Sander L. Gilman
Henry R. Luce Distinguished Service Professor
Of the Liberal Arts in Human Biology
The University of Chicago
1050 E. 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637-1512
Telephone: 773-702-3268
FAX: 773-702-9861
A Humanist Looks at Language Teaching and Study in 1999
1. A Problem?
We live in a complex moment. Bilingualism has a truly bad press. The common
wisdom is that kids should be moved as quickly as possible from their first language to
English so they can mainstream and become real Americans – at least “immigrant” kids
in urban areas. Bilingualism is a good thing in the suburbs. There, kids acquiring a
second language are seen as enhancing their earning potential. And this good press is
coupled with the school district’s or parent’s ability to pay for languages being taught and
for students to actually go and study or travel in their country of choice.
The study of languages has whatever meaning you want to give it based on where
you stand. Speaking Spanish as a first language in Pilsen or Harlem means that you must
learn to speak English; in Evanston or Westchester, it means summers in Mexico City or
Madrid learning Spanish. Bilingualism is perceived as bad by parents who see their kids
potentially shut out of the American economic system if they speak primarily Spanish or
Polish. (Remember I’m from Chicago where these are the most important heritage
languages!) Bilingualism is absolutely necessary, say the parents in the suburbs, as it
guarantees my kids a role at the top of the new global economy.
Our contemporary dichotomy between language as a burden and language as an
advantage seems not at all to be mirrored in the 1979 report Strength Through Wisdom:
A Critique of U.S. Capability — A Report to the President from the President’s
Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies. Indeed Chapter One is
subtitled: “No longer foreign, no longer alien.” Language has become both foreign and
alien again in specific contexts in 1999. In 1979, a decade before the end of the Cold
War, the learning of languages was perceived clearly as a national advantage and learning
languages very young was clearly the central message of the report. How do you make
better Americans in the cold war era? You give them the tools with which they can
struggle against the multilingual aggressor. Thus the thrust of the report looks at early
language learning, as it should well have done.
Yet some small attention was given to higher education. There was a
continuation of the older, post-Sputnik National Defense Education Act model of
languages vital to American self-interest. Universities were seen as being a pool of
language specialists in exotic languages and the site of concomitant language centers,
which dealt with such languages. In 1979 Persian, Arabic, and Amharic were noted as
languages, which were for the moment of true national need; today we would (and do), of
course list other languages. The need for international studies programs and programs
abroad were also recognized. But they were seen as important also within the context of
a “security” model of language knowledge. Either national defense or national economic
interest demanded the teaching and study of languages. Indeed, the question of funding
such undertakings was outlined in considerable detail. The Title Six centers in the
Department of Education came to be the realization of the model in the report. The
implied ideology, which saw languages as tools of national self-interest, as proposed by
the report set was clearly followed over the subsequent decades. It lead to a major
rupture in the teaching the more-frequently-taught languages (MFTL) in the United
States which has yet to be healed to this day.
From the inception of an advanced teaching model of languages in W.W. II at
Monterey, CA and Ithaca, NY, there was a sense of the acquisition of language for two
distinct and very different purposes. Existing long before W.W. II was the notion of the
study of languages and their high culture as a means of achieving the polish or command
of another “high” culture other than American culture. The serious study of French or
German attempted to turn out individuals who could “pass” as French or German in their
command of the language and the high culture. (This was very different than the attitude
toward Francophone immigrants in Maine or German immigrants in the Midwest.) To do
so, you went to university and then undertook some study abroad. This model was
clearly already in place in the ante-bellum south, when students from Virginia and
Georgia regularly studied in Goethe’s Germany.
World War II pushed the notion of an applied and pragmatic knowledge of the
knowledge excluding any deep study of cultural objects, except whether they provided
insight into the mentality of the enemy (or ally). Language was reduced to a means of
communication, but without any need to claim deep knowledge. It is clear that this was
possible because there was a large number of “native informants” in virtually all of the
combatant languages who has sophisticated knowledge of the culture as well as the
language. These two means of seeing language either as a special knowledge, which
ennobles or language as pragmatic tool haunts the teaching of language and culture in
American Higher education. This has played itself out in the politics of language study
and teaching in American higher education over the past twenty years.
Let me give you a practical example. In creating a European studies faculty the
most difficult “niche” to fill is in the one area in the humanities which is the most widely
taught — English. Pole the members of any department of English and ask how many
are specialist in English culture and you will find, no matter what their methodological
area, whether philology or continental criticism, that most concern themselves with the
formal nature of the object rather than with its “English” expression. (People in Irish
Studies are quite the opposite.) They are specialists in the novel or the film or material
culture or post-colonial studies — the “Englishness” of their project is, for the most part,
incidental to their interest. This is a claim on the “higher” nature of the calling of an
English department. It is the place where high (or even mass) culture is studied, not the
specific expression of “Englishness.”
So too was the model in “Germanic” or “Romance” departments until the past
decade. With the erosion of interest in Western Europe, some small number of
departments have begun to refunction themselves as quasi-area studies programs. Yet
what they teach and what they study, turns out to be just as marginally inflected by the
particulars of a national culture as in Departments of English. They may teach the
German travel narrative of the nineteenth century, but for the most part, they do so to
understand the universal nature of such narratives, not the particular German need for
them, or the language in which they are clothed. When the teaching on the undergraduate
level does attempt to explore the specific nature of the German contribution to a question,
it is rarely the paradigm for teaching graduate students. Their teaching is limited to
language virtually never to content, as if this split, underlined by the 1979 report, is a
natural one. They are taught to teach the language as if it is to be an end in itself.
Whether aiming at a four-skill fluency or at the reading of the canonical texts, the
assumption is that graduate students learn to teach language rather than the complexities
of the cultures in which that language is employed. Even those German Studies
programs, which are well structured and take their mandate seriously to explore the
widest range of things German (including literature), often do not provide teaching across
the curriculum for their students.
The President’s Commission was one of the key forces in helping to separate the
teaching of language, literature, and culture. It is clear that the guidelines of the
commission fundamentally positive. It actually helped drive the notion of insisting that
students develop useable language skills (rather than translation skills for literary analysis
or the pragmatic notion of language as a coping mechanism). This was not however
necessarily positive for the complex integration of language, textual study, and the use of
language in culture. The move to a greater and greater separation of language study and
the multiple functions of that study, which would include the study of complex texts of
all types, has isolated the traditional literature departments. From my perspective the
language and culture movement, perhaps best exemplified in German Studies by the
work of Claire Kramsch, recognizes the danger of this dichotomy, which was first
canonized in 1979.
For us in the humanities today who take seriously the study and teaching of
language, language is both a tool of analysis but also the best object for analysis. The
Austrian language critic Karl Kraus made this point a hundred years ago. The embattled
state of most “literature” departments comes from a split vision. Are such departments
devoted to the study of literature as an abstraction? Or are they devoted to the study of a
specific national language? The division seems to be between Goethe and business
German!
The idea that the humanities could benefit from the study and teaching of
language seems to be loosing ground. Language is becoming “merely skills transfer.” In
most of the Department of Education’s Title Six Centers FLAS programs, language
learning is seen as a necessary extension of the social science model. It is a skill such as
interviewing which is necessary for any serious fieldwork. But it is really understood in a
self-reflexive manner and it is rarely coupled with the central importance of written or
print culture for such societies. Seeing language as part of the humanities means that the
analytic tools which the critical humanist brings to the work enhances the study and
teaching of any culture. The humanities, with its complex web of methodological
strategies for reading and analyzing complex texts of all types, could provide a natural
home to the study of languages. If comparative literature comes to understand itself, as
Charles Bernheimer had desired, as the place where textual evidence is examined for
multiple purposes and through multiple, comparative modalities, then both the universal
claims and the specificity of the national traditional can exist simultaneously.
Humanists do not have a single answer: our approach is just as limited as that of
the social scientists. But we recognize there are ethical and critical questions resulting
from the analysis of languages. Humanists can begin to analyze the problematic, crosscultural meaning of globalized terms such as “human rights.” They can question the
claim that the study of language is an “expanding communication among peoples.”
Humanists of all stripes can make major contributions to the reintegration of the study of
literature, culture, and language.
It is using and interrogating such questions that the
humanist can contribute.
2. Restating the Problem
Why do we teach languages at universities? How do we teach languages at
universities? There has been traditionally a conflict in the learning and teaching of the
more-frequently-taught languages (MFTL) in the research universities in the United
States. On the one hand there are the claims of graduate education to train a new
generation of teachers. On the other hand, there is the “service” component, the teaching
of courses for students outside of the major. The undergraduate major was and is seen as
producing potential graduate students and those graduate students were seen as the source
of the next generation of scholars. “Service” teaching, all teaching which was not
focused on the potential for graduate study or graduate study itself, was dismissed as
“merely” skill transfer.
Happily over the past decade this imbalance has begun to shift radically. The clear
understanding that the teaching of language is simultaneously the teaching of culture has
meant that “language” courses no longer are seen as “service” courses but as the
prerequisite to more complex levels of cultural and literary analysis. Universities and
colleges have also become aware of the need for the globalization of the undergraduate
experience and have recognized the increased importance of the acquisition and use of
languages other than the native tongue of the student. The demands of this increased
range of options as well as economic pressures have forced higher education to look at
MFTL as a place where multiple goals must be successfully pursued. Research
universities have begun seriously to examined how a system of higher education could
provide structures for the widest range of students interested in MFTL based on their
diverging interests and different goals. The self-imposed reduction by responsible
graduate programs of the number of graduate students in MFTL due to the reduced job
market has also begun to encourage departments broadly to experiment. The more
limited the pool of graduate students, the greater the pressure from the faculty to develop
interesting teaching opportunities for their faculty and their graduate students. No longer
can graduate students expect to teach at research institutions such as the one at which
they studied. And the problem of the articulation of graduate education in MFTL and the
post-graduate school experience is becoming more and more evident.
The real conflict about goals and intentions which has existed in universities such
as Cornell University between the claims of the Department of Modern Languages and
Linguistics (DMLL) (as it was constituted up to its dissolution two years ago) and those
dedicated Departments teaching MFTL should not be duplicated in the new model. The
DMLL was created during World War II to train intelligence officers in German and
Japanese as well as other appropriate languages. After the war, it was the center, which

The exception here has been the teaching of Spanish. The number of native and heritage speakers of
Spanish as well as the perception that Spanish has come to be a “second language” in the United States has
meant a constant expansion of Spanish during a period of the reduction of enrollment in French, German,
taught virtually all modern languages for undergraduates. (In the past decade it also
undertook more and more in the field of “pure” linguistics. It has now been divided into
a “Language” and a “Linguistics” department.) The language-based departments, such as
Romance and German Studies, taught upper division literature and culture courses and
trained graduate students in these areas. The focus of the DMLL was on undergraduate
teaching; that of the language-based departments on the training of their graduate
students as well as for undergraduates who would be culturally competent to take their
courses. The graduate students saw that which went on in the DMLL as outside of their
interest; the DMLL saw the training of these graduate students as the next generation of
the teachers of MFTL as peripheral to their mission. The conflict resulted in a
competition between the “core” center and the language-based departments over the
philosophy of language learning and teaching.
3. An Alternative Model
One can teach the MFTL in a complex, university-wide structure of consultation
rather than competition. In most of the older center models undergraduate instruction
was the sole focus. Graduate students and their training were secondary, even though it
is the graduate students in MFTL who will be the next generation of teachers. Graduate
students in turn were exposed to a single, dominant model of the acquisition of the
second language and culture, which seemed beyond their own scholarly and pedagogical
interest. In other research settings with stand-alone departments devoted to MFTL,
and Russian. The growth of interest in Chinese and Japanese, while evident, is not of the same level. And
yet many of the same problems exist for the actual teaching of Spanish as for the other MFTL.
graduate education predominated and the teaching of language to undergraduates was
understood as a “necessary evil” to support and train graduate students. All of this
accounted for a sense that language teaching was something the “good” graduate students
wanted to flee.
The new model will address the broader range of language teaching and learning
at a major research University with highly-ranked graduate programs as well as a highly
selective undergraduate “College.” The model proposed attempts to provide innovations
in the range of language learning experiences without throwing out the “baby with the
bath water.” Research universities have an obligation to the more traditional structure of
undergraduate and graduate teaching while acknowledging the realities of the job market
and the pragmatics of shifting student interest. The new model for language learning and
teaching should benefit not only the widest range of undergraduates but also the graduate
students who will be trained in a model, which is as appropriate to teaching at a research
university as well at a liberal arts college.
With the constitution of the new language center MFTL will become a ubiquitous
feature of the university curriculum. While the initial language learning structures can
remain department based, language instruction in the MFTL after the first or second year
will provide instruction throughout the entire undergraduate experience. Analogous to
the model of “writing across the curriculum,” in which writing becomes a centerpiece of
all of the departments in the humanities and social sciences, “languages across the
curriculum” will enable students to study a broad range of topics in ways which make
sense for them. All advanced “language” courses will also be real “content” courses.
The student’s motivation will be to combine the use of the language with the content of
the courses. Senior faculty members as well as younger teachers in an apprenticeship
situation will teach these courses. They will be taught in the most diverse academic
settings and will address the specific needs of students in those settings. They will have
multiple goals and will address multiple audiences. These courses will range from the
existing culture, literature, and film courses to the teaching of the undergraduate
humanities and social science “core courses” in target languages to the teaching of
discussion groups in connection with existing classes throughout the humanities, social
sciences, and natural sciences. The “natural” integration of language into the total
curriculum will be a major feature of the undergraduate program and will be a recruiting
feature for the best undergraduates.
The MFTL could offer at least one section of languages across the curriculum
each semester or quarter. These discussion sections or courses would be concentrated 1)
in the larger courses across the curriculum where 2) instructors are available. The faculty
will be recruited from both language specialists and the content specialists. Thus it is
clear that at present it will not be difficult to find tutors and faculty for courses in the
humanities (such as philosophy) and the social sciences (such as anthropology or
government). There may be younger and older colleagues in the natural sciences
interested in doing discussion sections in languages other than English.
4. The Role of the Students
Undergraduate students will come into such a program because their interests are
broad and because they understand that the study of languages other than their own will
provide different access to their own intellectual or professional interests. Undergraduate
students will also come because of the strong language programs, which provide true
breadth for those individuals interested in undergraduate majors and potential graduate
education. It is this model of collaboration across programs, which will make such new
centers for MFTL the dominant national model during the next decade.
Graduate students in MFTL (in small, select numbers) will chose to do their
Ph.D.s in Universities with such programs because they will have an exemplary training
in the language, linguistics, literature, and culture combined with the ability to learn how
languages can be made intrinsic to the entire undergraduate curriculum. Language
teaching will be the teaching of content across the curriculum. There will be no line in
the sand between the teaching of language, even on the most rudimentary level and the
teaching of materials with intellectual content. Graduate students, who will take part in
such teaching in a mentored environment, will learn to teach the content of the material
as equal in importance to the language. The existing language-based departments will be
the site for the primary instruction in the target language and will be structure responsible
for the intellectual content of the courses where ever they are taught. The collaboration
between the new language-across-the curriculum model and the existing culture and
literature based programs will assure the broadest exposure of prospective university and
college teachers of MFTL to the need for a systematic integration of all of these aspects
of language teaching.
It is vital to understand that two separate student “pools” exists — and that each is
itself divided into two segments. There are the students who enter university with
substantial language experience. They may have had a year or a summer in a contact
experience; may have taken AP language courses, or may be a heritage or first-generation
speaker. These students tend to cluster in a very small number of languages — Spanish
is clearly the most widely spoken language of this group. These students, however, may
see their language skills as central or as peripheral to their college experience. For those
who further want to study the language and culture, there is little question of the
adequacy of present programs. But for those who wish to undertake pre-professional
studies in law or medicine, in business or any other discipline, their experience or
interests may seem truly marginal to their language skills.
On the other hand more and more students are beginning a second language at
university. The older model of a German program, for example, which could rely on
students of high school German or heritage speakers for the bulk of their students, has
exhausted itself. For these students who will begin their language study at the university
new programs must be created which enable students to undertake an intensive
experience including time in the target country early in their college experience. A
freshman or sophomore quarter or summer abroad program is a natural complement to
the junior year abroad for those students who wish to take the more traditional track.
Thus language programs must function for those students who enter with facility in a
language or wish to have true facility in a language beginning with the university
experience. All must incorporate a broader range of courses than the traditional major
and all most offer programs in the target countries.
One major aside must be made here. There is a question about the articulation of
high school (pre-college) language study and that at universities. In some languages such
as Russian and Chinese this is a limited problem as there are fewer high schools which
teach these languages. There has been great concern about the improvement of K-12
language learning. While such improvements are desirable, the present nature of funding
for K-12 education in the United States makes the general improvement of language
teaching on this area difficult. K-12 language education will not stem the decline of
language study in the he Unites States until there is uniform funding for all schools.
Language study in many schools districts is now where art and music was a few decades
ago — they are on the brink of vanishing or being radically reduced. Universities must
take the primary obligation for the training of students in the MFTL upon themselves.
Strong beginning programs; strong programs abroad; strong and broader programs of
instruction are the answer.
5. Where are MFTL Taught?
Intrinsic to all on-campus teaching is the possibility for learning experiences
abroad. These should range from the freshman core and / or civilization courses taught
abroad in the contact language as part of a language quarter at the end of the first year to
a second year quarter for beginning language students with a summer internship in the
field of their interest through to the more traditional “junior year abroad” to internships
for juniors and seniors combined with intensive, advanced language instruction. All of
the on-campus experience will integrate such quarters or years abroad. No longer will
the Junior Year Abroad (JYA) primarily be the place where humanities majors
experience other cultures. Every undergraduate no matter what his or her interests will
find a structure where the experience abroad will meet their intellectual and professional
goals.
Such a structure is vital if languages are to be made part of every student’s
academic experience. Traditionally the highly structured nature of science (especially
“pre-med”) majors has precluded students from studying abroad. The creation of the
option to study abroad from a quarter the first or second years as part of the required
course experience, even if it electives, which is at the core undergraduate program will
enable students to obtain quickly true facility in a MFTL. While the traditional JYA may
well be impossible for such students, a quarter during their first two years (together with
a summer internship) could more easily be integrated into the undergraduate experience.
Returning to campus with the language facility thus acquired means that the availability
of discussion sections in some of their science or social science courses would enable
them to maintain their language while completing their majors.
The economics of programs abroad are complex. While cost intensive, the fact
that students pay the full university tuition means that the programs should be selfsufficient. Even given the reduction of tuition income following the needs based system,
the programs abroad should be self-financing. The programs should be full campuses but
they can be collaborative efforts among a number of colleges and universities. The
benefit of having a substantial number of students in residence abroad is also reflect in
economies of scale at the home campus. Once a specific percentage of students are
studying on a regular bases abroad, the costs on the home campus are reduced, especially
those for long-term expansion of facilities.
Such programs abroad work only if there is an equally complex set of options for
language learning and teaching available to students on campus. Such teaching can be
undertaken in state-of-the-art classrooms but can also be integrated into the living
arrangements with language lounges being made available to students for leisure time
language activities but also a place in the dormitories where formal and informal
instruction could take place. Dedicated language classrooms as well as language
“lounges” and “houses” in the dormitories should be wired for computer and sound
equipment. Teaching of different types will take place both in the new classrooms as
well as in the new language houses. In addition, the existing network and cable potential
at most institutions means that there can be a ubiquitous environment of access to TV and
network capability. This should be made available to classroom, dorm rooms, as well as
alternative teaching environments. The administrative new structure envisioned for
language learning and teaching will provide access and support. Already projects such
as the Iowa-based Scola or the Notre Dame-based RAI project in Italian intend to make
real television experience available on a real time basis.
6. Who Teaches MFTL?
Teaching across the curriculum means the ability of teachers of MFTL to prepare
teaching materials for a wide range of options with the widest set of goals. Research and
publication on the teaching of all aspects of the MFTL must be part of this model. At
present a great deal of such research is being undertaken at many research universities.
The expansion of the teaching role of MFTL into the broader curriculum means that
additional research as well as the preparation of teaching materials must be undertaken.
This expansion should also contain financial support for the development of materials for
the classroom and the ability to test these materials in a controlled environment. Indeed
the preparation of language teaching materials for the wide range of content based
courses across the curriculum could be made available as part of the network capacity to
other institutions of higher learning.
Here the uniqueness of such a model becomes clear. The existing departments
MFTL contain scholars of world-renown in the study of the linguistics, culture, and
literature of these fields. Already a wide range of courses are offered toward
undergraduate students interested in a more professional track or who simply enjoy the
study of a culture for its own sake. Multiple models for the integration of language and
culture exist within these programs. Such programs are to (or already have) taken the
responsible direction and have begun to limit the number of graduate students, fewer and
fewer majors oriented to graduate study will and should be produced. More and more of
the instruction should be aimed at those students interested in obtaining “real” use of the
language in their own areas. This does not mean creating service departments, but rather
expanding the mission of the teachers of MFTL beyond their present scope.
The new program should also offer a wide-range of middle and advanced level
courses literally across the curriculum. This may mean having small discussion classes
attached to undergraduate courses in biology or macroeconomics taught in MFTL. These
courses will not merely “rehearse” what has been said in English in German or Spanish.
Rather they would use the analogous German or Spanish textbook or reader in order to
teach students how the German or Spanish student learns to think about the field. Such
sections may be taught by faculty members or by graduate students knowledgeable in the
field. Some of these tutors may well be graduate students in the specific field with a
native or near-native command of the target language. All of these teachers would be
closely supervised by the second-language acquisition specialists (SLA) in MFTL who
would provide summer workshops to teach them how to teach across the curriculum,
provide them with models for testing, and help them develop class plans and educational
goals to incorporate both content and language-learning goals. The best computer and
language laboratory equipment should be available to both teachers and students.
7. Speaking MFTL well — and that includes English
All of the above comments about the teaching of MFTL assume that
undergraduate students are native speakers of English. Certainly this is not the case.
Many students are native or heritage speakers of languages other than English. Courses
in MFTL must also take this into consideration. Courses for these students (such as
Spanish for second-generation / heritage Spanish speakers) as well as the teaching of
languages across the curriculum will provide opportunity for such students to improve
their language skills or bring them up to true native ability in courses with real content.
But equally important is the teaching of English as a second language, which must be
considered as part of the teaching of the more commonly taught languages. ESL for
undergraduates means that the best of non-English-speaking undergraduates will have
parallel experiences to the best of those learning other more commonly taught nonEnglish languages. Just as any university has students with a greater facility in the use of
Spanish or German who could take high-level content-based courses (such as the core
courses) their freshman year in the target languages to improve their language ability so
too we have students whose English, while rated highly on the TOEFL test, could be
improved through a combined experience which uses the language while teaching its
nuances. Thus the language laboratory as it is envisioned in the expanded language
center would deal with the widest range of language learning including accent
modification for speakers of languages other than English as well as the teaching of the
pronunciation of MFTL. The language lab structures should be radically expanded and
further decentralized, so that it is available across the campus. Just as dedicated teaching
spaces will exist in classroom buildings and dormitories, so too there will be a larger
number of language lab spaces with state-of-the-art facilities throughout the campus.
8. The Next Decade
The teaching of MFTL is an imperative for the new University. The reason is
clear. Arguments about globalization, notions of the special status of the MFTL are not
enough. Given that all students can benefit from languages in different ways, single
arguments, which ring true more some or even may students will not answer the question.
The answer is that there are probably as many rationales for the teaching and learning of
the MFTL as there are cohorts of students. By rethinking languages both within
departments dedicated to them and across the entire university a broader spectrum of
needs will be addressed and the notion of the need for MFTL will become as unnecessary
as the notion of the need for writing courses. They simply will “be” an intrinsic part of
the university. The goal will be to merge the interests of the traditional humanities
departments with all of the other claims on the teaching of language. No special pleading
that a humanistic or social science approach to language is “better” is necessary. All of
the goals, from the acknowledgement of the role of high culture through to the use of
language as a tool to examine the presupposition of cultures can find a place within the
new University, but only if we take the multiaxial notion of language learning and
teaching seriously.