession's knowledge of how students learn a foreign language derives
primarily from research done by English as a Second Language and Spanish
professors, he said, and those findings may not apply as well to other
languages. Ms. Feal urged universities to develop multiple paths to the
foreign language major, and to design foreign language curricula that are
more relevant both to departments outside of literature and languages, and
to students' interests and career goals.

Most language programs are designed to prepare students for graduate work,
she said, yet only 6.1 percent of undergraduate language majors go on to
obtain doctoral degrees. The crisis in foreign-language education she
said, "does not ask us to give up literature, but it does ask us to give
up the idea that most undergraduates want to study literature as the
exclusive focus of a language program." While implementing the
recommendations of the ad hoc committee would be a massive undertaking,
she said, "our survival depends on it."

Contradictions of Purpose?

Heidi Byrnes, a professor of German at Georgetown University, criticized
several aspects of the report. She argued that the conclusions were often
based on muddled assumptions on the nature of language education and that
the report failed to offer a concrete plan to achieve its recommendations.
In particular, Ms. Byrnes took issue with the report's suggestion that
universities develop more interdisciplinary, team-taught classes to better
integrate content and language instruction. Such a solution, she argued,
could unintentionally exacerbate the already existing chasm between
literary and cultural studies, and language instruction.

"Interdisciplinary work," she said, "will downplay the role of language
and language acquisition, precisely because this is not the major interest
of colleagues in history or art or philosophy or political science, or
gender or film studies, who might contribute to this kind of
interdisciplinary enterprise." Ms. Byrnes also urged the MLA to play a
bigger role in putting its recommendations in place. While curricular and
structural changes happen at the institutional level, she said, strong
centralized leadership is needed to overcome the inertia that has kept
language departments divided for so long.

"Unless the MLA itself, as an organization, is willing to exert
leadership, most likely in ways it has not done in the past, its own
significance in these matters is seriously challenged." The association,
she argued, needs to "find leaders in its own council of literary cultural
scholars who will make the project theirs, who will lend it authority,
urgency, and gravitas, and who will devise ways of harnessing the
organization's resources in ways that will encourage the kind of changes
envisioned at the heart of the report."

Ms. Feal vigorously defended the report and the MLA's role in the reform
effort. She said that the committee's report had the support of the
association's leading officers and that the MLA planned to lead the debate
through "analysis and exhortation." She pointed to the MLA's recent
studies on foreign-language enrollment and continuing research on
departmental "best practices" and on tenured versus nontenured staffing in
foreign language departments as useful data in lobbying for change at the
institutional level. The association has also restructured its executive
council to include graduate students and a community-college
representative, and altered the format of its annual meeting to include a
greater number of events and panels focused on foreign languages.

In the past, Ms. Feal said, the profession operated on a fantasy that
students would graduate from college with near-native foreign-language
proficiency. But the reality, she said, is that most programs have had to
settle for teaching students to speak another language "well enough."
Given the challenges, she said, departments should also set about teaching
students about the process of learning a language, which might serve them
both later in life and in other fields of study.

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