Where is language in higher education?
As a nation, we’re experiencing a critical shortage of language. Not only are we (on
average) monoglot, but (on average) we aren’t good at formal English and (again, on
average) we don’t think language matters much. English is enough, and any kind of
English will do. Perhaps the most telling fact about us is our dismal showing in the
Brussels translation and interpreting world, where we produce too few suitable
candidates to fill our quota of posts. This shortage of candidates has two sources: not
only a lack of foreign-language skills, but also a lack of skills in the formal English
needed in this world [check, source].
The foreign-language crisis is well known and well documented, not only for
school-level education [refs: Nuffield, Strategy, Dearing] but also for higher
education [references: Footitt, Worton]. Rather oddly, none of these discussions
mention the crisis in first-language English skills, which is also well documented. In
1999, Sir Claus Moser reported [ref] that about 7 million adults in the UK – about
20% of the adult population – were functionally illiterate, to the extent of not being
able to find the page for plumbers in the Yellow Pages. The Labour government
invested £xxx million in literacy, but still failed to meet its own targets; so in 2006,
the then Shadow Education Minister Nick Gibb described as ‘unacceptable’ the
finding that 33% of 14-year olds were below the expected level of ability in reading
[BBC 13/9/2206]. Government has introduced a test of literacy skills for all trainee
teachers, recognising that the C pass at GCSE which trainees all have does not
guarantee literacy. And it is normal for UK universities to employ an ‘academic
literacy tutor’ to fix the glaring defects in undergraduates’ literacy skills that so many
lecturers complain of. The UK’s performance in literacy training compares very
poorly with those of our competitors; among adults, our rate of adult illiteracy in 1997
was twice that of adults in Germany [Moser], and in the 2009 Pisa survey the UK was
placed 25th for reading skills [OECD 2009], with a score barely above the average for
the 76 countries in the survey. The only source of comfort for literacy teachers is that
the UK performed even more poorly in numeracy, with a figure well below the
average. In short, we are badly underperforming, not only in learning foreign
languages, but also in learning the more formal written version of our own language
that is so important in a modern society.
What, then, are our universities doing about the crisis in language? One might
think that they would be rising to the challenge of satisfying the national need for
more language. After all, every university (apart from specialised places like Imperial
College) has departments (or even whole schools) that deal specifically with
language: at least a department of English, and in most cases departments of French,
German and so on - don’t they? And these departments are full of experts on
language who are producing a new generation of graduates ready to raise the national
game, and especially through school teaching - aren’t they?
If you take the label on the packet seriously, then yes universities do have
departments for languages. After all, what is a department of English if not a
deparment that specialises in the English language (just as a department of chemistry
deals with chemistry, and so on)? And similarly for the language French, handled by
the French department.
But how reliable are these labels? To find out, we undertook a small research
project on the research interests of academic staff in departments of English and
French. The project was easy (though tedious) because the information is declared
openly on the internet in departmental or individual webpages. For lack of resources,
we limited the study to the Russell group of twenty universities (minus Imperial
College and the LSE, neither of which has relevant departments). We are not taking
the Russell group as a representative sample of our universities; on the contrary, we
know that other universities outside this group have extremely different profiles in
this area as in many others. Nevertheless, this is a very influential group, and lessons
can be learned from our findings, however unrepresentative they may be.
Identifying departments of French and English was generally easy. All the
French departments we considered are called simply ‘French’, and most English
departments are departments of ‘English’, but there are exceptions. Cardiff,
Edinburgh, Glasgow and Newcastle all have separate departments where research is
done on English language (alongside many other languages in some cases). In those
cases we counted all researchers in those other departments as researching ‘English
language’, as though they had been in the same department as the literary and other
researchers – as indeed they are in one university, Sheffield. As can be seen, then, we
ignored organisational boundaries in order to find, as far as possible, all the
researchers in a university who might be seen as researching English language,
whether or not they are located in a ‘Department of English’.
We considered every staff member whose research interests were available on
the internet, giving a total of 817 for English and 287 for French. The number of
research staff excluded for lack of information was rather small (certainly less than
10% of the total), and nothing suggested to us that this exclusion might seriously
skew the data. As our focus was on research, we also excluded staff listed as
honorary, emeritus, temporary, visiting or associate as well as tutors, lecteurs/lectrices
and instructors. We classified each staff member as researching on ‘language’ or
‘non-language’, a distinction that was remarkably easy to make in the vast majority of
cases. Research counted as ‘language’ if it focused in any way on language, including
philology, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, text linguistics, stylistics, translation
studies (but not simply 'translation' as a literary category) and language pedagogy;
otherwise it counted as ‘non-language’. In short, we again bent over backwards to
recognise language research wherever it might exist, so ‘non-language’ research
would have no explicit language content whatever – literature, history, sociology,
film, and so on through a wide range of non-linguistic topics.
What we found confirmed what everyday academic experience tells us: that,
however liberally you define ‘language research’, language research typically has a
very low profile indeed. The figures are listed alphabetically by university in Table 1.
Belfast: Queen's
Birmingham
Bristol
Cambridge
Cardiff
Edinburgh
Glasgow
Leeds
Liverpool
London: King's
London: UCL
Manchester
Newcastle
Nottingham
Oxford
Sheffield
Southampton
Warwick
all
Lang
6
21
1
1
18
24
25
5
7
2
3
1
12
14
5
22
0
2
169
English
Other % Lang
32
15.8
24
46.7
23
4.2
90
1.1
28
39.1
35
40.7
35
41.7
43
10.4
27
20.6
32
5.9
30
9.1
35
2.8
38
24
22
38.9
76
6.2
36
37.9
33
0
33
5.7
672
20.1
N
38
45
24
91
46
59
60
48
34
34
33
36
50
36
81
58
33
35
841
Lang
2
0
1
2
0
1
1
2
2
1
0
3
4
2
6
0
7
0
34
French
Other % Lang
8
20
12
0
9
10
34
5.6
6
0
11
8.3
7
12.5
18
10
8
20
14
6.7
15
0
11
21.4
8
33.3
14
12.5
45
11.8
11
0
6
53.8
16
0
253
11.8
N
10
12
10
36
6
12
8
20
10
15
15
14
12
16
51
11
13
16
287
E% - F%
-4.2
46.7
-5.8
-4.5
39.1
32.4
29.2
0.4
0.6
-0.8
9.1
-18.6
-9.3
26.4
-5.6
37.9
-53.8
5.7
Table 1: Language and non-language researchers in Russell group departments of English and
French
The most striking fact is that language researchers form a small percentage of
the overall research workforce in the areas called ‘English’ and ‘French’. On average
(the highlighted boxes near the bottom), they constitute 20.1% of research staff in
English, and a mere 11.8% in French – this in spite of our extremely inclusive criteria
for ‘language’ research. Another fact is the enormous range of variation, with
variation in both subjects between about 50% (Birmingham, Glasgow and Edinburgh
in English, and Southampton in French) and 0% (this time Southampton in English
and Birmingham, Cardiff, UCL, Sheffield and Warwick in French). This variation
means that students in some our most eminent departments have no experience
whatever of research on language.
Another important fact that emerges from our figures throws some light on the
reasons for these variations. The column on the extreme right labelled ‘E% - F%’
shows the difference between the percentages for English and for French; for
example, in Queen’s University Belfast, 15.8% of researchers in English are language
researchers, in contrast with 20% in French, giving a difference of 4.2% in favour of
French (hence the minus sign). The 53.8% difference for Southampton is particularly
instructive, because this university is at the top of the ‘language’ league for French,
but at the bottom for English. What the large difference figures suggest is that the
percentage of language researchers does not reflect university-level policy, at least not
in the universities concerned. Instead, it is the result of decisions taken at
departmental or school level. One wonders whether higher management teams in the
universities concerned are even aware of the differences within their departments;
which raises the question whether these universities, or any others, have any policy at
all on the status of language research.
[[Should we bring in figures collected in 2002 for PhD grants from AHRB for French,
which we used, successfully, as evidence for ring-fenced awards for linguistics of
MFL? I’d need to update them, but I dare say I could do that.]]
These figures point to a deficit in the area of language research. We shall now
try to establish a connection between this deficit and the one with which we started,
the nation’s language deficit in both first-language literacy and foreign languages. The
first step is the truism that teaching should, where possible, be informed by the
teacher’s own research. This principle underlies our university system, and Russell
group universities are particularly keen to use research excellence in promoting their
courses to prospective students. Teachers are most enthusiastic, well informed and
generally inspiring when teaching about their own research. We see no reason to
doubt this principle, but how does it apply in the case of language? The answer is
different for English and for foreign languages such as French.
An English department can easily tailor its course provision to match the
departmental research profile. The more language researchers are available, the more
courses on language can be offered; but if nobody researches language, so be it: no
language courses need to be offered. An ‘English’ degree, in spite of its name, need
not contain any teaching at all about English; and even where language courses are
available, they need not be obligatory so students can graduate ‘in English’ without
ever studying English. This freedom to match teaching to research may be one of the
reasons why English degrees are so popular and so successful in producing
enthusiastic graduates – and, not least, enthusiastic future school teachers.
For foreign-language departments the situation is very different, because the
language has to be taught in some way. Much of the language-learning is covered, of
course, by the obligatory year abroad; but at least some language teaching has to be
offered during the other years. The result is as described by one of us elsewhere
[Coleman 2004:9-10]:
Even as I write, a typical scenario is being played out in major UK
universities. Academic staff in the Modern Languages Department are highly
rated for their world-class research in literature, and derive a not insubstantial
RAE income as a result. They have never been trained as language teachers,
are contentedly unaware of the extensive research literature on advanced level
language teaching, and resent spending time teaching language: it distracts
them from research, and, now that the communicative approach in schools
delivers entrants with less than total mastery of the grammatical system and
its nomenclature, language classes consist largely of 'remedial' work 'at a
level which we shouldn't be working at'. Yet they will not relinquish it to
the trained professional staff in the very competent language centre because
they need the income which derives from having all the students' credits
registered in the department. Research income alone cannot sustain them:
they rely on the resources derived from teaching literature to ever fewer
and more recalcitrant students, and from teaching language resentfully and
perhaps ineffectively.
And if the language is not taught by research-active academics, it is typically taught
by temporary language assistants whose relatively low status (compared with the
internationally famous researchers) is blatantly obvious, not only to the teachers
concerned (Blühdorn 2011), but also to the students. The result, then, is that a student
on a foreign-language degree course is encouraged to believe that the language is at
best a useful tool, and nothing more. Nothing suggests that it might have any interest
in its own right. It is mere mechanics, best left to technicians.
This marginalization of language must have an impact on students, and we
assume that one effect is to channel their intellectual energy towards things other than
language. Of course, we know that among the 700 reasons for studying a foreign
language [ref], the personal satisfaction of mastering the language system ranks high,
so students are no doubt left with some interest in the language despite the
departmental culture. And even the study of literature can include quite close attention
to linguistic detail, with possible benefits for students’ appreciation of language. But
the main point is that the departmental culture in a typical Russell-group department
of French or English trivialises language by treating it either as a mere tool or as a
collection of tiny details with no interesting structure. It would be hard to claim that
either deparment encourages its graduates to take language any more seriously than
the general population; in fact, these departments are part of the problem, not part of
the solution.
Another effect of downgrading language is even more insidious because it
involves a vicious cycle within the education system. The National Curriculum,
introduced in 1990, gives a high status not only to language, but to understanding how
language works – what the official documents call ‘Knowledge about Language’
(KAL). According to the documents both for English and for languages such as
French, children should know a great deal about the grammar and internal variation in
both languages, and the French teacher should build explicitly on the KAL taught by
the English teacher [refs]. This language focus at school presents an obvious
challenge for the university English and French departments which are responsible for
producing the next generation of school teachers: how to provide the confident and
firm grounding in these language issues that any future school teacher will need. The
problem is manageable for those undergraduates who left school with a firm
grounding which simply needs topping up; but as we all know, that is simply not the
case, and has not been for several generations. What most undergraduates need, at
least if they aspire to school teaching, is a heavy dose of elementary KAL. But as we
have just shown, very little KAL is on offer in most of the departments that we
surveyed.
The result is different in English and in foreign languages. For English
graduates school teaching is still a popular option, and PGCE English courses attract
more well qualified applicants than they can take. In contrast, PGCE courses in
foreign languages are undersubscribed and attract much less well qualified graduates
[ref: parliamentary committee report]. But in both cases, the PGCE course is too short
and busy for students to learn any KAL, so they start their new post knowing no more
KAL than they knew when they left school. As far as grammar, in particular, is
concerned, this is very little [ref: Alderson and Hudson]; and we know that grammar
is one of the two areas where trainee English teachers feel least well prepared [ref:
Blake and Shortis] – the other, surprisingly, being poetry. The result is obvious: these
teachers cannot provide the KAL required by the official documents, so KAL is either
not taught, or taught badly, leaving the next generation of school-leavers with no
more KAL than their predecessors. This outcome is certainly not what foreignlanguage departments want, to judge by the frequent complaints of how badly schoolleavers are prepared in terms of KAL [refs?]. Even English departments may wish for
more KAL when addressing literary issues or poorly written essays.
Throughout this article we have focused on English as well as foreign
languages, in contrast with most discussions of ‘the language crisis’. As we explained
at the outset, this makes sense not only because English is a language but also because
there is a national crisis in English as well as in foreign language. However, the
discussion of school teaching and the national curriculum introduces another reason
for considering English and foreign languages together. The two subjects are linked at
school by a relation which, at least in theory, is both close and symbiotic. Children’s
first encounter with KAL is in English, where they learn not only ideas about how
language works but also a terminology for talking about it – terms such as consonant
and dialect as well as the terminology of grammar such as noun, subject and tense.
With this KAL in place, they are ready to apply it in learning a foreign language,
which both enriches and consolidates the ideas and terminology. As explained earlier,
this relation is envisaged very explicitly in the National Curriculum documents for
foreign languages (though much less so in those for English).
This mutually supportive relation between first-language literacy and foreignlanguage learning is taken for granted in the education systems of many countries, and
(from what one hears) works well. But not so in the UK, and especially not so in the
area of grammar and grammatical terminology. Grammatical analysis was a
significant part of English teaching during the 19th century and early 20th century, but
it degenerated, dwindled and died during the 1960s, when it was finally removed from
the O-level syllabus. Why? One plausible explanation links the decline in school
grammar to its disappearance, a generation earlier, from the research agenda of
English departments at our universities [ref: Hudson and Walmsley]. The final push
came from an energetic anti-grammar campaign by Leavisite defenders of the virtues
of literature as the only subject worth teaching in English. Whatever the reason, the
result was that by the 1980s very little English grammar was taught in our state
schools.
This disappearance of grammar from the English curriculum left foreignlanguage teachers with an unpleasant forced choice: either to teach the terminology
and ideas of grammar themselves, or to bypass grammar altogether. Whether by
accident or by design, a new approach to language teaching appeared which rejected
the ‘grammar-translation’ method in favour of the now familiar ‘communicative’
methods. Not surprisingly, perhaps, language teachers accepted the new methods
enthusiastically as a solution to the problem of talking about grammar without a
shared metalanguage. In this view of history, then, developments in English teaching
had profound knock-on effects on foreign-language teaching. The shift to
‘communicative’ teaching in turn had its own consequences, not least the
development of a deep division between students’ experiences at school and in
university language departments (where methods have tended to stay in the older
‘grammar-translation’ mode). This mismatch of teaching methods between school is
difficult for students who want to pursue languages at university; it discourages others
from even considering that course; and it frustrates university teachers of language.
This reading of history is clearly open to debate, but if it is right we can blame
some of the traumas of modern-language teaching in this century on developments in
English teaching in the early 20th century. No wonder, then, that the English and
French departments in our survey have turned their backs so firmly on language in
favour of the more comfortable alternatives.
Returning, then, to the national shortage of language with which we started,
we would like to suggest the following ........
References
Blühdorn, Annette 2011. 'From zero to hero: on the status of HE language teachers',
Liaison 6: 36-37.