The educational promise of
the language center in the age
of globalization
Claire Kramsch, UC Berkeley
Center for Language Study
Yale University 9 November 2012
Outline
Introduction: Historical background
•
Samples from language centers’ mission statements
•
The challenge of globalization in FL education
•
Back to basics: what is language, language teaching, language learning?
•
New possible roles for the language center
Conclusion: The global/local language center
Introduction: Historical background
•
The legacy of the language lab: opportunities and constraints. Great
opportunities for exploring instructional technology and CmC. But risk of
ghettoization of language teaching and reductionist view of IT.
•
Support for disenfranchised language faculty and professional development.
But professional development is not the same as intellectual stimulation.
•
Space for pedagogic and technological innovation and experimentation. But
learning conditions have changed radically. Who is asking the difficult
questions brought on by globalization?
•
Needed: A space for conceptualizing the fundamental epistemological and
disciplinary restructuring necessary to meet the demands of meaning
making, communication and literacy both in FLs and in English in a global
age.
Samples from language centers’ mission statements
STANFORD
At the Language Center, we prepare all Stanford students to have a foreign language
capability that enhances their academic program and enables them to live, work, study,
and research in a different country. Stanford students need to be able to initiate
interactions with persons from other cultures but also to engage with them on issues of
mutual concern.
In order to accomplish this goal for Stanford students, the Language Center is
proficiency-oriented and standards-based. A proficiency orientation refers to emphasizing
doing rather than knowing. We try to make sure that students learn to speak, listen, read,
and write in ways that are immediately useful in a real world setting. Standards-based
refers to the National Standards on Foreign Language Learning that attend not only to
linguistic dimensions, but also to connections that learners make between languages,
cultures, and various academic areas; comparisons between languages and cultures;
and a knowledge of communities that speak a particular language.
UC BERKELEY
Founded in 1994, the Berkeley Language Center’s mission is to support the
learning and teaching of heritage and foreign languages on the Berkeley
campus and, where appropriate, in the University of California system. To meet
this overarching goal, the BLC employs numerous strategies to improve
teaching effectiveness and enhance the learning environment:
→ Provide language instructors with opportunities to learn of new
developments in the fields of sociolinguistics, language pedagogy, and second
language acquisition theory;
→ Support research by language instructors and its dissemination at
professional meetings and in professional journals;
→ Support faculty production of new language learning materials;
→ Provide faculty and students with state-of-the-art learning facilities and
equipment;
→ Provide faculty and students with access to language learning materials;
→ Maintain a library and media archive of materials for language teaching and
research.
RICE UNIVERSITY’s Center for the Study of Languages (CSL)
seeks to develop and promote excellent language teaching and learning for
twelve languages through the third year of instruction with new technologies
and the current national standards for foreign language education playing an
integral part of the syllabus. The principal objective of our programs is to
educate students who are linguistically and culturally equipped to communicate
successfully.
U OF WISCONSIN-MADISON
The administrative home of the Doctoral Program in Second Language Acqusition (SLA), the Language
Institute spearheads collaborative projects and instructional initiatives including:
-research studies on foreign language education such as the 2009-13 study, funded by the U.S. Department of
Education International Research and Studies Program, to investigate the alignment of postsecondary student goals
with the goals of the U.S. Standards for Foreign Language Learning, and a study, with International Academic
Programs, to research the long-term impact of study abroad;
-course and curriculum development initiatives such as distance, online language courses, including hybrid
Chinese courses for high school students, online Chinese courses for business professionals, instructional materials
development in languages such as Kazakh, Russian, Persian, Swahili and Uzbek;
-outreach programs such as World Languages Day for Wisconsin K-12 schools and the broader community;
-workshops and invited lectures such as the 2012-13 series on Language, Cognition and Sociality and bi-weekly
Language Over Lunch brownbag presentations;
-the Russian Flagship Center, an undergraduate program that provides opportunities for highly-motivated students of all
majors to achieve a professional level of competence in Russian by graduation;
-acacemic and career advising for undergraduate students and resources for university academic advisors.
CERCLL U. of Arizona
Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language
and Literacy (CERCLL) is a Title VI Language Resource
Center. We research culture, language and literacy within
less commonly taught languages. We also provide
educators with teaching resources and opportunities for
meaningful professional development.
YALE Center for Language Study
The CLS is a place for the language community to share ideas, bridge cultures,
and further the study of languages at Yale.
The CLS is offering a new Certificate in Second Language
Acquisition designed for Yale graduate students in departments of language &
literature to provide a comprehensive training program in SLA and language
teaching methodology.
BROWN UNIVERSITY Center for Language Studies.
Since 1987, the Center for Language Studies has facilitated contacts and
cooperation among faculty with teaching and research interests in second
languages. Our mission is to strengthen language study at Brown University
through promoting research, developing teaching techniques, courses,
programs, and learning resources, and creating new curricular configurations.
CLS supports the application of technologies in language learning, promotes
the professional development of language faculty and graduate students.
Members include teaching faculty from every language department on campus.
CLS is the academic home for American Sign Language, Arabic, Catalan,
English for International Teaching Assistants, Hindi/Urdu, and Modern Persian.
In addition, the Center often offers non-credit language courses. For academic
year 2012-13 we will be offering non-credit courses in Kiswahili and Turkish.
In sum: Some of the traditional roles of the language center have been:
•
•
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•
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provider of teaching services (Stanford, Brown)
testing services (Stanford)
delivering instruction (Brown, Stanford, Rice)
in-service training of teachers (Brown, Stanford, Berkeley)
producing innovative pedagogic materials (U of AZ, Brown)
research and resource clearinghouse (Berkeley, UW Madison, U of AZ)
Language Centers have been called upon to promote, improve, professionalize
language learning & teaching, commonly conceived - the how. They have not
played a role in reconceptualizing the why and what for of foreign language
instruction, the internationalization of American education, or the increasingly
multilingual nature of research and education in a global world.
The
challenge
of
globalization
IT TAKES A WORLD VIEW TO CREATE A GLOBAL
CITIZEN
Avenues: The World School is now open.
And students at every level (K-9) are gaining the benefits of our World Course,
developed at Harvard by leading educators.
With a curriculum that integrates demography, geography, economic trade,
world cultures and more, we’re preparing students to seize opportunities in this
interconnected world.
Every Avenues student will graduate with fluency in a second language. To help
them achieve this, we’ve integrated “best practices” from some of the world’s
most innovative schools. In our lower school Mandarin Chinese immersion
program, for example, students gain a deeper understanding through
experience.
Their music class is taught in Mandarin. And they learn musical rhythm through
body movement, based on a technique developed in Switzerland.
If you’d like to learn more about Avenues admissions, you’re invited to attend a
parent information event. Register at avenues.org or call Avenues admissions at
646.664.0800.
Avenues. The World School. 259 Tenth Avenue New York.
The challenge of globalization for FL education
Globalization:
• Mobility and migration of people, capital, goods and knowledge
Block, D, Gray J. & Holborow M. 2012.Neoliberalism and Applied Linguistics. R.
Duchene,A. & Heller,M.(Eds) 2012 Language in Late Capitalism. Pride and profit. R.
•
Global information technologies, 24/7 media, ubiquity and simultaneity
Coupland, N (Ed.). 2010 Handbook of Language and Globalization. Wiley-Blackwell.
Block, D. 2010. Globalization and Language Teaching. Ibidem 287-304.
Block D & Cameron, D. (Eds.) 2002. Globalization and Language Teaching. Routledge.
Increased diversity and rapid change, i.e., pragmatic unpredictability,
semiotic uncertainty, authentic inauthenticity
Kramsch, C. 2012. Imposture: A late modern notion in post-structuralist SLA research.
Applied Linguistics 33:5
Kramsch, C. In press. Authenticity and legitimacy in multilingual SLA. Journal of Critical
Multilingualism Studies.
Kramsch, C. In press. History and memory in the development of intercultural
competence. In F.Sharifian & Jarmani (Eds.) Language and Intercultural
Communication in the New Era. Routledge.
•
Cultural hybridity, linguistic multiplicity, explosion of speech genres
-Briggs, C. & Bauman, R. 1992. Genre, intertextuality and social power.
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2:2, 131-172.
-Ward, Steven. 2012. Neoliberalism and the global restructuring of knowledge and
education. Routledge
•
New ways of talking about language, about culture. From language as usevalue to language as exchange-value.
- Heller, M. 2003. Globalization, the new economy, and the commodification of language
and identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7:4, 473-92.
- Heller, M. and Duchene, A. Pride and profit: Changing discourses of language, capital
and nation-state. In Duchene, A. & Heller, M. Language in Late Capitalism. Routledge
- Thurlow, C. & Jaworski, A. 2010. Tourism Discourse. Language and global mobility.
Palgrave Macmillan.
Proliferation of meaning making practices, hypersemioticization of everyday life
The new skills required:
• cognitive, social, cultural, emotional, aesthetic flexibility,
• expectation of diversity and difference,
• multiplicity of voices,
• tolerance of ambiguity,
• awareness of one’s own subject position,
• sense of history,
• questioning dominant ideologies
The challenges: lack of teacher preparation; expectations of students; language
ideology in the public at large; lack of consensus on what language is and what
language does
Back to Basics
Globalization prompts us to ask new questions about the ultimate goals of
language instruction in an era of multilingualism, heteroglossia etc. Language
learners have to learn, as the 2007 MLA Report advocates, how to “operate
between languages” (p.35), i.e., how to develop a linguistic and cultural
competence across multilingual contexts. While this multilingual imperative has
been the theme of a special issue of the MLJ on multilingualism (Jasone Cenoz
and Durk Gorter 2011), and while applied linguists have put forth a range of
suggestions for embracing multilingualism (from Auer and Wei’s plurilingualism
to Blommaert’s truncated multilingualism, to Makoni and Pennycook’s
disinventing national languages, to post colonial scholars heterolingualism, and
Creese & Blackledge’s notion of translanguaging), such multilingualism has not
yet been taken seriously by foreign language teachers in departments of
foreign languages and literatures at educational institutions. See MIIS School
of trsl./interpretation predicated on perfect monolingualism A and B (no
Spanglish or Chinglish!) .
“What is language? language teaching?”
FL instructors at UC Berkeley discover that they have quite different views of
what they are in the business of doing.
Urdu: “Language, basically/fundamentally, is a means/medium of
communication through words and sentences. Language teaching is to try to
enable learner to communicate through words, sentences and paragraphs in
target language and to understand what is spoken or written through words,
sentences and paragraphs”.
Chinese: “Language is medium and message, form and content. It encapsulates
the values, beliefs, past and present histories of a community sharing the same
set of symbols.” “Language is a cultural product, a systems of forms that people
in a community with shared cultural behavior, values, and mind utilize or
manipulate to express ideas and feelings to fulfill particular purposes in
particular sociocultural contexts”
German: “Language is what we live, speak, read, see, hear, feel, taste, play
with, wonder about. Yes, it is a tool to communicate, but so much more – it lets
us express emotions, feelings, thoughts, upbringings, cultures, worldviews.
Language helps us to see and understand the world we live in, its people, and
ourselves.” Language teaching is to make learners curious and enable them to
change perspective, learn about others and themselves, become tolerant of
ambiguity, appreciate the aesthetics of a language and get a sense about what
language represents and can do.”
Italian: “In terms of its social attribute, language is what makes us different from
other species, what makes us human beings. We use it to describe the world
that we live in, to express our emotions and deliver our thoughts. Language
also helps us get a better understanding of other cultures and people. Overall,
language is a lively and changing subject.”
Danish: “A code consisting of symbols/elements. Different codes connected
with different (often nation states) groups, used to communicate. Symbols
imbued with meanings beyond the symbolic value. Learning a language is
learning to crack the code.”
French: “Language is not only a closed linguistic system made up of linguistic
structures and parts of speech, it is also a living mode of communication and a
way of constructing social and cultural realities, real and imagined worlds, and
historical and social identities”.
FL teachers in the U.S. don’t seem to have had to grapple yet with issues of
global English, multilingual encounters, historical identities, and the neoliberal
commodification of language. Nor have they really dealt critically with the
injunction of the MLA Report (2007):
“Students are educated to function as informed and capable interlocutors with
educated native speakers in the target language. They learn to comprehend
speakers of the target language as members of foreign societies and to grasp
themselves as Americans – that is, as members of a society that is foreign to
others. They also learn to relate to fellow members of their own society who
speak languages other than English.”
All the phrases in italics raise questions five years later.
New possible roles for the Language Center
REDEFINE THE LANGUAGE CENTER:
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In addition to being an L2 Pedagogic Center where L2 skills are researched
and taught , and FL teachers are trained, the Language Center should be
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a Language Research Center for the exploration of how knowledge gets
constructed through different symbolic systems, among which L1, L2, L3.
TOPICS FOR RESEARCH
- What knowledge/language ideology gets constructed
through our foreign language pedagogies
through our textbooks and other instructional materials
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What is at stake in the construction, transmission and dissemination of
knowledge through meaning-making symbolic systems and practices of
inquiry that are different in different societies/cultures ? How is knowledge
constructed in English different from knowledge constructed in French or
German? For the sciences and engineering, see: Baumgratz, G. Mobility
in higher education: Cross-cultural communication issues. European
Journal of Education 28:3, (1993) 327-228.
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Initiate both undergraduate/ graduate students and faculty to the field of
applied linguistics, broadly conceived.
Find links between the humanities and the social sciences, the social
sciences and the hard sciences (see Big Ideas courses), foreign languages
and English through focus on “Big L Language” in the construction of
knowledge: see St.Olaf
Help familiarize undergraduates, graduate students and faculty with the big
questions raised by globalization: the bilingual mind, multilingualism,
(in)authenticity, code-switching, language ideology, the economy of
symbolic systems; old and new ways of “learning”.
If faculty and grad students don’t want to tackle these big questions, engage
the undergraduates. They are hungry for this kind of knowledge !
Help redefine “internationalization” as reframing the questions, not
diversifying the answers : see St.Olaf, Waterloo U., Indiana U.
The Language Center
A forum for discussing the role of Language in a global
economy
Who, if not the Language Centers, can ask the difficult questions of the future:
FROM STUDENTS
- Is global English an aid or a threat to foreign language study? (see J.House
languages for communication vs. languages for identification in ”ELF: a
threat to multilingualism?” Journal of Sociolinguistics 7:4 (2003), 556-578)
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“I already know Spanish, why do I need to take Russian?” (see M.Holquist’s
big L argument)
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“I just want to know enough German to talk to graffiti artists in Germany;
why do I need the whole of German grammar?” (see S.B.Heath’s argument)
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“How do I get to better my English?” (an American learner of German)
FROM TEACHERS
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“While it seems reasonable to downplay the educated NS as the goal of
instruction, what will take its place as the goal of instruction with regard to
language performance measures?”
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“If we are to teach how to ‘operate between languages’, are we no longer to
worry about control over such linguistic features as verbal aspect, mood,
question formation, word order, pragmatic knowledge etc.?”
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“In a post-national era, what should we mean by ‘culture’? (a purely
social/anthropological category? A psychological category? A humanistic
category?) and how does culture interface with language?”
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“What is the appropriate ‘knowledge base’ for a foreign language educator?”
All these questions capture the anxiety of foreign language
learners and teachers faced with the spread of English and
its attendant global ideologies. L2 grammars = the last
bastion of incorruptibility ?
Foreign languages have a crucial role to play in the
discussion about the globalization of education. What but
the Language Center can play that role?
Conclusion: The global/local Language Center
Equally distant from a totalizing tourist gaze on foreign
languages and cultures (taught in standard L2), and from a
totalizing view of Language with a big L (taught in English),
each foreign language presents a unique case study in
local particularity, starting with its unique grammar right up
to its unique history and literature. The Language Center
must make sure it remains both universal in its relevance
and particular in its approach. Its patron saint? Saint
Jerome.
Jerome
In Durer’s engraving
you sit hunched over your desk,
writing, with an extraneous
halo around your head.
You have everything you need: a mind
at ease with itself, and the generous
sunlight on pen, page, ink,
the few chairs, the vellum-bound books,
the skull on the windowsill that keeps you
honest (memento mori).
What you are concerned with
in your subtle craft is not simply
the life of language–to take
those boulderlike nouns of the Hebrew
text, those torrential verbs,
into your ear and remake them
in the hic-haec-hoc of your time–
but an innermost truth. For years
you listened when the Spirit was
the faintest breeze, not even the
breath of a sound. And wondered
how the word of God could be clasped
between the covers of a book.
Now, by the latticed window,
absorbed in your work,
the word becomes flesh, becomes sunlight
and leaf mold, the smell of fresh bread
from the bakery down the lane,
the rumble of an oxcart, the unconscious
ritual of a young woman
combing her hair, the bray
of a mule, an infant crying:
the whole vibrant life
of Bethlehem, outside your door.
None of it is an intrusion.
you are sitting in the magic circle
of yourself. In a corner, the small
watchdog is curled up, dreaming,
and beside it, on the threshold, the lion
dozes, with half-closed eyes.
—Stephen Mitchell. Engraving above by Albrecht Durer.
We can imagine the language center of the future as operating between the
global Language of knowledge and the local languages on the ground:
- Between the “life of language” and its L2, L3 “innermost truths”
- Between the “spirit of language” and the “covers of our textbooks”
- Between the multilingual “vibrant life” of bakers, butchers and crying babies
and the “magic circle” of our classrooms.
- Between languages, dialects, registers, styles, voices, modalities.
A language center that would help teachers navigate both the mandate to
“operate between languages” and the need to operate within their very distinct
grammars.