I'm gonna introduce my colleagues from Columbia University Stephane Charitos,
He leads the Language Resource Center there. I've known him for quite a number of years and
have known him to be very willing to propose to evocative questions
and throw out interesting solutions and raise really good issues
and that's exactly what we invited him to do here this afternoon.
I hope you'll join me in welcoming him and I hope you'll enjoy his talk.
Thank you everyone.
Let me begin by thanking Cathy and Emily as well, the organizers of the
Shared Less Commonly Taught Language Symposium for asking me to talk and giving me the
opportunity to speak with you today. Can you hear me?
I'm having a problem I think the tie might be...
How's that? [Laughter] Can you hear me better?
How's that? There's a reason why I never wear ties. [Laughter]
Let me begin by saying I don't know how many of you were present
in May at the Chicago Language Symposium this year.
If you were you might remember that I gave a talk there which offers some
thoughts on the current state of language education in the U.S.
Much of the data I which informed my comments at the time originated from the 2016
MLA preliminary report on enrollments in languages other than English.
I had hoped, and I had spoken to Dennis Looney about this when I saw him in New York that
as promised by the author, there might have been an update to that
report by the end of the summer and this would have given us a more
granular look at the data. Unfortunately, to date this update has not been published,
so my comments today will reiterate many of the points I made back in May, or in
April actually, and I apologize for that. I will, however, try to be more succinct
in order to give us more of an opportunity to have a discussion about some of the things I talk about.
Let me begin as I usually begin, with a couple of anecdotes.
I was in Holland this summer, giving a talk,
and at some point I went to get lunch at a restaurant.
And the waitress came up to me and asked me if I wanted to see a menu in Dutch or in English.
Since I was feeling mischevious I switched into French and I told her in
French that I would like to see a menu in French. She didn't miss a beat,
she switched into French herself and said mais bien sur, (no problem.
This little episode of linguistic nimbleness brought back to mind another incident which
occurred many years before when I was an undergraduate at the University of Arkansas.
I was at a party, I was talking to this girl and during the conversation I mentioned I was from France
She said "Wow you're from France? That's so cool! Do you speak French?" [Laughter]
And for a couple of seconds I thought, you know, I was taken aback, and I have felt like telling her
"No, I speak Italian like everyone else in France" [Laughter] but then I don't recap these
But then I did acknowledge that I did indeed speak French.
I don't recount these episodes, these anecdotes, in order to disparage one culture or praise another.
Instead, I bring them up to highlight some of the fundamental differences
displayed towards foreign languages and foreign cultures between the US and Europe.
Rather than being benign or innocuous, these differences highlight a
far more depressing truth. The fact that far fewer Americans care to learn
something about the rest of the world than their European counterparts.
Despite being a racially diverse country where over 350 languages are spoken on a daily basis,
the U.S. is filled with millions of people who speak English and only English
and who show little to no interest in studying another language.
And it does seem that this situation is not bound to get any better
any time soon. The election of President Trump to the presidency in conjunction
with a broad protectionist sentiment in the US, the imposition of harsh
immigration policies, and the reappearance of English-only rhetoric
all give the impression that the United States is not only turning its
back on the world but that Americans are fine with and even proud of actively
ignoring any language other than English. As we will see in a moment, both last
year's report from the Commission on language-learning and the 2017 report
from the nonprofit American Council for International Education, as well as the
newly releases MLA report on language enrollments all make it quite clear that,
as a nation, the U.S. is faced with a rapidly deteriorating ability to
interact with the rest of the world in any language other than English. It is
against this background that we must examine the state of language study in
the US and ask some tough questions about its future. What I want to do with
you today is threefold: first, I want to share some data that
summarizes and contextualizes the current situation of foreing language education
in the U.S. at both the institutional and the societal context. Having
presented the numbers that sketch out the broader picture, I next want to
outline a number of issues which in my opinion directly affect the role foreign
languages are called to play or not within the context of higher education
in the U.S. today. Finally, I will end by discussing a number of practical
recommendations that could help us formulate specific policies to address
the challenges we face in upholding the visibility and importance of language
education, particularly at the institutional level. But before I start,
let me perhaps explain why I speak of language education in general and not
more specifically of LCTLs, even though I understand that this conference is
concerned primarily with LCTLs. Well, the first reason is...
the first reason is because LCTLs, while important, are but a small part of
a much larger picture. In other words, there are only the tip of a much larger
iceberg. If we look closely at the data we see that LCTLs, and I'm using
the MLA definition of LCTLs here, which is any reason other than the 15 more commonly-taught languages in the US,
LCTLs account for a little over 2% of total language enrollment in 2016, bout
35,000 students. That's a paltry 0.2 percent increase from the 2013
figures. The data only shows that three percent, so if you want to look, so here's
the total enrollments, you'll notice that enrollments over a thousand exist in only
nine languages. And enrollment of less than a hundred number 189. Enrollments in
the LCTLs are also characterized by both extreme volatility and
vulnerability. So 97 languages are taught at a single institution; 164 languages
at three institutions or less; and 43 languages were dropped since 2013, and 40
languages were added. So you have extreme volatility and you don't have durability.
So that's one of the reasons I want to talk about LANGUAGES rather than LCTLs.
There's also, looking at the total counts of institutions that teach languages,
there's only three percent of all institution of higher education surveyed
in 2016 offered instruction in more than 15 languages. 70% offered
instruction in six languages or less. So when we're talking about LCTLs, you
know we're really talking about the tip of the iceberg, and we really shouldn't be talking about
what's under the surface. And that's the second reason, because while LCTLs are
undoubtedly important, particularly to these institutions like my institution
that have a global research presence, an institution like mine have historically
provided the bulk of instruction in the LCTLs. The specific challenges and
problems associated the instruction and provision of LCTLs are simply not
consequential to the vast majority of those teaching languages today. That's
not to say, or in any way demean or disparage the excellent work
accomplished under very trying circumstances by those engaged in the
teaching of LCTLS. It is simply meant to acknowledge a reality. However one can
also think of LCTLs, and this is the second point I'd like to make, like a
canary in a coal mine. By that I mean that while it may seem at first that only
LCTLs are in a vulnerable institutional position, I believe that
many, if not all language programs, will in due course have to face the same
constraints but littles are facing. Since they are all more or less
equally affected by the challenges posed by broader forces that are shaping what
euphamistically has come to be called the nation's "language deficit."
Lastly, I believe there's an urgency today that compels us to take a more
systemic look at the condition under which all languages and not just LCTLs
are offered in university settings. When overall language
enrollments nationwide are dropping, when advanced level enrollments are down,
when the number of language majors are down, when funding and jobs for language
education are down, when the use of adjuncts is up, and when language
departments are being shuttered and programs closed, I think we urgently need
to have a serious discussion about the long term fate of language education at
a time when there are both shrinking resources to support them
institutionally, and growing skepticism about their overall worth in a societal
setting. So as I said, I want to begin by looking at the data from three sources. This is
the first one: in 2014 a bipartisan group of members of Congress asked the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences to undertake a new study of the nation's
language educational needs. In response, they produced a report titled "America's
Languages: Investing in Language Learning for the 21st Century" which I highly
recommend, you should read it. The report takes a critical look at the state of
language education in the US and concludes that the US has neglected
languages in its educational curricula, its international strategies, and its
domestic policies, to the point that it can no longer prepare citizens who can
compete globally in the 21st century. In particular, I want to highlight three of
the reports findings. The fact that despite its long history as an immigrant
nation, only 20% of the total population speaks a language other than English at
home, and that only half of them are considered proficient in reading, writing,
and speaking a second language. So it means that a population of 320 million,
we're talking about maybe 30 million Americans who are proficient in a second language.
The fact that only a small percentage of these thirty million, 16.3%
of those who reported speaking another language acquired that language at
school. That means that they're not picking up a language in our classes,
they're picking up the language at home, okay?
And we know that by the third generation they would have lost that language. And
the fact that...this is the third fact that I want to highlight, the
fact that there is a critical shortage of qualified foreign language
instructors or teachers in the US. And this means that this unfortunate
situation of us not teaching the next generation will
not improve over time and will continue to deteriorate, unless something is done
to fundamentally address this deficit, the fact that there are no teachers. We
are not training teachers. Let's look at the next report. Last year a national
survey the National K-12 Foreign Language Enrollment Survey, sponsored by the
Language Flagship, the Defense Institute, the National Security Education Office,
published data on the state of language study in theUS across the K through
12 continuum. Looking at the data, one can only say that the outlook for language
education in the US classroom is dismal. Despite a growing population, and
the American population IS growing...and despite a growing population of American
who speak a language other than English at home, and I'll talk about that in
graphics later on in my presentation, only about 20% of the total US
school-age population is enrolled in a language class or in a language program.
Moreover, enrollments rates vary widely from state to state, with some states,
Arizona and Arkansas for example, reporting that fewer than 10% of
students are studying world languages. So that's one other problem, the other
problem is that Spanish continues to be the most popular language with
enrollments totally more than all other languages combined. So there is no
diversity in what we teach at the k-12 level. There are some emerging news that
could be considered good. The popularity of Chinese language learning is soaring
across all of the US in K through twelve settings. It ranks at the fourth
most widely taught foreign language in the country's educational system, and we
now offer Chinese courses in every state except South Dakota.
So Chinese is a success story. I should have switched....So you can see
here, one of the other problems is that none of these languages
except Chinese perhaps, and Arabic, are on what the US considers to be a critical
language list. So we're simply not training people in critical
languages at all it's also interesting that eight times more students take
Latin than Arabic in the K through 12 setting. So again, that should tell you
something. In comparison, let me point out the
learning a foreign language is a nearly ubiquitous experience for students
throughout Europe, with the median of ninety-two (percent) of primary and
secondary school students across Europe learning at least one other language in
school as part of their education. Furthermore, studying a second foreign
language for at least one year is compulsory in more than 20 European
countries. You also see that 64% of all Europeans consider
themselves to be bilingual, and this is not something that you see in this
country. Finally, I'm going to skip to the 2016 MLA report, it released its
preliminary report on enrollments earlier this year in March.
Aggregated course enrollments in languages other than English were about a
million four hundred thousand, that's down from a million six
hundred thousand roughly in 2013. Until recently, and I had been speaking to MLA
people, the hope had been that the figures that the
organization had reported in 2013, so in 2013 they reported a draw, that showed
an overall enrollment of course falling by 6.7%. They had hoped that this was an
aberration, and nothing but an aberration, an anomaly. And that the
system would eventually go back to its quote unquote normal state. We now have a
9.2 percent drop since 2013, the second largest decline in the history of the
census. This clarifies any uncertainty we might have had: what we are experiencing
now is not a brief statistical fluke, but the continuation and even
acceleration of a sustained downward trend. Enrollment dropped in all
languages in the top 15, with only Japanese and Korean showing
modest improvement. You can probably see it better here. You see that all
languages dropped, the only two languages that showed a modest improvement were
Japanese and Korean. And when I talk about "modest improvement" I'm talking
about 3,500 students nationwide. That's the improvement we're talking
about. The decrease in enrollment has affected all European languages,
including Spanish which is down almost 10%, French over 11%, German 7, and
Italian over 20%. Even languages that have hitherto been growing robustly,
Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic and so forth, are losing ground.
Enrollment is also dropping, or is anemic at best, in most of the languages that the
US deems to be critical to its national security. There are 3 Tajik learners in the country.
The number of Pashto learners is less than a hundred, probably less than 40. That's the
situation. It also shows us the uniformity in the languages students
pursue: French and Spanish continue to dominate language offering nationwide. In
terms of ranking, sixty-two percent of all students enroll in these two
languages alone. But for me perhaps the most striking statistics are the
following three: the fact that the ratio of students enrolled in language courses in
relation to the total number of students enrolled in
post-secondary education in the u.s. fell to 7.5%.
That almost matches the low point we've had in 1980 or 7.3. That means that seven
and a half, let's say 8 students out of a hundred are studying
language, ok? Because this means that the overall language demand is dropping, even
as the overall number of students enrolling in institutions of higher
education is growing. So even though we have a growing total population, the number
of students who are taking language course are dropping to near historical lows.
The second thing is that with the notable exception of
Korean, you see Korean right here which went from...
all most commonly taught languages show especially sharp declines in enrollments
at the advanced levels. It's not clear why this is happening at this particular
time. Why are we having this loss of upper division enrollments? Is it
because institutions are cutting language programs and therefore students
can't continue, they have limited options for Advanced Studies, or is it because
students are not enrolling in courses offered? It could be one of the two - but the
fact remains that fewer and fewer students are pursuing the language
studies to the point where they can make a meaningful usage of the language
they're learning. They're basically fulfilling the language requirement, if
there is a language requirement, and dropping out of the language programs.
The third point I wanted to make is that the number of institutions reporting offerings in no
language programs at all is steadily climbing. We went from 176 to 219. So more
and more institution are simply cutting their language programs entirely. So how
can we succinctly summarize what all this is
telling us, because it's not enough to look at data; you still have to make sense out of
it. You still have to go under the hood to find out what's going on. In my
opinion, and as someon...my first training was as an economist, what the
data is saying is that the language education is facing a chronically
depressed demand curve. As the data clearly shows, demand for language
instruction at an institution of post-secondary education is anemic at
best and declining at worst throughout every point of the entire curve. And not
just for the last three years. There's the same data, and I've calculated what's
called a regression line that takes care of the deviations from...
the little deviation from one point to the next. When you calculate a regression
line and you plot it historically against the available data, you can
clearly see the general downward trend. So even though it seems to have picked
up a little bit, the trend is downwards and it's steadily downwards. And it's
been slow since the beginning. All this means is that language education in the
U.S. is rapidly becoming like 'kabana' the exquisite Japanese art of floral
arrangement: the rarified specialty of a happy few. And unless we find ways to
successfully deal with the issues of student enrollment, student recruitment,
and perhaps more importantly student retention, it really won't matter what we
do with the LCTLs or with languages in general. We need to find ways to attract
students, to enroll these students, and to retain these students. Otherwise we could
be talking about less, more commonly taught languages, we won't be talking on
languages anymore. Someone who dreamed of being a mathematician in high school,
that's what I wanted to be, I remember that one of my mentors one told me about
a particularly challenging equation in differential geometry. Before one can
begin to offer a solution to a problem one must understand the roots of the
problems itself. So with that in mind I think, and this is
the second part of my presentation, there's a number of factors we can point
to that are negatively impacting language studies in the U.S. in a
significant way. I'm going to go over this rather briefly, many of them are self-evident...
...because later on about advocacy these are the points that they have to address
at both an institutional level and a society.
So here are some of the reasons why I feel language education is
where it is in the US: nativism. There's a lack of interest in other cultures and
other languages in this country. And that lack of interest is growing. I'll leave it
at that. Americans see English as a lingua franca. Why should we learn
another language when other people are learning English? The fact that they're
learning English protects us from having to learn their language. That's a growing
sentiment which I hear a lot from students I speak to.
Language learning is time consuming and we're the, you know,
we're the impulse society. We want what we want then we want it now. We don't
want to wait, we don't want to have to work for it. I mean we're in a society
that has same-day delivery, has movies streaming on-demand, instant feedback
from your followers on social media. We don't have time. So I think that's also
impacted... one of the reasons which I hear from students: "language
education takes time, it's repetitive you got to keep doing it and it's never over,
constantly have to be working at it." Globalization.
...That when we talk about globalization in this country we're talking about globalizing
in English. There's a very public rhetoric about the need to prepare
students to be global citizens of tomorrow ,yet more and more people both
inside and outside academia are questioning to the degree to which
engaging with the languages of culture the rest of the world is really
necessary. Since they're learning English, if we want to be global we can just do
it in English. In particular though I wanted to point out some of these which
are really affecting what's going on. STEM education: a lot of our students now
because, this feeds into the debate about what is the role of a university.. many students the decline that we're seeing in language
Is it to educate citizens or is it to train students for work, for the job market?
And for many students, um...the decline that we're seeing in
enrollment is part of a larger trend away from the humanities in favor or
more applied career-oriented sources from majors. And so we also have to
tackle this within that broader kind of perspective. There's the corporatization
of the of the university so when we see the decline in language enrollments, it
comes at a time when a culture inherited from the corporate world is actively
reshaping almost every part of higher education. And not only are they
introducing new bureaucratic and management structures which are
controlled by a cast of emerging professional administrators, but they're
also bringing methods of operation that have traditionally played no role in how
we conduct our affairs. And in particular I'll mention metrics. There's an
obsession with metrics. If it's not measurable, it doesn't exist.
And unfortunately the only metric we've been able to present have been enrollments and
those are not good. So we need to think about what other
metrics we may be able to provide. Accountability. That's a societal problem,
more and more calls have been growing in the last couple of decades for increased
accountability and transparency at colleges and university. There's a
widespread feeling amongst students, parents, administrators, government and the
general public that higher education is not delivering value for money and that
colleges and universities should be accountable for administrative and
academic activities. I think that's particularly widespread at public
institutions, we're a little bit more protected at private institutions, but it's
there as well. In such an environment it's harder for language programs to be
appealing, unlike programs and degrees that focus
specifically in developing skills for the workplace. Budgetary pressure. I can
see you looking at me saying, yeah well what kind of budgetary pressure do you
have? We have budgetary pressure like everyone else. Since 2008, spending on
public colleges and universities has remained well below historic levels. There's
only three states that have upped their spending from what they were spending in
2008 and the other 47 are still spending less than they were spending in 2008 on
higher education. One of the consequences for language studies is that many
institutions have used the budgetary crisis as an excuse to cut back on their
overall commitment to language programs. And these cutbacks have not
only skewed the playing field away from foreign language education as a whole,
they've also exacerbated the institutional rivalries between foreign
languages by pitting languages currently in demand against languages that may be
in less of a demand as they compete for a for their share of an ever shrinking
budgetary pie. I talked to the budget director
of Columbia, I said is this true for us? He said it is is partly true. We are back to our
spending levels of 2008. However we have revised the way we are thinking about our
endowment. we used to think our endowment was growing at fifteen to seventeen
percent a year. We've completely revised this and so that means that as they
project forward into the future, the future is not as rosy as it used to be,
even for us. I don't want to belabor the point here,
but these are some of the reasons, there are probably others, that are affecting
language education in general. And as I said, if you're going to be talking about
advocacy, these are some of the things you're going to have to be addressing to
the people who are making a decision. What can we do about this? I've been in
this business for over 30 years, and year after year I go to conferences and I hear
from colleagues who invariably express the same frustrations: administrators
don't appreciate, they don't value the importance of teaching and research in
the languages, or voices are either systematically ignored or were not
sufficienly heard, and the future outlook for language education in the US is
grim and getting grimmer. However, I've also noticed that these moments of
frustration seldom go beyond griping and complaining. It seems that as a
profession we have embraced the debilitating mindset that asserts that
despite the dire straits in which we find ourselves,
there is very little we can do to affect the status of language learning at our
institutions. Yet, if we are to have a future of the profession, I believe it is
vital that we respond to the concerns of students, their families, university
administrators, and the wider public about the concerns they have about language
education in general and educate them about why language
does matter. And I think our response must focus on showing empirically and
convincingly that language programs are delivering what we say they are. So we
have to say, if we're saying that we're doing X Y and Z, we have to show that.
But more importantly than showing
that we are doing what we say we are doing, we must forcefully demonstrate why
the very kind of knowledge we produce is indispensable to the business of
academic learning and to society at large. So it's not enough to say that
we're doing a good job, we have to prove to them that the job we're doing is worth doing.
I think this is where this game
is going to get played. There's an urgent need, one would say a critical need, to
move forward with a concerted effort to change the negative perception
associated with language education institutionally as well as societally. In
economics when you have a sharp fall in and demand, some possible responses can
include any and all of the following: the redesign of the product, the opening of
new markets, the launching of a new advertising campaign, or the
establishment of alliances to share costs and expenditures. So I'd like to
inspire myself from economics and propose a multi-pronged approach that
addresses the various challenges we face in upholding the visibility and
importance of language study at the institutional level. And I'm going to
propose four discrete yet overlapping axes, it means that you can't just work
on one of them, you have to work on all four of them at the same time: Inform,
advocate, innovate, collaborate. I want to look at each of them in turn. By "inform" I
mean both giving and gathering better information.
before we mount any information campaign, before we mount any any campaign to try
to convince students, administrators, and the public of the importance of language
of learning, it seems to me that we need to collect more meaningful data that
we don't currently available. Enrollment data provides a broad standard measure
that gauges language sequence interest, but it's simply too crude a tool to
properly inform our knowledge of our students' motivation. It's always surprising
to me, and I've been in this this business for 30 years,
we know surprisingly little about why our students decide to study a language,
why they choose one language over another, or what they do with a language
skill post graduation. We simply don't bother to ask. So the first thing we need
to do, we need to do a better job of surveying our students to understand why
they're studying, or not studying, a language or a particular language. We
also need to mine existing data more carefully. We need to look beyond raw
enrollment data and more closely to study the divergent fate of various
language programs insofar as this can provide a different insight in the
situation than simple enrollment figures. While some programs, many programs are
dramatically losing students, in some cases without apparent explanations,
other programs are growing. This means that certain programs are doing things
right, at least for themselves We need to learn from their successes, and widely
disseminate and emulate their practices. I'll show you a little bit of
what I mean. I'll come back...
I've done some data mining at Columbia,
so one of the questions I would ask my administrators and my colleagues is why do we have these two additional languages.
And for example where does this come from?
Why has this materialized in the last six years, 8 years?
What happened with Yiddish? We used to be the top Yiddish teaching institution in the nation.
It's now dropped out of our top 15.
Greek used to be ranked as high as #4, what happened? By Greek I mean Ancient Greek.
So, you have to start looking at data more granularly, so I would urge you all to do
this at your own institutions. The other question I would ask is "where's the data
before 2000?" They couln't come up with it when I asked for it. Interesting.
Here's our annual language enrollment from 2000.
Wow, what a drop.
But sometimes, you know, this is an optical illusion.
And if you draw a regression line, this is where language enrollments are.
This is just a scalar optical illusion. But still, we've had a decline of about 12% since our peak. So there is a decline.
You can see this better if you look at it like this, if you change the scale. You see that it's pretty flat.
But more importantly than that, when you mine the data further...
Here are our top 15 languages. They're about 92% of all our enrollments.
It means that the other 40 languages we teach--we teach about 55 languages at Columbia.
The other 40 languages are about 8% of our total enrollment.
I ask questions from one perspective, I can tell you administrators are looking at this from another perspective:
"Do we really need to be teaching 40 languages to the 8% of students taking languages?"
And perhaps this is also interesting. These are our top two languages, which happen to be: _______?
French and Spanish, Spanish and French.
They're about 45% of total enrollments, and that has been pretty much staying.
So these are the kinds of data mining that you should do with your data.
It's important to understand the data and understand granularly what it's
telling you as opposed to looking at national averages or national data. And I
think everyone should do this, and then we should come together talk about our
own data.
Once you've done this, I think there's an acute need to both increase the
visibility of language and manage belief about language education amongst those
that matter the most: the students and their parents. The students are in your
class, their parents tell them what to do, kinda, most of the time. So the overall of any
campaign to inform should be both to promote the value, the importance, and the benefit
that can result from the language education, so you want to stress the
positive things that you see, as well as address common misconceptions about
language education that end up portraying it as a problem to be
eliminated rather than an asset to be praised, or to be prized.
So you want to both inform what's good about language education, but at the same time you want to address misinformation that may be out there.
It's been my experience that the most effective promotion for languages, especially for the LCTLs,
comes through the sharing of our students personal experiences. Successful
students attract other students into a class. Any informational campaign about
language education should publicly call attention to the value and the
transformative power of language learning in our students life through
the collection, curation, and distribution of personal stories. I just got one
yesterday, I didn't have time to put it here. A girl who took two semesters
of Ukrainian and is now working on Ukrainian radio in the Ukraine. That's
the kind of story that appeals to students: "Two semesters and she's working
on Ukrainian radio? Great!" you know. So we need to use these stories to showcase
values, arguments, and experiences that are most relevant to our students and
highlight the ways in which languages have made a difference, transformed a life for
the better, or otherwise positively impacted them. We need to coordinate the
stories and we need widely using social media tools. That's
what students use. Doing campaigns that appeal to us doesn't appeal to students.
We need to appeal to them in a language that they understand. I understand that
many of us are not comfortable carrying out these activities, but it's crucial in
my opinion that we find ways to cut through the noise, in order to position
language in education in ways that engender support and participation.
The future language education may well depend on our ability to sufficiently
communicate the relevance of languages today to those who are voting with their
feet. The last thing I will say is that we need to, and I put two campaigns here
where we're starting to let students tell their stories: one admission
in-state and one in Columbia for the Shared Course Initiative. It's one of the
ways that we found that we attract more students to the Shared Course Initiative, and I'll say a few words about it,
by letting students talk about how it's transformed their langauge learning.
The last thing I will say about informing is that we need to have a unified message about language
education, not a specific pitch for a particular language. So the first thing
you need to do is you need to make sure you're talking about the value of language education IN GENERAL,
before you pitch for your own language, because a rising tide will lift all boats.
Otherwise, what you're doing is you're competing with other languages. And you don't want to be
competing here, you want to be working together to make language education more
visible at your institution because that will bring more students to
each each and every language program. So that's what I wanted to say about
informing. I want to talk a little bit about advocacy.
Informing and advocating are closely related and sometimes you can go
from one to the other, but I think advocacy differs from the simple
gathering and dissemination of information in two significant ways. One,
it targets a specific group of people who are seen as decision-makers and two, it
aims to influence their decision in order to affect positive change. So
you're not simply informing people, you're actually trying to get them to change their behavior.
We know as language professionals but there are enormous personal, professional, and societal benefits to learning another
language. The challenge we face is how do we communicate these rich and
significant benefits to those who are in decision-making capacity our institution,
as well as the government level, both state and national. For many
administrators, the real value of learning a language is something of
a black box. I know this from talking to my boss who's a really nice guy. "I'm a
statistician, what do I know?" More often than not, it seems that those who decide or
share in a decision about language programs at institutional levels are not
as well inform about the benefits associated with language learning as
they could be. I think it's our job to make them appreciate this fact, that they
should, before making a decision, perhaps learn more about what language education
is, and what its value is for students in general. We need to remember as we do
advocacy that administrators are not always influenced by objective factors.
So it's not just a matter of presenting data. Often they are influenced by their
own intuitive stance towards foreign languages, which is often a throwback to
their own experience. So if they had a bad experience in college, they're not
going to be particularly well disposed towards foreign language. So
it's our job also to correct the oftentimes erroneous image
institutional decision-makers might have of language education. And
we need to advocate for our current instructional practices, not the way they
remember they were taught 40, 50 years ago. This includes not only higher
administration but other structural decision-makers and we tend to forget
about them. We tend to think that if we talk to the Dean, and the Dean agrees
everything will be fine. We need to talk to advisors and other mid-level
administrators, because they're the ones who often help students make decisions
about whether to take on language or not, or to take this language as opposed to
another. One of the things I do every year is I meet with the advising corps at Columbia,
and I tell them: "Please stop encouraging students to test out of a language.
Please stress the importance of language for them, even if they can test out of
the language. Tell them to take another language because if you are pushing them
to take the easy way out most of the students will do that."
Talking about that, before I go on:
Some of the other data that I'm gathering at Columbia, and I urge you to do this,
I'm talking to the language departments to see how many students, as a percentage, are testing out of a language,
And have they kept the data historically. I want to see if more students are testing out.
How many students are coming with advanced AP placement in certain languages and
testing out. What percentage of students are continuing despite the fact that
they've tested out of the language requirement. This is important data. A lot
of the students who take less commonly-taught languages at Columbia come to my Center. One of the
things we started doing this year, we started asking students who decided not to take a language,
so they sign up and then they drop a language. We reach out to them.
Was it the scheduling, was it the fact that you thought the language was too hard,
was it the fact that you decided to do something else? We need to know this,
otherwise we're just shooting in the dark. So before you advocate you need to pick up information.
You know this, some of you've done advocacy. Warning: you need to start early. You need to start
advocating before the problem has become a problem.
You really need to start early and you don't want to dilute the message. You want to talk about one
thing and one thing only. Like I said, if you're reactive and you wait until the
situation has become critical, chances are that decisions have already been
taken, so you want to head them off at the pass. The last thing I will say is,
one of the things that seems to appeal the most to the administrators I've talked to
is when I can make the argument of how language education at Columbia aligns with the
institutional strategic goals and priorities. So you need to know what the
strategic mission of your institution is. You need to know what the vision of your institution is.
There are a number of buzzwords going around Columbia the last few years, you need to know what these buzzwords are.
And you need to show how what you're doing, what the language programs are doing, are actually aligned
with these strategic goals, strategic mission, and buzzwords. Otherwise you're
talking a counter-current and you're not going to get any traction.
So information, advocacy, innovation.
I want to continue to speak as an economist, and I will say that the crisis
that we're facing today is as much related to the product we are selling as
it is to our inability to make that product work. Fine, what do I mean by this?
What the data is telling us, the historical data is that students are
deserting the language ship in significant numbers, and they're saying
in a louder and louder voice with their feet that they're not finding much value
in what we have to offer. This should make us stop and think. If we are to reverse
this trend, it is incumbent upon us to take action and complement our information
and advocacy campaign with concrete steps that rassess our methods and changes
the substance and structures of our programs, in order to make language
learning a more desirable activity for a greater number of students. There's not
always a very good match between demand--that is, what students are saying they
want, and what we are offering them. ou can't go, at my university, with a language that will go unmentioned...
teaching a course for social studies or for social scientists,
which is packed, they have to turn students away every semester.
And that, all of a sudden the department decides they're going to offer a course in medieval poetry, then they're wwondering
why they can't get more than two students for the course. We're not offering something that the students
want. That's what this is telling us. So we need to offer things that students are
looking for. Our success or failure will largely depend on the extent to which we
can become agents for change and can respond strategically to the
increasingly hostile scrutiny that language instruction is receiving for
both students and administrators. So we need to tailor our programs to our students'
goals and objectives and find the right balance between encouraging the study of
language, literature, and culture, and increase opportunity to help our
students find the best suited and most exciting use of the target language in
the content area of their choice. Not every student who studies a language
wants to study literature. That's another way of saying this. We need to hear this.
When you increase opportunities for students in a language, then you give
your program a chance to grow. Here are some suggestions for transformation of
the language curriculum that could include more project-based learning,
greater focus on heritage language education... I'll start with that one.
We know that the number of heritage students is growing. More and more of us
are finding heritage in our classes. We need to provide opportunities for these
students, opportunities for them to value the language they already know and a
desire to go deeper into that language.
We need to focus on project-based and experiential learning experiences.
Students want to do something with the language.
They want to go out, they want to connect to a community where that language is used,
they want to do something that they find is socially beneficially to themselves and others.
I like, I have a degree in medieval poetry. I like Latin. But I understand that many people don't.
It doesn't rock their boat.
I understand that. A lot of people want to work in social work, and public health,
and sustainable development. They want to do archival work. We need to make sure that
we're offering courses that prepare them to do what it is that they want to do.
One of the most successful courses I've taught at Columbia lately has to do with
the relationship between language and space. Students want to go out and explore the city,
explore the urban environment, they want to explore language in space.
We should increase service-based learning.
Students want to serve, they're very idealistic. They want to do good, they
want to serve the community. They want to be able to make a difference
and we need to help them do that, especially in places where there are
perhaps underserved communities that would benefit. We need to focus on
languages for specific purposes. When we talk about arguments, about the value of
learning a foreign language, we sometimes overlook the key term:value. For many
students, learning another language is done as much for practical purposes as
it is to engage deeply with another culture and a different literary
tradition. We have to be careful that we don't empower a narrative that reduces
language learning to reductive exercise, so language as a tool. Nonetheless, it
would be a mistake to resist the call to incorporate courses in a broader
language curriculum that stress the practical skills that many students value.
Consequently, I think that any reform, any particular reform could and should
include more languages for specific purposes. Spanish for medical purposes,
Spanish for dental purposes, we have a course, Haitian Creole for newly arrived immigrants in New York,
legal courses for various people who work with incoming communities.
We need to offer more of this. We need to incentivize advanced study, remember I said that
that less and less students are taking advanced course.
So we need to find ways institutionally to incentivize Advanced Studies. An example here would be Yale's
new certificate of advanced proficiency. So it's a certificate they give to
students to take courses beyond the language requirement. Our students, at
least at Yale and Colombia, they collect certificate like candy, so the
moment you offer a certificate they will do something. I'm going to skip over the
other areas that we need to do to do innovation. I'm not going to say anything
about structural and curricular reform. It's sad that the 2007 MLA report has
not really been followed, but the transformation of languages department
needs to occur at some point. There's very few departments that have followed
the recommendation of the report. Until you do this you're going to continue to
have these problems. We also need to pay more attention to professional
development. If we want our faculty to be able to offer innovative courses, we want
them to attract students with more innovative ways of teaching.
We need to help them develop as professionals.
We need to send them to conferences, to teach workshops for them. We need to provide them with the opportunity to
grow as professionals and human beings.
Now, the last thing I will talk about...
is collaboration. To thrive in tomorrow's environment, language programs have to
be prepared to change. And I strongly believe that collaboration can be a
crucial lever to enact fundamental change in who we are and what we do.
In my opinion, fostering a culture across institutional collaboration will have to
become a priority in higher education in a not too distant future. But it's not
going to be easy for this idea to get a hold in our current institutional
landscape. Fundamentally, collaboration means thinking across boundaries and
joining forces with partners in order to find innovative solutions to common
challenges. However, with the notable exception of a small number of efforts,
the vast majorities of colleges and universities continue to operate today
within a culture that portrays each academic mission as distinctly unique.
The prevailing view is that all relevant expertise can be and in fact
should be found locally on one's own campus. Accordingly, most colleges and
university are conditioned to see their peers more as competitors than as
potential partners. And this entrenched mindset makes it difficult for
collaborative initiatives to emerge and be successful. However, collaboration can
be and is a powerful vehicle to establish course and program sharing
initiatives that leverage resources and expertise amongst a number of partner
institutions in order to increase academic offerings, expand curricular choices, and make
more efficient use of existing local resources. I'll mention a number of
them. The one I know the best is the Shared Course Initiative. It's an
initiative that tried to bring a collaborator ethos to the teaching of
the LCTLs. It was established in 2012 with the help of Mellon,
it's a collaboration between Yale, Cornell, and Columbia that uses
high-definition video conferencing to synchronously connect classroom across
these three sites and supplement local face-to-face offerings with language
instruction delivered via distance. We had six years of support from Mellon,
We were successful enough that this has now gone into the hard budget of our institutions.
So we've transititoned from soft money to hard money. And when I talk about the transformational power...
the way we think of LCTLs now in these three institutions are through a collaborative mindset.
We no longer think of offering language only on our own campus.
The moment we set up LCTL program, we immediately think of
the other two partners. There's been other shared models of an instruction for language study.
They're starting to gain momentum in a wide range of
institutional contexts: the Big Ten Alliance, the New York Six partnership,
the Five Colleges, the LCTL partnership at MSU, the University of Chicago LCTLS,
the Great Lakes... It is the future. We no longer should think of
ourselves as islands in the stream, individual islands.
We need to start thinking collaboratively as groups of institutions that work together
to offer something to a growing group of students. Let me also point out, in a
completely different context, the groundbreaking work of COERLL, as a
center that seeks to promote a culture of collaboration in the creation and
usage of open educational resources. So I think, you know, as we move forward towards the future,
we do need to think about collectively, partnership, rather than start to think individually.
If we think individually, we're just going to continue to reproduce what we've known
up to now. We need to change our mindset and start thinking about how do we go
forward collaboratively together. I want to conclude with a few reflections on
the notion of crisis. People are always talking to me about "the language crisis." We're accustomed
to thinking of language education as being in crisis. It's a term that comes
over and over again to describe the situation we're witnessing today.
Conventional wisdom would say that "language education in the US is in crisis,"
but I'm not sure if the word crisis is well chosen.
In my opinion the rhetoric of crisis in fact serves more to obfuscate and to hide the
current state of affairs rather than allow for an accurate diagnosis.
After all, you know that the word crisis is used to describe an accute situation.
Something that flares up suddenly before subsiding again.
[Speaking French]
Something that's temporary, and then it goes away.
The implication is that the organism returns to a state of normalcy after the
predicament has subsided. In other words, everything will be fine after the crisis
is over. With this is mind, I would argue that the word crisis is
not an appropriate metaphor to characterize the situation we are
experiencing today within the field of language education in the U.S. The
radical shift in enrollments the data points to is not a sudden explosive
crisis characterized by the emergence of a unique set of circumstances, but is
rather the latest manifestation of an ongoing systemic set of long-standing structural issues.
Already in 1997, Richard Lambert had identified a "quiet crisis" in the field of language education.
So I think it's incumbent upon us to try to look beyond the rhetoric of crisis if
we're to begin to develop an effective response that successfully addresses the
lack of interest or achievement in foreign languages in the US today.
It's here perhaps that I'll talk about the second meaning of the word crisis. Those of you
who have some knowledge of Greek--I'm also half Greek--you'll know that the
word is derived from the original Greek verb that means to decide.
And apart from describing a period of intense difficulty, the word also refers
to a time when an important decision has to be made. We are, I believe at such a junction.
If we're to go beyond the current crisis, it's imperative that we
find ways to deal meaningfully with the situation that confront us
and determine a clear path forward as a community.
Otherwise, I'm very much afraid that the current state of affairs will grind on
into the foreseeable future until in the end we will wake up one day and
find that we have become almost totally irrelevant. Let me finish by saying that
we need to accept that there are no quick fixes. We should not expect the
number of enrollments to dramatically increase overnight.
Bringing about change takes time, but it's a challenge that we should face with
courage and convictions. There are some optimistic signs on the horizon.
The demographics in this country are changing.
There's been an increase of 150% of people who say they speak another language at home.
So obviously, because of immigration, because of bicultural marriages,
more and more Americans are starting to speak another language at home. We see this trend.
The challenge is how do we transform this into opportunities for language learning at the formal level.
So despite all the negativity that I've been giving you, I remain optimistic that...
for those of you who speak Greek...
I remain optimistic that there are ways forward, and I hope that we can work at
them together to try to find solutions that lifts all boats.
Thank you. [Applause]
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