"Foreign Languages in the University: The Case for a Content Orientation for the Discipline." ...

Foreign Languages in the University: The Case for a Content Orientation for the DisciplineAuthor(s): Janet King SwaffarSource: Monatshefte, Vol. 73, No. 3 (Fall, 1981), pp. 271-288Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30165240 .

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Foreign Languages in the University: The Case for a Content Orientation for the Discipline

JANET KING SWAFFAR

University of Texas-Austin

The curriculum and enrollment problems confronting foreign language departments in the 1980's can be viewed as part of the problem facing all humanistic disciplines, which, pragmatically speaking, aren't good for much, but which are still in the American tradition of a college education, a tradition which is, for all our emulations of European models, unique.' We are the only nation which attempts to house and administer the entire spec- trum of higher education within our major universities. We are also the only nation which has attempted, since World War II, to encourage over half the population of the country to continue past high school for a college degree. Additionally, the increase in the proportion of high school graduates attend- ing college was enhanced by the GI bill of the post-war era.

As a result of this legacy, the demographics of advanced education ra- dically changed the makeup of foreign language departments in major universities between the end of World War II and the beginning of this decade. To accommodate the sudden influx of students in the late 1960's, large universities created relatively large graduate departments in foreign languages to staff lower-division courses almost exclusively with graduate students in training. Consequently, foreign language departments developed a two- tiered system: graduate students and teachers specializing in elementary or required courses on the one hand, and the professors of advanced and graduate courses on the other. Now at the beginning of the 1980's, we find this system in serious trouble. First, the baby-boom is over and university and college enrollments are starting to decline. Second, universities have produced an excess of Ph.D.'s for whom employment prospects are limited. As a consequence, the number of graduate students is also declining. Third, we have a growing tendency in advanced education to view the humanistic disciplines as adjunct, rather than primary, fields of study. The English, Govern- ment, History, or Sociology B.A. is considered a good preparatory degree for law, medicine, or international studies. Therefore, partially because of the dwindling job-markets within the teaching profession, and partially be-

Monatshefte, Vol. 73, No. 3, 1981 271 0026-9271/81/0003-0271.01.00/0 c 1981 by The Board of Regents of The University of Wisconsin System



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cause of the uniquely American situation of having what would otherwise be physically separate professional schools of law, medicine, or business incor- porated into our university structure, we in the humanistic disciplines have both a problem and an opportunity to integrate our programs more closely with the needs of applied disciplines.

The situation which confronts us is potentially a boon to foreign language instruction, but in actual practice we have not capitalized on this potential and diverse audience. The practical question which arises: Why not? Why is it, in an era of consolidation, we do not seize the opportunity to function in a dual role: as professional training ground for language majors and as a supplemental curriculum option for applied disciplines? Why have we been unable to expand into a new academic market in business, medicine, international law, or social services, a market predisposed to utilize our expertise to enhance their programs' present needs and future scope?2 With this potential for growth, why do we find so few signs of life before, during, and after our language requirements?

The answer to this question lies, I believe, in the history of our departments, because that history has given us the configuration of colleagues and courses which we now have. We are all products of the two-tiered system. On one level, our prestigious professors are notable for their scholarship in literature, linguistics, and theory. Their teaching is largely separate from that of colleagues on the second level, those instructors teaching beginning or required language courses. Thus it is hardly surprising that there is little or no dialogue in large departments (indeed, even some smaller ones) about their own language programs and about what is taught in their sequence of language courses.

I speak here of very fundamental kinds of ignorance-about the language of instruction, for example. We know from John Carroll's assessment in 1967 that, for all foreign language majors in our colleges and universities, only about half of all their courses, including both elementary and intermediate language instruction, were, in their estimation, offered in the target language.3 Yet I think most of us would agree that this is an important feature of any foreign language program. Both in multiple section courses and courses in a sequence, a consistent policy needs to be established for expectations regarding language use, length and type of reading assignments, weighting and evaluation of work. Moreover, this consistency must be established not only within each learning level, but, just as importantly, in the progression from level to level. It is imperative that the entire faculty of a department participate in developing a program in which each level encom- passes and expands on the previous work. Departments must recognize that what is at issue here is much more than lower division policy. It is a delinea- tion of development stages, which, in turn, are preconditions for establish- ing growth patterns rather than frustration patterns for students.



Foreign Languages in the University 273

Consistent policies and consistent classroom expectations are not a prominent feature of foreign language programs in the United States. If this assertion sounds outrd, consider your own department. If you ask your colleagues why they are teaching a foreign language, the responses will generally fall into four categories: (1) to teach about the grammar of English- oftentimes students do not learn their own language until they are confronted with a foreign one; (2) to teach translation, since one doesn't know if students can read a language unless they are capable of transposing it into their mother tongue; (3) to train students in a variety of so-called skills: speaking, writing, reading, or listening; (4) to teach about the foreign culture. If such disparity is perceived to exist in actual practice, as well as in theory, it seems fair to conclude that little unanimity exists about what to emphasize in the first year of an elementary program, the second year, and the years after the requirement.

Clearly, then, one of the major reasons that we have had so little life after the language requirement is that we have so little consistency of approach, so little sense of a standard progression from beginning to intermediate to advanced language learning. A review of textbooks confirms this assertion at a glance. Beginners' books stress oral production and non- contextual grammar exercises, while intermediate texts provide largely reading materials appropriate for interpretation and open discussion. The problem of transition between these two levels of activity is rarely addressed. Virtually no attention has been paid to research conclusions that comprehension and interpretive ability do not automatically proceed from mastery of grammatical paradigms or vocabulary as demonstrated in the ability to do word-for-word translations or to vary situational dialogues. This failure to address the seminal problem of transition between learning levels creates a situation that debilitates departmental programs, either in- stantly, if there is no language requirement and the supply of unwilling and frustrated students is cut off for lack of a viable program, or slowly and pain- fully through attrition and reluctance to continue beyond the requirement if there is one. This issue of continuty and progression is the fundament shared by all departments which have developed an effective undergraduate curriculum. Anyone who doubts this assertion need only consult one of the new volumes in the ACTFL Professional Library, Award Winning Foreign Lan- guage Programs, to identify the "Prescription for Success" as a matter of

departmental self-definition, here the situating of high school programs within the broader academic objectives of their curricula.4

The lack of program coherence is so widespread and has been an accepted malaise for so many years that the ACTFL volume is eminently justified in styling itself as the "first book of its kind." Up to now debates have been restricted to methodological differences within segments of programs. Yet, ironically, the only instance of discriminating research involving such meth-



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odological investigations (by Chastain and Woerdehoff) merely emphasizes that, without the reinforcement of a consistent program, performance gains achieved by a particular methodology at a specific learning level are eradi- cated.5 The gains made by students exposed to the cognitive code instruction in the first year were lost when the cognitive code group joined the audiolingual control group in the second year.6 The very formulation of such an experiment in which one method's "efficacy" is evaluated against another's reflects a uniquely post-World War II situation, as L.G. Kelly's book Twenty-Five Centuries of Language Teaching testifies.7

The methodological pluralism of past centuries never threatened to become as self-defeating as the problem we are facing, simply because foreign language instruction functioned to serve the study of other disciplines, such as literature, philosophy, or law. With World War II, it suddenly be- came a perceived value to be able to communicate in a living language. On a relatively unconscious level, then, the profession decided to reformulate its elementary and intermediate teaching methodologies in order to teach students to communicate. This was done, however, without reformulating the pre-World War II objectives for advanced language students. As a result, the so-called lower division emerged-a realm which functioned as a sub- group within the traditional department and which progressively removed itself from the mainstream of the discipline.

With the swelling enrollments of the 1950's and 1960's, this pedagogical sub-group consolidated its existence by hiring its own faculty, a faculty designated as "beginning language instructors." This faculty, consisting of teaching assistants under the supervision of a few pedagogical specialists, enabled the traditional faculty to consolidate its own sphere of interest in advanced courses and graduate work in the department. The inevitable result of this process has been the dual department whose existence is reflected in the coinages "upper" and "lower" division. And compounding the problem of the lower division ghetto, departments, in abdicating their involvement with the lower division, have also abdicated their formative role in specifying objectives for beginning and intermediate programs.

The immediate result was a leadership vacuum for the lower division- a lack of involvement by senior faculty in and specification of a departmental program at the beginning and intermediate levels. This vacuum was rapidly filled by a series of methods-audiolingual, structural, cognitive code. Pre- viously foreign languages had been considered a preparation for reading in other disciplines, and the predominant approach had been the so-called grammar-translation method. But the new methodologies which emerged after the war emphasized production and communication. Thus during the late 1950's and early 1960's, a climate of optimism and enthusiasm for language study led proponents of new methods to assume a degree of achievement which could not be attained. By the time John Carroll published his




study of the achievements of language majors in U.S. colleges and universities in 1967, however, only students who had been in the foreign country or who had parents who spoke the target language achieved a minimal proficiency after four years of study. If proficiency could not be achieved by students motivated enough to major in the foreign language in a four-year period, then the promises for proficiency after a two-year language requirement were clearly specious. A whole series of comprehensive evaluations of various lower division methodologies-notably Agard and Dunkel in the 1950's, Sherer Wertheimer in the early 1960's, and the Pennsylvania Report in the 1970's-merely confirmed the basis for skepticism about claims for language proficiency after two years of study." Moreover, with the exception of temporary advantages demonstrated in the Chastain and Woerdehoff

study," none of the methodological groups could confirm significant statisti- cal superiority over the others.

The academic lesson of this experience has yet to be learned-namely, that innovations in methodology are not a panacea for our problems. The issue can be stated even more bluntly: in trying to redeem the structure of competing methodologies predominant since World War II, we in the profession have ignored our fundamental problem-that with each new methodology our large language departments have institutionalized a new description of expected achievement based on the first year of language preparation. In this fashion an entire departmental language program is being defined from the bottom up according to shifting lower division methodologies instead of language abilities needed in terms of departmental and university objectives. Thus the upper divisions of our two-tiered university departments are reduced to accommodating their instruction to the con- tradictions or, at best, the internal diffuseness of the lower division. Because there is no department decision about the meshing and integration of com- ponents of a four-year program, lower and upper divisions within departments continue to work at cross purposes with one another, thereby rein- forcing their mutual exclusivity.

The problems spawned by this situation at large universities have had repercussion for state colleges, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges. In the wake of enthusiasm for foreign language studies and the burgeoning departments of the early 1960's, faculty were hired to serve enrollment needs without regard to long term departmental objectives or fulfillment of the needs of a given institution.' Commonly, "beginning language" staff was hired on the basis of linguistic competence alone, regard- less of scholarly interest or experience. Frequently such faculty lacked Ph.D.'s or advanced preparation beyond the M.A. As a result, foreign language departments in smaller colleges have tenured faculty whose academic credentials do not compare favorably with those of many part-time or temporary faculty who are now available in large numbers.



276 Swaffar

Perhaps even more serious than the problem of hiring practices was the fact that small colleges used the large university departments as their models. They also adopted the lower and upper division split and the emphasis on the use of particular methods in conjunction with expensive language laboratory equipment. At the same time, their accelerated internal dialogue and their much more intimate knowledge of what students are and are not able to do, led them faster to disenchantment with the excessive promises for language proficiency than was the case in the large university. By the mid-1970's, under pressure to reduce all requirements, the language departments in both large and small colleges frequently headed the list. The demand for a two-year sequence was deemed excessive when compared with the requirements for one or two semesters in govern- ment, history, or even the various natural sciences. To compound the problem, the study of foreign languages was frequently deemed to present excessive demands on time and energy which were believed to interfere with the pursuit of studies in other disciplines." These factors, added to the problem of the professional status of tenured staff without Ph.D.'s in small colleges, tended to make required language courses highly vulnerable.

Operating on the lower division model found in large departments, smaller college departments were in a considerable bind. The prescription of a two-year sequence, predicated as necessary for the language exposure to have any value, was also bound to training and materials which did not have carry-over into other subject matter. Foreign language study was indeed remedial on a contentual as well as a linguistic level. It was based on materials whose informational value did not reflect the intellectual maturation of students. Neither the dialogues nor the short graded readings used in conjunction with the pattern drills of texts of the 1960's and early 1970's presented the students with stimulating ideas or, with few exceptions, information which was of value in its own right. Therefore, one of the major objections that many students had to foreign language study was the fact that it did not stimulate their intellectual capacities.

Ironically, the small colleges potentially would have had the most viable alternative to this dilemma. In the small college it would be appropriate to limit the demands of course work to specific tasks in, say, social services or business, an accommodation which would be impractical within the large university structure. Such accommodation would involve a rejection of the two-year lower division concept in which the student was to be prepared for any and all language situations. Yet, persistently faithful to that era's model, small college language faculty frequently walked into curriculum meetings prepared to argue for a four-semester requirement, an argument which they lost almost as surely as they were unprepared to propose creative alternatives to their demands.




In effect, the contradictory features inherent to the dual university department were transmitted directly and with even less felicitous results to the smaller institutions-the emphasis on production in the first year, the shift to reading in the second year, the lack of formulation and conscious decisions about the educational aims which the department was attempting to achieve and, lastly, a lack of flexibility to adapt language instruction to the changing times. The policy of non-academic lower division training as distinct from the academic upper division work further estranged the beleaguered language teachers in small colleges-individuals who were literally caught in the middle between the ostensible demands of the profession (proficient foreign language students in two years) and the academic needs and traditions of their own institutions (students who were capable of reading texts in a foreign language in terms of a particular discipline, or interviewing Hispanic patients in a hospital setting). The application of foreign languages to other realms of the liberal arts education was not, as it had been prior to World War II, fundamental to their self-definition. With the abdication of this inte- grative role within their own institution, foreign languages experienced a concommitant loss of support from other humanistic disciplines.

Even in the wake of the widespread decline in foreign language requirements,the current focus of attention still remains on enrollments-as though numbers alone, as in the 1960's and 1970's, were to be considered a sufficient mandate for continued practices. The big university departments of the 1960's and 1970's did not equip their graduate students to deal con- structively today with alternative solutions to the problem of decreasing interest in foreign language study. It is in this sense, too, that small colleges are heirs to the problems of the large institution.

The foreign language profession as a whole has been utilizing paradigms for survival which are no longer applicable, paradigms based on an ostensible golden age of the past two decades, an age in which, as I have tried to indicate, the blessings received were very mixed. It was a time of high enrollments and total employment. It was also a time of illusory expectations, of self-defeating eclecticism, and of growing schizophrenia within the discipline about how to teach foreign languages on the one hand and how to integrate the multiple functions of a foreign language department- language teaching, teacher education, scholarship, the undergraduate and graduate major programs-into existing departmental structures, whether large or small. In providing the profession with high enrollments and a cap- tive audience, the 1960's and 1970's created an idiosyncratic set of assumptions about language teaching, assumptions which are now impeding the profession in dealing with the soluble problems it faces today.

How can we go about discarding these assumptions and identifying the realities of a constructive future for the profession within the parameters of



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the American system of higher education? If we are going to set about reintegrating ourselves into that system, we must first set about reintegrating our own departments. We must first cease to view our elementary language instruction as a task distinct and separate from the academic concerns of the department and the institution in which that department functions. Only then can we cease to focus on "methodologies" relevant solely to a separate lower division. Only then can we shift our attention to the implementation and the goals of a total academic program representing both a consistently articulated philosophy and the practical pedagogical features of progression between learning levels, a progression predicated on what has been achieved at the previous level of instruction. In short, only then can we commence to accept the reality that a method does not automatically result in a language program and commence to operate under the assumption that, re- gardless of "methods" chosen, what the department wants students to learn must be agreed upon before any viable program can be constructed.

Getting departments to agree upon anything, as any chairman knows, is more easily said than done. While methodological and textbook uniform- ity has characterized the conduct of lower division programs, preparation for courses at the upper division in large institutions has been largely the re- sponse to immediate rather than long-range needs. Attempts to build total programs which include all four years of language study will probably be viewed as "managerial" and as an infringement on the individual upper division faculty member's freedom of presentation and selection of materials. The most cogent argument to counter such objections is that, of all academic disciplines which function with a liberal arts curriculum, foreign languages is the only one which allows its faculty to determine course content and presentation mode on an individual rather than a definitive concept of the field.

All disciplines other than foreign languages address themselves to an identifiable set of questions: history deals with the relationships between past and present; physics, with the study of matter and energy and their transformations; philosophy, with the origin and constitution of reality. Even linguistics, in isolation, focuses on the analytical processes by which we examine the structure and meaning of language. Within each of these disciplines there are many methodologies or pedagogical strategies which restrict the organization of data both in humanistic disciplines and in the natural sciences. But such methodologies never serve as programs per se but only to preselect that segment of the field which is the larger focus of the department. For example, a total history even of a limited period is generally an overwhelming task, and so a methodological focus, such as the social or the economic history of a period, is applied to exclude sufficient data so that the information which remains can be organized into comprehensible patterns.

Unlike such academic disciplines as history, physics, et al, language studies have no identifiable, no restricted field for coherent study. Foreign




languages encompass any and all phenomena occurring in that language. Unless otherwise identified as the departmental emphasis, e.g. in Harvard where course offerings are centrally philological, or at Wisconsin, where a socio-political orientation characterizes the program from the first year on- ward, the medium in our discipline is indeed the only message. Upper division courses in language departments can and often do deal in everything from soup to nuts, from literature to sociology, to history, to the natural sciences. The identity of upper division course work is often, in actual practice, established by selecting anything written in a foreign language or origi- nally written in a foreign language or related to the foreign culture, on the basis of linguistic rather than contentual considerations. The parameters of content are defined by the medium of language itself, with the result that our discipline cannot be located in a distinctive body of questions: we have no disciplinary boundaries for our study. What we do have in foreign languages is the option of multiple contents instead of multiple approaches to a single content, as is the case in other disciplines. Since we rarely have a content focus at the upper division level, we cannot evaluate our methodologies at the lower division level with respect to a particular contentual objective. Our departments do not achieve uniformly identifiable characters.

Diametrically opposed to the multiple content emphasis of today's upper division is the exclusivity of language emphasis at the lower division level. Here the focus on mastery of language for global communication (i.e., application in any and all disciplines and life situations) defines most course work. Very rarely do we undertake to teach language in terms of a conten- tually defined communicative framework. As a result, students are denied reasonable limits for the achievements expected of them. By way of illustration, a student of social work learning how to communicate in Spanish will perceive immediate benefits if the range of vocabulary and structures to be learned in elementary classes are oriented around the content of life situations in hospitals, house visitations, sociological research, and reading of case studies. Similarly, a business student can appreciate and derive meaning almost from the outset of instruction from unedited office memos, business forms, invoices, catalogues, instruction manuals for the operation of office machinery, or participation in simulated office discussion on management practices or the chit-chat appropriate to a business lunch. Colleagues outside the United States have provided us with considerable substantiation for this intuitively obvious fact. Programs developed in England, France, Germany, and Italy, accomplish their restricted objectives for training in a specific area in the span of one semester to one year.12

Today, practical exigencies are beginning to lead foreign language departments to consider such alternatives to their previous course of action. Shrinking enrollments have led graduate faculty to participate to a much greater extent than was heretofore the case in the lower division realm. In



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the smaller colleges, where even in the best of years most faculty participa- ted in all phases of the undergraduate program, the tendency has been to consolidate and consider course revisions in terms of a shifting student population. In the larger universities, there has been a forced integration, and the actuality of experience in the lower division classroom is replacing the second-hand knowledge of the pedagogically removed professors whose time and energy was heretofore focused exclusively in graduate and upper division course work. In the wake of twenty years of a two-tiered system, however, such professors have become interlopers, aliens in the province of lower division planning and development. Moreover, this type of work has not been prestigious and has not been associated with rewards, either mone- tary or professional. One might add that such a practice is in stark contrast to many departments in the natural sciences and the social sciences, where lively, popular required courses for freshmen and sophomores are the pride of the department, and effective teaching of such courses carries with it considerable status and recognition.

The status of the lower division in foreign languages contrasts starkly with this situation. At present, the reintegration of the strictly academic professor into the lower division program is frequently viewed as a necessary evil, the addition of a lower division course-a perfunctory matter of teaching sufficient hours to fill a course load. Exacerbating this situation is the fact that the present methodological constitution of most lower division courses precludes them from being a fertile ground for the types of expertise which these academic professors profess. Beginning language instruction, as pres- ently conceived in most large institutions, allows little leeway for excursuses into any type of literary analysis, examination of primitive myths, or the me- dieval lyric. It is focused on method, not content.

To a large measure, integration problems facing large departments can be eased through reassessment of the record of the past twenty years and scrutiny of a growing body of research focused less on absolute standards of achievement and more on the role of language studies as a mediator of a mode of apperception distinct and informative in ways which contrast with or enhance our mode of apperception in our native language. Increasingly, this research encourages the foreign language teacher to consider language as a mediator of ideas rather than as an end itself, to discard the notion of skill development in favor of the notion of thought development in terms of a foreign tongue. Research such as that of Krashen on adult language acquisition stresses that the comprehension of concepts and the ability to process linguistic information apparently not only outdistances the learner's ability to express himself, but is also an extremely effective precondition for even- tual communicative competence.13 Two mutually supporting bodies of evi- dence in psycholinguistics and discourse analysis have emerged stressing the




importance of comprehension prior to production and logical processing of information as a facilitator of recall.'4

The possibility of supplanting a "skill" hierarchy with a comprehension production hierarchy is particularly fruitful at a point in our professional history when it has become virtually imperative for foreign language to become discipline-oriented and to recognize that we have not produced proficient students by means of a two-year skill-oriented program. If we can stop thinking in terms of the specious promise of absolute language proficiency, it should be possible for us to develop concepts of limited subject matter proficiency in terms of a given foreign language, language with a delineated purpose for study. If we can create programs which foster foreign language study as a basis for continued contact with the literature or linguistic sphere of focused academic or professional pursuits, we can render foreign languages a viable component of an educated person's life, one which that person continues to use and apply past the period of formal education.

Before we can commence constructive rethinking of our own future, we must identify the non-constructive thinking of our immediate past. I believe there are five basic areas which need to be examined and rethought if we are to truly revitalize language instruction in the United States.

The first is motivation, an area which has been neglected in foreign language teaching. High attrition rates have been one of the major drawbacks of the methodological emphasis of past decades. At the same time, the lux- ury of having plentiful numbers of students tended to allow us to overlook the disaffection with our teaching and our materials. It was all too easy in these years to attribute low motivation to an unwillingness to buckle down and do hard work or to simple intellectual laziness. Attitude surveys on foreign language study indicate that this perception has not been shared by students. On the contrary, while there is resentment about the fact that the demands of foreign language classes on students' study time exceed the time required by other subjects,"'5 even more serious objections are raised about the lack of perceived utility of language.'6 Such dissatisfactions manifest themselves in high attrition rates. Most departments lose from 35 to 50 per- cent of their students between the first and second semester of beginning language instruction. Major studies conducted to research the results of various methodologies confirm this experience. In the Scherer and Wertheimer study conducted at the University of Colorado, as well as in the Pennsylva- nia Report conducted in the high schools of that state, only half of the students who started with both the experimental and control sections com- pleted their course work after a two year sequence."

Few studies have been undertaken that investigate what can be done to improve student attitude and motivation to continue language study. The motivation problem is more than one of stemming declining enrollments, however. It is central to the effectiveness of our discipline. The research we



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have on factors contributing to effective learning of any subject identify student motivation as the core consideration in learning and retention of subject matter.'8 Our professional indifference to this important issue not only costs us our students between semesters, but also costs us a considerable learning potential.

Efforts made to discover what students want to learn and their objectives for engaging in foreign language study are frequently all that it takes to establish dialogue between a department and its students which can have immediate impact in lowering attrition.

The second area which bears serious reexamination is that of standards: the basis for assessing language proficiency. Since the standards for proficiency established in the 1960's have proven unrealistic, standards based on a concept of total linguistic competence as a feasible goal, it is clearly in order that we reassess these standards in terms of practical objectives. This may well mean no more than reexamination of our priorities-do we want students to be able to do everything, or do we think some abilities proceed reasonably from others? Can some kinds of knowledge in special- ized areas, such as foreign language for business, social services, or the arts, be assessed in lieu of the global linguistic demands placed on students in most present day proficiency examinations? Concommitantly, we also need to reassess our value hierarchy in existing examinations. For example, should equal penalties be imposed for errors in verb tense and adjective end- ings? Do reading and listening comprehension passages reward the capacity to infer and analyze meaning as well as recognition of grammatical and se- mantic detail? Current studies on student/teacher interaction and discourse analysis further suggest that assessments of proficiency vary when they are made by teachers, lay people, native or non-native speakers."'9 Such research necessarily extends the present day definition of proficiency as reflecting mastery of vocabulary and morphological structure to include recognition of concepts, the identification of overall meaning, and communicative competence according to standards of logical clarity and intelligibility, as well as grammaticality.

The third area, which is just commencing to receive long overdue attention, is the problem of language loss and the implied concommitant problem of language use beyond formal education. Despite empirical indications that foreign language proficiency is related to early exposure to the language, such proficiency has heretofore been assessed cumulatively, as in Carroll's study of foreign language majors. The profession has not been systematic in distinguishing temporary, possibly short-term, memory losses in language ability (e.g., in the summer's lag between high school and college) from permanent, non-retrievable losses which may or may not occur after a designated time lapse. Such ignorance severely hampers us in multiple ways. Un- able to truly distinguish temporary from permanent language loss, we




frequently fail to adequately acknowledge prior language experience in high school or elementary language programs and consequently denigrate the value of this experience by college placement in courses which prove too easy for these students. Often students opt not to continue study com- menced in high school or find themselves poorly motivated in an elementary class ill-suited to their abilities once an initial refresher period is behind them. Each of us who has visisted a foreign country whose language we stud- ied some time before has experienced this rapid retrieval of our fluency within a fortnight.

The work on assessment of language loss currently being undertaken at the University of Pennsylvania deserves the widespread input and support of the profession.20 The ramifications of this study should, among other things, help the profession establish how students with prior training can and cannot be expected to perform and the constraints which foster or inhibit valid assessment of their abilities.

The fourth area relates closely to the foregoing concern of language loss: the problem of a smooth transition from basic levels of language learning in the high schools and elementary schools to advanced work at the college level. Because we at the university level frequently fail to reward students' prior accomplishments by penalizing them for short-term losses or by testing a range of accomplishments predicated on a single methodology, we justifiably alienate a potential audience. If our research can identify the nature of temporary language loss, we can then encourage universities to do their placement testing while students are in public school language classes or, alternately, offer a two to three week intensive or remedial course for such students to reactivate their recall and orient them to the college program. If we can measure language learning instead of language loss, we can then provide the conditions for rapid language acquisition by students with prior training.

The fifth and last area we need to reevaluate has been the underlying theme of this paper: the question of content or the subject matter which we teach in aforeign language. It is time the profession shifted its focus from the way foreign languages are taught at the lower division level to the question of what is taught, and whether what is taught is substantial, is interesting, and is at the intellectual level of the students to whom the subject matter is addressed. There are sufficient indications-motivational, psycholinguistic, and discipline-extrinsic-that courses with informational content stimulate continued interest and facilitate language learning. If we can stop viewing foreign languages in isolation and start thinking of them as vehicles to trans- mit information, we will find a receptive audience among students and faculty from other disciplines. For example, the focus on a social problem, be it the status of women, terrorism, guest workers, aging, or ecology, should not be treated in terms of minimal reference or "graded" readings in simplistic,



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innocuous versions on the peripheries of authentic language. To be intellec- tually stimulated, our students must be presented with differing points of view and differing types of texts. Treatments of ecology, for example, can be found in political polemics, short stories, anti-nuke flyers, and newspaper cartoons. Such generic reality needs to be reflected in a variety of packages which honestly delineate the complexities of these problems within the foreign culture of the language under study.

To achieve the foregoing, we must reevaluate the ultimate focus of our departments. The literature/philology bias, which has dominated the upper division, must recognize that literature is intimately associated with the sociological, political, and economic fabric of a nation. Similarly, dialect differences and class distinctions reflected in language use represent a refocus- ing of traditional sociolinguistic concerns in terms of a particular pragmatic content. In this fashion the burgeoning interest in culture and business courses reflected in the Monatshefte survey of fall 198021 can focus a total program of learning rather than having to coexist among a plethora of lin- guistically as well as topically unrelated options. By coalescing our currently disparate upper and lower division, any department can create course sequences in which localized content about the art, history, music, and politics of the foreign country are arranged around the evolution of, for example, emerging capitalism and business practices. Such sequences must progress through conceptually related vocabulary and structures which are developed consciously in a series of courses, thereby providing students with reasonable expectations under which to achieve both language and ideational proficiency. Departments that construct such programs can provide their adult language learner with the kind of intellectual stimulation which can compare favorably with other disciplines. Students can be learning while learning a foreign language.

There are already a variety of indications that the climate and the atti- tudes toward our concept of what foreign language should be teaching have undergone changes which foreshadow a coming to grips with the problems of the past twenty years and revision of assumptions that have exacerbated those problems. Perhaps most heartening is the increasing professional interest in what to teach and how to teach foreign languages, an interest which is no longer isolated within a small minority of the professional community. The professional pedagogues of the large universities and the faculty of small colleges whose primary job is to teach beginning language are being joined by colleagues, funding agencies, and professional organizations. All are keenly aware that our enrollment problem is not a problem in itself. Rather, it is symptomatic of the fundamental need for restructuring our discipline.

Signal leadership is being provided by the Modern Language Associa- tion in a variety of visible and concrete activities. Consider the following: the establishment of a standing committee on teaching and related activities, a




group whose advocacy has channeled publications to the professional public in guiding books and monographs toward completion at various presses. A glance at this committee's sponsorship list from 1975 to the present is an impressive testimony of ever-increasing suport from an organization which 15 years ago had been more accurately characterized as strictly academic.This narrow academic focus was so pronounced that the pedagogical needs conceived of in the profession in the early 1960's were relegated to a separate organization, a separate purview with the establishment of ACTFL under the auspices of the Modern Language Association as parent organization.Today not only the ACTFL meetings, but the MLA itself, feature a range of sections dealing with pedagogical topics, sections which are as well and as diversely attended as the strictly scholarly sections. This trend toward reamalgamation of pedagogy and scholarship is symptomatic of efforts to bridge the upper division and lower division gap within large universities.

In addition, for the past two years, efforts have been underway to strength- en language programs at professionally and geographically isolated institutions.With funding from the NEH and the Exxon Education Founda- tion, Claire Guadiani has piloted an extremely effective outreach program. Colleagues who would not otherwise be in a position to participate effectively in national meetings attend specially designed seminars as well as reg- ular MLA sessions. They learn about a variety of curricular models and approaches to management of foreign language departments. They also learn resource development and reestablish themselves in professional networks. They work under the guidance of colleagues who have complementary academic and language teaching credentials.22 Similarly, the NEH summer seminars function to bridge the gap between institutions and increase dialogue within the profession by providing contact between scholars in large and small language departments.

Aside from such independent programs for individuals, the NEH has funded an impressive range of programs for institutions whose consistent objective has been to encourage language departments from elementary school through college to develop language curricula predicated on innovative use of existing resources. Such funding has gone to both established departments and to virtually unknown regional institutions. A less financially ambitious but equally focused outreach to struggling colleagues and institutions of all types has been the NEH consultantship program. A low-budget branch of the program's divisions, the consultantship grants are designed to aid humanities departments in assessing their potential and discovering ways to enhance it.23

A fourth trend which is slowly but surely emerging is that smaller colleges are developing programs to serve their own institutional needs, programs which are virtually independent of large university models. Both the recent ACTFL volume alluded to earlier and the professional journals-the



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Modern Language Journal, The Foreign Language Annals, and specific language publications-all testify to the innovative thinking and research initia- tive of smaller institutions. The question of survival, not only in regard to the existence of major or minor programs, but also as departments has, in part, prompted these efforts. But members of smaller departments, for all the jeopardy these departments may be facing, do have the advantage of far greater personal contact with each other and with colleagues in their institutions. Moreover, small college departments can much more readily undertake the kinds of self-assessment procedures which can lead to meaningful change. Most course assignments are rotating, and faculty opinions about courses are based on one's own classroom experience. There are fewer course/instructor surveys to evaluate in order to decide which courses or features of courses seem to interest students and are considered of greatest value. Smaller colleges can more easily locate their students both during and after formal instruction to determine perceived immediate as well as long- range benefits or applications of foreign language study. Motivation to keep students is necessarily higher because intersemester attrition is not, as in the large universities, a question of revising commitments to graduate students. On the contrary: the percentage of enrollment increase achieved through program reformulation is frequently the fine line of a small department's survival-i.e., the number of full-time positions within the department which can be maintained.24

My proposals in this essay have, I believe, been very modest. I have not suggested new ideologies, revolutionary revisions or radical exorcism of existing practices. In only one sense have I differed from the bulk of the literature concerning the problem of dwindling foreign language enrollments: I have asked departments to regard the responsibility for enrollments as their own, rather than as that of the academic community or the larger community itself. I have suggested that one of our most serious stumbling-blocks in confronting this problem is our own disciplinary diffusion-a diffusion rooted not so much in methodological differences as in a profound methodological indifference to the importance of effective boundaries, of self-definition. This indifference results in idiosyncratic courses and disparate objectives. Self-definition must be predicated on agreement about what a department wants of itself and its students, a recognition that, to have an effective, cohe- sive program, departments need interlocking classroom syllabi and in- formed analysis of what interests and motivates our students, what foreign language students want to learn and what they find worthwhile.

Part of our self-definition will involve a rethinking of the role of foreign language in the American academic community. We are going to have to seriously reconsider our job at the university and our potential with respect to other disciplines, such as business, law, social services, the fine arts- disciplines whose needs have not been primary considerations in the foreign




language instruction of the post-World War II years. I am suggesting that our reintegration be not only departmental, but also into the university community itself, as that of a discipline defined by an emphasis on content rather than by language alone. A content orientation does not imply forsaking the traditional ideal of languages as a component in the education of a truly cultured human being. On the contrary, I suggest the cultured human being today is precisely the individual who can participate effectively in a dialogue between the humanistic and pragmatic sectors of our society.

'I would like to thank Richard Brod and Kurt Muiller for their incisive editorial com- ments. My colleagues, G. Truett Cates and Katherine Arens, provided me with extensive, much appreciated discussion and suggestions.

The public largely dismisses the academy as an effective teacher of foreign languages. Typically, a recent Playboy article of "Ways to Learn a Second Language," Vol. 27, No. 5 (1980), p. 211, suggests Berlitz, self-instruction, electronic translators, and private tutors, pointing out that these methods are "faster and more expedient than classroom training."

John Carroll, The Foreign Language Attainments of Language Majors in the Senior Year: A Survey Conducted in U.S. Colleges and Universities (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), p. 136.

4William D. Sims and Sandra B. Hammond, Award Winning Foreign Language Pro- grams: Prescriptions for Success (Skokie, Ill., 1981).

"Kenneth D. Chastain and Frank J. Woerdehoff, "A Methodological Study Comparing the Audio-Lingual Habit Theory and the Cognitive-Code Learning Theory," MLJ, 52 (1968), 268-79.

6Kenneth D. Chastain, "A Methodological Study Comparing the Audio-Lingual Habit Theory and the Cognitive-Code Learning Theory: Continued," MLJ, 54 (1970), 257-66.

7L.G. Kelly, 25 Centuries of Language Teaching (Rowley, Mass., 1976; orig. 1969). 8Frederick B. Agard & Harold B. Dunkel, An Investigation of Second Language Teach-

ing (Boston, 1948); George A. Scherer & Michael Wertheimer, A Psycholinguistic Experiment in Foreign Language Teaching (New York, 1964); P.D. Smith, A Comparison of the Cognitive and Audiolingual Approaches to Foreign Language Instruction: The Pennsylvania Foreign Lan- guage Project (Philadelphia, 1970).

9Chastain and Woerdehoff, see note 5. 1oLanguages were caught in the same uncontrolled expansion as the rest of the univer-

sity. The heritage which we in the foreign languages are confronting-shifting lower division requirements, laxity in standards for student admission, hastily tenured faculty, and the dilu- tion of a research focus-were the subject of a conference sponsored by the International Coun- cil on the Future of the University, reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 4 May 1981, p. 1.

11Leon Jakobovits, "Research Findings and FL Requirements in Colleges and Universi- ties," FLA, 2 (1969).

12See the proceedings of the New York ACTFL/Goethe Institute Workshop Zum Thema: Leseverstehen, Sept. 25-28, 1979 (forthcoming), particularly Karin Herrmann's "Kon- zeption und Durchftihrung von Fachlesekursen fir Geisteswissenschaftler."

'3Stephen D. Krashen's research results lead him to distinguish between acquired language as a "creative construction process" found in both children and adults, and learned language, defined as "conscious mental representations of linguistic rules." Cf. "Individual Varia- tion in the Use of the Monitor," in Second Language Acquisition Research, Issues and Implications, ed. William C. Ritchie (New York, 1978), p. 175. At the very least, such an em- pirically ascertainable distinction suggests that for many language learners the acquisition process is predicated on interlocking cognitive and creative factors. See also Dan Slobin, "Cognitive Prerequisites for the Development of Grammar," in Studies of Child Language De- velopment, ed. Charles Ferguson & Dan Slobin (New York, 1973), pp. 175-208; and J.



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Wagner-Gough & E. Hatch, "The Importance of Input Data in Second Language Acquisition Studies," Language Learning, 25 (1975), 297-308. For a series of studies exploring the theoreti- cal and practical implications of a comprehension/production sequence, see The Comprehen- sion Approach: An Evolving Methodology in Foreign Language Instruction, ed. Harris Winitz (Rowley, Mass., 1981).

14For a comprehensive overview of such research, see Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, "Some Remarks on Creativity in Language Acquisition," in Second Language Research, Issues and Implications, ed. William C. Ritchie (New York, 1978), pp. 65-89. For an analysis of the curricular implications of a focus on "Conceptual Aspects of Language Learning," see G.D. Kennedy's essay of that name in Understanding Second and Foreign Language Learning, Issues and App roaches, ed. Jack C. Richards (Rowley, Mass., 1978), pp. 117-133.

Jakobovits, p. 448. 16'"Jakobovits, p. 448. 17See Scherer & Wertheimer and P.D. Smith, note 8. 18Peter Strevens locates success or failure of foreign language students in a motivational

hierarchy, the first five levels of deterrents being: "unwilling learners, low expectations of success, unattainable aims and objectives, unsuitable syllabus (or no syllabus), and confusion between language learning and the study of literature (or, more recently, linguistics)"; see "The Nature of Language Teaching," in Understanding Second and Foreign Language Learn- ing, Issues and Approaches, ed. Jack C. Richards (Rowley, Mass., 1978), esp. p. 197. The rela- tionship between motivation and achievement is a vicious circle, as Jakobovits (p. 448) asserts: "It is well known that lack of achievement in a subject lowers student motivation and thus the lack of intrinsic interest in FL study at the college level may, to a certain extent, be the result of previous and concurrent failure in FL study."

'9See, for example: Linda Gaylord Piazza, "French Tolerance for Grammatical Errors Made by Americans," MLJ, 64 (1980), 422-427; and Vicki B. Galloway, "Perceptions of the Communicative Efforts of American Students of Spanish," MLJ, 64 (1980), 428-433.

20For information concerning this project, contact Professor Barbara Freed, Assistant Director of Language Attrition Project, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104.

21Valters Nollendorfs and Christopher J. Wickham, "The Attraction and the Retention of Undergraduate Students," Monatshefte, 72 (1980), 331-336.

22In the two year existence of the pilot program, there have been 100 participants. The effects of the program in such areas as new courses, programs, research, enrollment gains, and participants' publications will be forthcoming at Jossey-Bass. For further information, contact the initiator and current director of this project, Professor Claire Gaudiani, Romance Lan- guages, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA, 19104.

23For information, contact Janice Litwin, Program Officer, NEH Consultantship Pro- gram, National Endowment for the Humanities, Mail Stop 202, 806 15th Street, N.W., Wash- ington, D.C. 20506.

24As an illustration of the impact of a new language program tailored to the needs of a small college, see: Charles W. Byrd, "Intensive Language Instruction at a Small Liberal Arts College: The Dartmouth Model at Emory and Henry," MLJ, 64 (1980), 297-302. Claire Gau- diani reports that during the Workshops for Development of FL Programs many session dealt with effective management, growth, and development of foreign language programs. Subsequent to the first workshop 15 of the initial 44 reporting participants mention significant increase in student enrollments (unpublished NEH Final Report, Grant EH 00140-80-30, p. 3). Similarly, Austin College in Sherman, Texas, implemented a German program in comprehension-based instruction on the strength of student enthusiasm and enrollment gains which had been demonstrated at the University of Texas at Austin, where the program originated. The program was discontinued at the University of Texas for lack of faculty participation. Despite enrollment gains, it was difficult to involve a large German Department faculty of 26 in a growing university of 42,000 students, most of whom are required to study a foreign language. Austin College, on the other hand, has no language requirement, a student population of approximately 1,100, and two full-time assistant professors to teach 70 German students, a total enrollment which has doubled in the two-year period since the implementation of the comprehension-based program.



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