Pat Chaput's posting.

[Julie Cassiday]

Dear Seelangers,

I would like to second Pat Chaput's remarks about the dangers of using
personal experience and anecdote as the basis of policy-making decisions in
the foreign languages.  I was recently involved at my own school in a
serious debate about curricular reform, part of which focused on the
question of instituting a foreign language proficiency requirement.

I won't bother describing in detail the particular requirement that we
debated, but I will comment that the faculty at my college failed to approve
the requirement in part due to the negative experiences of my colleagues
while studying foreign languages in high school and college.  During
discussions of the initiative at meetings of the college's faculty, one
colleague claimed that such a requirement would serve our students poorly
since he had been unable to learn French while in high school.  Another
stated that "elementary proficiency" is an oxymoron, comparing it to an
airplane ticket half-way across the ocean.  Even when I pointed out that
"elementary proficiency" is indeed measurable and that pedagogical linguists
have developed a number of different scales by which proficiency in foreign
languages can be determined, a number of my colleagues outside of the
foreign languages exhibited a startling and dismissive attitude toward this
information.

Luckily, the failure of this particular initiative has not threatened the
status of foreign languages at my school in any way.  However, it has taught
me that some American academics suffer from a persistent provincialism
whenever the topic of foreign languages enters the conversation.  I am not
sure if additional evidence from research and scholarship in foreign
language pedagogy would have changed the minds of my foreign language phobic
colleagues, but it would have certainly helped others listening to the
debate to realize that personal experience is not an appropriate "default
basis" for making a curricular decision about the study of foreign
languages.

Julie Cassiday
Williams College

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