In case you hadn’t heard, the world is getting smaller and flatter, and increasingly Americans are called on to interact with the world outside their own borders. At the same time, our lack of proficiency with key languages is hampering our ability to carry out intelligence operations and military interventions in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq (and has led to the weird scenario of soldiers carrying PDA-like devices around which 'speak' Arabic for them, see http://www.geek.com/portable-electronic-translators-in-the-military/ for details). And paradoxically, "in American universities the study of foreign languages is in a decline which seems irreversible." (Hilton, 2001) What is going on? In order to unravel this phenomenon, I present The Seven (Dirty Little) Secrets (or DLSs for short) of Language Learning.
DLS #1: Learning Languages is Hard
In spite of some claims to the contrary (here's one I think all universities should try, http://www.claritaslux.com/sleep-learning.htm )learning a foreign language to the point of usefulness is hard work and can take years of commitment. What do you need to learn to really learn a language? Well, hundreds, or more like thousands of words, for starters. Then there are those pesky grammar rules, with their genders, their cases, their tenses you've never heard of, weird word orders, subjunctives, particles, etc. etc. ad nauseam. If you're lucky, the language you're learning at least uses the Roman alphabet - but if not, look forward to joyful hours of memorizing the new letters and characters you're going to need if you want to make it at least past the lower-intermediate level. Add to this all the politeness rules, registers, and pragmatics, and you're starting to get the picture. But language learning is not only about amassing knowledge of all these things. Now you know them, you have to use them - you need to put your thoughts into words in speech and writing, and you have to understand uninterrupted flows of the language when you listen, or make sense of chunks of text in the language when you read (the speed at which you can do these things is called fluency). You develop these skills by practicing them, again and again. You develop communicative competence by interacting with others in the language, building your confidence and ability while you go, but it's not generally a fast process. It all takes time, and unless you devote yourself singlemindedly to the task, it's going to take lots and lots of time if you want to achieve a significant result. It also takes motivation over the stretch.
The point is that if Americans are going to learn languages succesfully, they need to start early. As an MLA report puts it, "learning languages other than English must be included in the earliest years of the K-12 system if the United States is to have a citizenry capable of communicating with educated native speakers in their language." (MLA p. 8) However, foreign language resources in the K-12 system can be sparse - in my town, three middle schools share one French teacher, who teaches classes of up to 37 children once a week.
To sum up, "the prevalent practice of offering and sometimes requiring one or two years of foreign language study for high school or college graduation is simply inadequate for giving students meaningful competence in foreign languages." (Panetta, p. 1) Why? Language learning is hard. It takes time.
DLS #2: The Payoff is Often Minimal
In spite of their best efforts, many learners of foreign languages do not succeed in raising their level to useability. "Four-year language majors often graduate with disappointingly low levels of linguistic ability." (MLA, p. 7) Learning a language is not simply a matter of absorbing material and passing a test. It comprises a set of skills the ultimate test of which is the ability to use them in real-life interactions in the language. While some learners seem to have a knack for learning and using languages, others are less able to make the transition into real-world use, without which those courses result in little more than a grade on a transcript, and the sad statement that, "I took French in college, but I can't say more than a couple of words." When you consider the cost of higher education, where does it make more sense to risk your investment - in courses and degrees that offer a clear career-related benefit, or in risky language courses that may not yield any practical results?
DLS #3: You May Never Get to Use It
I learned French and German during my secondary and college education (remember I grew up in the UK) and used them when I worked in tourism in those countries back in the late eighties. I learned Japanese when I lived in Japan, and studied it to college-entry level. Since I arrived in the U.S. in 1997, I've barely used any of these languages, and I've been working in international education this whole time. (I learned Spanish a few years ago, but rarely found the need to use it.) This is not to say that everyone's experience will be the same as mine, but we are not living in Europe here: we are somewhat geographically isolated, we don't live in close contact with foreign language speakers (actually we do, they live in our neighborhoods, but for the most part our social circles don't coincide, and in any case most of them are learning or using English) and many of us have no need to use foreign languages except for those trips to Paris where we get to try out our faltering French on waiters and hotel staff. (Case in point - my brother-in-law went to a Paris restaurant and inadvertantly ordered, in French, the one food he cannot stand - eggplant.)
Panetta states, "Perhaps at the heart of the problem is the fact that most American adults do not expect to use a foreign language, or, if they do, the time commitments required to achieve and retain a high level of skill, weighed against expected use, do not favor language learning in school." (p. 6) A fine summation of DLS #3.
DLS #4: Higher Ed Does a Poor Job of Teaching Foreign Languages
Even today, foreign language teaching can trace its roots to the teaching of classical languages and their literatures, and the typical college language education, once past the intermediate level, is the reading of literary works. There is another strand of language teaching in universities, based on more recent ideas about communicative competence, and which stresses the ability to use the language in practical situations. But while foreign literature professors are relatively easy to come by, at least in the more popular languages, finding competent teachers of language skills is more of a challenge. Early in the 20th century, the US underwent a period of xenophobia, in which foreign languages were forbidden, and foreign language newspapers and school programs were eliminated in a wave of "Americanization." (Panetta, p. 3) (We continue to see this phenomenon in calls for 'English only' in public life.) The US did not recover fully from this period, and the knock-on effect is that since foreign language competency has not been valued, there is a dearth of instructors who are able to impart the knowledge and skills of foreign languages. (Compare this to the glut of ESL teachers.)
Even where language programs teaching practical skills are available, they are not valued in higher education. The tenured positions are for literature professors, while the language instructors are in non-tenured positions (MLA p. 2). "Foreign language instructors often work entirely outside departmental power structures and have little or no say in the educational mission of their department, even in areas where they have particular expertise." (ibid)
In higher education, there is no agreement about what is required to fix the problem. While Corral and Patai bemoan the "replace(ment of) the study of literature in a foreign language with culture-based courses, not to mention the ever-proliferating film courses," (Chronicle) the MLA claims that this is precisely the type of course that is needed (p. 2). This is because Corral and Patai see the problem from the point of view of the decline of the liberal arts in general, while the MLA defines it as a problem of deficient knowledge of languages and their cultures.
If foreign language departments continue to confer power on literature professors while denying the same to their language instructors, we cannot expect to see much improvement in the quality of language teaching in the universities.
DLS #5: Study Abroad Programs Tend To Embody US Parochialism
Back in 2001, David Maxwell, a professor of Russian at Stanford, argued that "there is no reason why Americans should study foreign languages and that foreign language departments are painfully ineffective. If a student wants to study a foreign language, he should go to the country where the language is spoken." (Hilton)
It is a common myth that 'the best way to learn a foreign language is to go to the country where it's spoken,' and many US study abroad programs will support this. For my research, I walked a few steps to the study abroad office, where I learned that there is usually no language prerequisite for students who wish to study abroad, and that study of the foreign language is not always required once there. My informant, an administrator in the Study Abroad Office, studied in Paris, with American professors, in English. Then I walked the other way to the office of the new NUin program (a kind of pre-freshman program which sends students to Greece and two English-speaking countries) and it was the same story. Not to mention that American students abroad are very well taken care of - flights are booked for them, they are met at the airport, they have an on-site advisor from the university, and their accommodation is taken care of (they often live together). This is in stark contrast to my own study abroad experience back in the '80s, when I packed a giant backpack, found my way by trains and ferry to Bonn, and had to figure it all out for myself.
Perhaps the aim of study abroad programs can be vaguely defined as the creation of 'global citizens,' whatever that may mean, but in practice they may be simply a mini-US college experience in a foreign land, and of course, we are very far away from 'traveling to the country to learn the language' in many cases.
DLS #6: English Is The World Language
Language scholars (such as David Crystal in English as a Global Language and David Graddol in The Future of English?) agree that English is the most learned foreign language in the world, and dominates international exchanges. It is estimated that there are more interactions in English between two non-native speakers of the language than there are between native and non-native speakers. The language school I used to manage trained foreign professionals to speak English, yet some of these professionals were not doing business with English speaking countries - you might have a German, for example, who needs to speak with a client in Japan. Common denominator: English. A recent NU delegation to China consisted of several administrators, not one of whom (to my knowledge) spoke Chinese. We might say that it would have helped them to know the language, but the fact is that most Americans, most of the time, can get by with English, even if they are doing business internationally.
Further, U.S. corporations are teaching English to their employees in other countries, and employing foreign nationals to conduct their business in those countries, rather than sending monolingual American managers to do the job. Panetta suggests that there will still be a need for foreign language ability for U.S. employees - who will monitor the performance of the foreign nationals, for example? (p.7) - but as long as there are competing demands on resources, companies will tend to place those resources where they are most needed. If it is possible to 'get by' without the language, then that is what they will do.
DLS #7: There Is No Foreign Language Policy
Many countries have a national curriculum, including a foreign language policy which dictates what and how much foreign language will be taught in the public school system. This is possible because of their relatively centralized government systems. In the federal U.S., however, where big government is frowned upon and states' rights hold sway over education policy, there is no such national policy. (In 1979, the President's Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies, calling Americans' incompetence in foreign languages 'scandalous,' made 65 recommedations, most of which were not implemented (Panetta p. 2 - 3).) In the US, it is more or less every state, every school district, and every higher education institute for itself. The results are these: school districts decide whether to implement or eliminate language programs, often in keeping with budget constraints; there is no uniform set of language learning objectives by which leaners' progress can be measured (compare this with the Europe-wide Common European Framework, which provides a common set of descriptors for any language, and which can be referred to by employers or others who need to know a person's language level); there is no articulation between the different levels of education, such as between high school and university, and therefore there is inefficiency in building on students' prior achievements in the language; and many colleges have no foreign language requirement - even in those that do, students may take the language simply to satisfy the requirement (ibid).
Thus while it is often claimed that Americans (meaning monolingual, English-speaking Americans) are poor language learners, America, as such, is doing very little to address the situation.
These, then, are the Seven (Dirty Little) Secrets of Foreign Language Learning.
In conclusion (and I absolutely promise to make my postings shorter), expecting improvements in language teaching in higher education because of a shrinking, flattening, globalized world, is rather like expecting secondary schools to increase their physical education programs in the face of increasing childhood obesity. We all think it is desirable, but there are forces that constrain the ability to get it done. The first thing to do though is to analyze and present the problem. This was my attempt, and I now look forward to reading what others have to say.
Sources
Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World, The Modern Language Association of America, 2007, at http://www.mla.org/pdf/forlang_news_pdf.pdf
Corral, W.H., and Patai, D., An End to Foreign Languages, an End to the Liberal Arts, The Chronicle of Higher Education, at
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i39/39a03001.htm
Hilton, R, Stanford University: the teaching of "foreign" languages, 3.17.01 at http://www.stanford.edu/group/wais/Universities/universities_foreignlang31701.html
Panetta, L.E., Foreign Language Education: If "Scandalous:" in the 20th Century, What Will it be in the 21st Century, at https://www.stanford.edu/dept/lc/language/about/conferencepapers/panettapaper.pdf
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