Building Better Bridges from Secondary School to College: Foreign Language Training and Current Trends in International Studies
Keynote address at the NC-AATF/AATSP Joint Spring Meeting, April 21, 2007
by
Dr. Chris Alexander, McGee Director of Dean Rusk International Studies Program at Davidson College
Thank you and good morning. It’s an honor to be here because so many of you, and here I’m talking particularly to those of you who teach at the primary and secondary level, occupy the front line in one of the most crucial social, economic and political struggles of our time -- the struggle to prepare young people to live and lead in an interdependent world by helping them to develop language skills that are more than a means of communication.
I know that I am preaching to the choir when I talk about the broad importance of foreign language study, the importance of thinking of language not merely as a tool for communicating, but as a tool for changing consciousness -- language as a portal to other cultures and other values, and language learning as a method of developing empathy, of teaching not the golden rule, but the platinum rule. The golden rule says that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us. If you think about that language, it really is an ethnocentric construct. It suggests that we should treat others as we want to be treated – that is, we should treat others according to our notion of what is right and proper. The platinum rule involves doing unto others as they would do unto themselves. People who can understand what that means and what it involves in a particular cultural context are people who have developed deep empathy.
You understand better than anyone that no single activity teaches the platinum rule better than language learning and spending time in other cultures. But the point I want to make here at the outset is that in terms of our society as a whole, you play a more important role in developing these attitudes than anyone else. In the US today, fewer than 25% of all 18-22 year olds attend a four-year college or university. Just a bit more than 25% of all US citizens have a passport. Put differently, all of the foreign language and literature programs at all the four-year schools in the country will reach a very small portion of the people in this country who are just entering adulthood and are just beginning to take on the full responsibilities of citizenship. Very few of those young people will obtain the basic legal document required to spend time in another country.
This means that for the vast majority of the American population, your classes at the primary and secondary level provide the first and last opportunity to look through the window on another culture, to develop the cross-cultural understanding and the sense of confidence, empowerment, and responsibility that comes with learning another language. When you think about your work from that perspective, I think it becomes clear that my colleagues and I at the college and university level really are your junior partners in the international education business. In a few moments I’m going to suggest that your senior role is actually increasing.
For the next few minutes, I want to share with you some thoughts and impressions about recent trends in international studies at the college and university level. Some of these trends involve changes in administrative and programmatic trends. Other trends deal with student interests and choices. Then, dangerous as it may be for someone who is not a language instructor, I want to suggest some possible implications that these trends could have for language study at both the secondary and post-secondary levels.
Let me begin with some of the programmatic changes that have shaped the general environment in which foreign languages are taught. Traditionally, foreign language departments on college and university campuses were just that – departments among many, scrambling for resources. Generally speaking, language departments benefited from core curricula that called on students (they would say “forced”) to take a certain amount of foreign language study. The required amount varied, but very rarely exceeded two years – a period of time that I suspect you would agree is far from sufficient to generate real proficiency. For most students, and frankly for most administrators, the foreign language requirement was a box to check off on the way to graduation. People spouted the rhetoric about language education being the hallmark of a truly educated person, but few students developed real fluency and language was treated largely in isolation of other departments.
All of these things are still truer today than we might like. Increasingly, however, college and university leaders think of foreign language education as part of much broader, institution-wide internationalization strategies. These plans seek to give students a more globalized perspective and a more globalized skill set by building bridges between disciplines and by creating new interdisciplinary majors and minors with names like international studies, international affairs, global studies, etc. Most schools now offer more international extracurricular activities, and in some cases, they have established centers or programs that are charged with overseeing this flurry of interdisciplinary international activity.
These initiatives really began to spread in the giddy aftermath of the cold war in the early 1990s – a period when it seemed that the forces of economic, political, and cultural globalization and interdependence would run roughshod over traditional borders between countries, cultures and between traditionally distinct disciplines like political science, history, economics, anthropology, and language study. There was a sense that the academy needed to adapt to new global realities with new initiatives that integrate skills and issues from across disciplines just as the forces of globalization were integrating economies, cultures, and political systems out in the real world. This effort gained new urgency, but for some different reasons, after September 11, 2001.
It is important to point out that these new internationalization strategies and programs were not identical. But they did create a new environment for language study. Language study went from being a box to check to occupying a central place in these new institutional strategies. Language departments received more attention in their own right, and they became part of new efforts to link language learning to other fields of study. Language across the curriculum programs are the best example of this.
Particularly since September 11, a second important development has shaped the language landscape on college and university campuses. Today, schools face rising pressure to add new languages, languages that are not only new to individual schools but to American higher education in general -- Mandarin and Arabic are the best examples of this, but the list also includes Hindi, Swahili, Farsi, Urdu, Pashto and some others. Not long ago, these languages attracted only small handfuls of students who were interested in them for purely academic purposes. They were interested in the history and culture of specific countries or regions. Because the numbers of students interested in these languages were so small, only large universities could afford to invest in the faculty and other resources necessary to teach them.
Today, many students see these less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) as the languages of commerce and politics in the twenty-first century. They now have a utilitarian relevance that they didn’t have ten years ago. All kinds of schools – large, small, public, and private – feel pressure to add them to their curriculum.
I should add that this pressure does not come only from students. The competition for prospective students also plays a role. I’ve seen this at Davidson. When a hotly-pursued high school senior calls and says that she is interested in the Middle East and is choosing between Stanford, Yale, Chapel Hill, Williams and Davidson, and when she then asks if you teach Arabic, you want very badly to say, “yes.” Thus, the competitive marketplace for strong students adds to the pressure to add new languages.
Let me add two additional quick points that seem worth making about the nature of these new languages. First, many of these languages are not only “less commonly taught.” They also are very challenging languages. They require many more contact hours and more substantial periods of time in an abroad environment to build proficiency than is the case with many of the languages that have generally attracted the largest numbers of American students. That fact does not combine well with what I’m going to say in a couple of minutes about changes in student perceptions.
The second quick point that I’ll make about these newer languages is that many students are inclined to think of them in purely utilitarian terms. They see languages like Mandarin or Japanese as business tools; they see Arabic, Farsi and Pashto as national security tools. Particularly in this latter category, getting students to see beyond contemporary political conflicts and beyond the goal of getting jobs in the military or the intelligence community can be tough. Getting students to use the study of these languages to understand and respect other cultures is an important, but difficult, challenge.
Those perceptions provide a good segue to some other trends in student attitudes. Let me start with a trend that will underwhelm you because it is so thoroughly integrated into our thinking and discourse that it seems silly to mention it at all to a group like this one. That trend is globalization, but I want to use it to make an important point that is not often discussed.
Those of us who care about international education generally think of globalization as our ally. You know all the verses of the song: while economies become more interdependent, communications technology shrinks the planet, reduces differences between cultures at some broad level, and makes it easier to learn about other countries. We hope that these developments make it clear to young people that it is important to learn other languages and to learn about other cultures by spending time there.
In a very general way, all this is true. The rising number of students who study abroad and the growth of international studies programs across the country support this notion. Last year, over 205,000 American students studied abroad. That’s an 8% increase over 2005, and it continues a recent trend that has seen the number of students studying abroad increase each year.
At the same time, though, those same agents of globalization generate some unintended and undesirable outcomes. Some of those consequences directly concern language learning. Precisely because students can access the world through their laptops and satellite televisions, and because they believe that globalization has generated more English speakers around the globe, many of them simply don’t believe that they need to develop meaningful proficiency in another language. Students realize that is both polite and smart to be able to speak some amount of a foreign language. But many of them think that this means being able to hail a cab, order a meal, or ask simple questions about someone’s family. Once the conversation moves beyond pleasantries, they assume that the people with whom they are likely to be talking will be able and willing to shift to English. The upshot is that even if students today understand the importance of studying language, many of them do not believe that it is necessary to become truly proficient.
A similar dynamic is changing the way students think about study abroad. As I indicated a moment ago, more American students study abroad today than ever before. But they are doing it for shorter periods of time. On many campuses, the traditional notion of “junior year abroad” has gone the way of the dodo. It is increasingly difficult to get students to stay abroad even for one whole semester. Last year, over half of all students who studied abroad did so for some portion of the summer, during a brief January term or some other option that involved less than a full semester. Only 38% studied abroad for a full semester, and only 6% studied abroad for a full year.
Several factors account for this trend. For many students, the need to earn money for college prevents them from being able to spend an extended period of time abroad. But many students don’t spend longer periods of time abroad because they don’t think it’s necessary. They don’t see any meaningful value-added in staying a semester rather than a month. They believe that they need to go abroad long enough to pick up some vocabulary they didn’t learn in class, to brush up on their pronunciation, and, frankly, to be able simply to say on a resume or in an interview that they went abroad.
Many students believe that they can satisfy those basic goals in a few weeks in the summer. Then they can come back and use their laptops and satellite televisions to stay connected to news, music, films, photographs from the place they visited. Why should they incur the financial costs and give up their friends and campus activities for a longer period of time when it’s easier now than ever before to interact with the world from their dorm room or apartment?
Another trend that I think deserves mention is the increasing diversity of experiences that students are having abroad. It used to be the case that a college-level abroad experience meant study abroad – students traveled to another country, took classes at a local university and transferred credit back to their home schools. Today, students go abroad to engage in a much broader range of activities. In addition to traditional study abroad, students go abroad for internships or for some kind of service learning or experiential learning opportunity. Some students want these kinds of experiences because they had some sort of study abroad experience in high school. Others are interested in these opportunities because they believe that they are more directly related to their ultimate career goals. They allow the student to put something on the resume that looks more like “work experience.” We’ve seen tremendous growth in recent years in the number of firms that offer to connect students with these more work-oriented, outside the classroom experiences.
So, if these are some of the major trends in international education, what implications do they have for foreign language education? I think the implications fall into two categories. One category concerns the skills that we need to help students develop. The other concerns the attitudes we need to help them develop.
I’ll start with attitudes. One of the most important things we can do is deflate students’ perception that there is a globalized culture out there that is – underneath some exotic window-dressing – an English-speaking, American culture. In fact, a good bit of anthropological and ethnographic research supports the impression that I suspect many students would form if they had an opportunity to spend 30 minutes listening to the radio or watching TV in another country. Yes, the radio will play some Britney Spears and Michael Jackson. The television will run some of the very worst American sitcoms with local-language subtitles or overdubs. But the vast majority of the music, television and popular culture is not American. In most regions, there are individual countries that have emerged as the dominant culture-shapers for their regions. In South America it’s Argentina, in Central America it’s Mexico, in the Middle East and North Africa, it’s Egypt.
This is a useful point for two reasons. First, as you know well, popular culture provides a wonderful way to engage young people of all sorts. It can be particularly useful with young men. Here I really must make a special plea for the male of the species. Evidence from across the country continues to show that across all of the activities that we lump under the general heading of “international studies” – language study, study abroad, involvement in international extracurricular activities – young women participate in much larger numbers than young men. Young men are less inclined to see the importance of these activities while they are in school, but they continue to be very interested in internationally oriented careers. If we do not do more to make language and culture studies more appealing to them, we will continue to send them out into careers for which they are not fully prepared.
Deflating the image of a globalized American culture also helps students to see the continuing importance of developing meaningful fluency in another language. By meaningful fluency, I mean something more than an ability to find a bathroom , order a meal, and exchange greetings. But I don’t mean very advanced or near-native fluency, either. That certainly would be nice, but it is not a realistic expectation for most students. Setting the standard that high can discourage students who feel that if they can’t reach it they shouldn’t even start.
By meaningful fluency, I’m talking about a level of fluency between these two extremes, a level that allows them to have meaningful professional conversations that require them to formulate arguments, to express abstract ideas, and to respond to others when they express abstract ideas or ask questions about ideas and opinions.
Let me give you an example. I know a Davidson alumnus who works with Asian financial markets. He spends roughly half of his time in Japan. He frequently tells students that he speaks Japanese reasonably well, but there are many people who speak it much better. He understands global finance very well, but there are many people who understand it better. However, there are very few people who understand both of these subjects as well as he does.
This is meaningful proficiency, a level of proficiency that allows him to engage in substantive, complex professional conversations and to understand and appreciate cultural values and other abstract ideas. This is a critical point. If students do not have skills that allow them to understand and talk about non-material abstractions, then we cannot expect them to truly appreciate the deep cultural values that sustain variety and distinctiveness at a time when globalization seems to be homogenizing cultures around the globe. They will not be able to see meaningful, nonmaterial differences beneath superficial, material similarities.
This takes us to the issue of skills. By most estimates, it takes at least 700 hours of instruction for most students to achieve an advanced score on the ACTFL tests for most languages. For languages like Russian, it takes more than 1,000 hours. Now, the typical undergraduate program involves three hours of instruction per week. Over the course of two years, or half a college career, students receive only 180 hours of instruction. These figures suggest strongly that if we want students to leave college with meaningful proficiency, they must begin college with stronger skills across the board. This is what makes your role so very important. This is what I meant when I said at the outset that the senior position you hold in the language learning business is likely to become even more critical in the future.
As a non-language instructor, I think that the new environment on college and university campuses that I described earlier creates a need for students who can do two things more quickly than most do now. First, we need students who can and will speak the language. I don’t mean “speak” in the sense that they use the language easily and correctly. I mean that we need more students who are willing to open their mouths and try. We need more students who have the confidence to speak, knowing full well that they are making mistakes, but also knowing that they are communicating, that someone understands the point they mean to make, and that improvement only comes through practice. Whether or not they arrive on a college or university campus with this willingness depends almost entirely on the environment you create in your classrooms at the primary and secondary level.
Second, we need more students who are able to conduct research in another language and to use language in the context of non-language courses. Remember I said that language across the curriculum has become one of the most common components in campus internationalization strategies. Those efforts to bring French, Spanish and other languages into history, economics or political science courses often fall short of expectations because students don’t have the skills to read college-level material in an another language, and they don’t know how to find research resources in a language other than English. Giving them assignments at the high school level that help them to develop those research skills, assignments that pull issues and texts from other disciplines into your classes, makes a great contribution to that effort.
Let me close by saying something about an issue that really sits at the intersection of students’ skills and attitudes. You and I didn’t get involved in this business because we enjoyed memorizing vocabulary lists and verb conjugations. We got involved in this business because we went some place and we fell in love with it and with the people we met there. We got such a thrill out of learning about a culture that was different. But we got an equal thrill out of really understanding, in a deep way and for the first time, that worn adage about “all people being the same.”
Language is the connective tissue between that simultaneous appreciation of difference and similarity. We felt empowered and confident because we were really communicating – we were really talking to someone in another language. We made mistakes, but that person smiled back at us, talked to us, made us feel like we belonged in that place. We came back from those experiences as much better speakers and readers of another language. But we also came back as very different human beings.
One of the most important things you can do for your students is to see to it that they arrive on some college and university campus with a firm commitment to having that kind of experience that changed your lives and mine. They need to begin their college careers with the idea that learning another language and spending time abroad is as much a requirement as any math, science, or literature class. Help them develop that commitment, and help them to be bold about living up to it. Help them understand that there is no single international experience that is right for every person, but for every person there is some experience that will stretch them and change the way they think about the world and their place in it.
Again, thank you for your invitation and your time. I’m honored to be your junior partner in producing a new generation of truly global citizens.