The planet has never been more connected, but students are hardly flocking to study foreign languages. Over all, enrollments in the courses have stagnated. Colleges are increasingly dropping foreign language as a requirement for graduation. Many departments have been targeted for closure or consolidation.
That’s not true for all languages. Interest has surged in Arabic, Chinese, Korean, and Portuguese, mirroring geopolitical trends. But other departments are withering. None has been hit harder in recent decades than German. Its enrollment is less than half of what it was in 1968, all the more notable as the number of college students has nearly tripled. Since 1990 more than 280 colleges have stopped teaching German.
Its sagging fortunes have prompted many departments to take a hard look at themselves and define their fundamental value to higher education. They have faced a reckoning that may visit other disciplines whose worth is questioned. What is the best way for professors to argue for their discipline’s relevance while preserving its essence? How should courses be organized and taught so that they add up to something? What will students realistically remember?
Some foreign-language departments have stuck with tradition. Others have emphasized universality, offering interdisciplinary courses, in English, that satisfy distribution requirements. Still others have pursued a combination, by teaching courses in German that are broadly accessible and incorporate culture.
Becoming part of the general-education curriculum is one strategy that emerged at a conference on the future of foreign languages this past fall. The idea is that departments will be preserved if their offerings are explicitly aligned with the priorities of their institutions, especially with the oft-stated goal of producing globally educated citizens.
More than half of institutions responding to a recent survey by the Association of American Colleges and Universities require students to take a course in global or world-culture studies. Nearly 90 percent of academic leaders included “knowledge of global world cultures” among their desired student-learning outcomes.
A foreign-language course can produce those outcomes, says Sharon Wilkinson, world-languages chair and a professor of French at Simpson College, which hosted the fall conference. That trait makes for a potentially powerful argument, Ms. Wilkinson says. “We’re important to the mission of the college.”
What foreign-language courses essentially do, she says, is put students in other people’s shoes, helping them think from a different perspective. That shift fosters awareness of other cultures. And this is the lasting value of language courses, she and her colleagues concluded after a round of soul-searching, she recalls. “No one sitting around the table said, I want them to remember how to conjugate the verb ‘to be.’”
Georgetown University’s German department was among the first to chart a different course, by seeking to develop students’ core literary and analytical skills. Heidi Byrnes, now a professor emerita, led a rethinking of the program in the 1990s. She said it meant letting go of old assumptions. She and her colleagues decided that their role was not necessarily to train the next generation of German scholars to, say, parse Goethe’s work, or even to develop fluent German speakers. It was instead to contribute to the broader educational enterprise, chiefly by teaching students how to read texts closely and how to form and present arguments.
“That’s a skill set that’s applicable across the entire undergraduate curriculum,” Ms. Byrnes says. “It just happens to be in German.”
Making Meaning
Foreign-language departments have traditionally followed a bifurcated model. Lower-level courses, focused on language acquisition, are taught primarily by contingent instructors and graduate students. They use textbooks and vocabulary lists, and drill grammar. Upper-level courses turn to culture and literature, often with scant language instruction. They are typically taught by tenured and tenure-track faculty members and are intended for majors.
Critics deride that model for contentless, intellectually thin lower-level courses and obscure, lecture-heavy upper-level instruction. It also exemplifies the broader trend that has split the professoriate between the fortunate few haves and the growing legion of have-nots.
The divisions in labor and curriculum came to be seen as “a lot of hooey” at Georgetown, says Peter C. Pfeiffer, the chair during the department’s transformation. Language here at Georgetown is taught all the way through, and culture and literature figure even in introductory classes. Teaching numbers, for example, may involve statistics on Germans’ spending and vacation habits.
At higher levels, students might do a textual analysis of a film. Cori Crane, who earned her doctorate from Georgetown and is now an assistant professor of German at the University of Texas at Austin, is helping to establish the model there. She uses Am Ende kommen Touristen, a film about a young German civil servant working at the museum at Auschwitz, to teach the subjunctive, not as a set of rules but as a rhetorical device. A character in the film speaks in the subjunctive, which, she says, underscores notions of victimhood and passivity. Students prefer learning that way because it feels intellectually substantive instead of by rote, she says. “It’s about showing how language makes meaning.”
The approach is catching on elsewhere, like the French department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Students in introductory courses might write an essay in English about sociological research on college-age students in France and how their attitudes compare with Americans’, says Heather Willis-Allen, an associate professor. “You tap into who they are,” she says of her students, “as critically thinking adults.”
The Modern Language Association made recommendations in 2007 in keeping with that approach. Over the past several years, many departments, if not most, have embraced them, says Rosemary G. Feal, the association’s executive director.
But that shift has its critics. Some foreign languages’ general-education offerings try to develop global awareness but are taught in English. Such courses can be watered down, sacrificing what’s distinctive about the discipline to satisfy enrollment pressures, says Elizabeth B. Bernhardt, a professor of German studies and director of the Language Center at Stanford University. Courses about, say, contemporary German politics are only nominally about her discipline, she says. And if they aren’t taught by a political scientist, they will tend toward what she calls a “faux interdisciplinarity.”
She’s also not convinced that the approach used at Georgetown is truly novel, or that its results are as impressive as faculty members there assert. Students in upper-level courses at Stanford discuss immigration, politics, and economics. In introductory courses they work in groups to learn traditional vocabulary.
Ms. Bernhardt thinks it’s a mistake to toss out the bifurcated structure. “There’s no other way around it,” she says. “You’ve got to go through the basic stuff.”
Intellectual Complexity
In German courses at Georgetown, students learn to describe the world around them in the first few weeks. But they quickly turn to more intellectually complex concepts.
During a recent meeting of Anja B. Banchoff’s intensive second-semester course, nine students, most of them freshmen and sophomores, tackled a lesson on the theme of heimat, which translates loosely to “homeland.” Ms. Banchoff, an assistant teaching professor, and her students kept up a conversation almost exclusively in German for more than an hour. She posted a slide on an overhead projector: Nationalstolz — eine deutsche Debatte, or “National pride is a German debate.”
The professor calibrated her language to her students’ skill level, using body language and vocal inflection. “Stolz” means pride, she explained, lowering her voice and flexing her muscles. She went for cognates like “signifikanz” rather than the more precise German word, “bedeuten.”
“Stolz,” she said, is a fraught topic for many Germans, for whom flag waving provokes discomfort. She asked students to describe items that express national pride, and they collectively developed a vocabulary list. Banner, flag, national anthem. The words didn’t come from a textbook.
Should Germans express national pride? The students debated. Tara Advaney, a freshman in the School of Foreign Service, said the Holocaust had made it a loaded issue. She reached for a word that probably would not arise in most introductory courses: “perpetrators.”
There was no reading to prepare for that day: Ms. Banchoff drew out students’ prior knowledge and built the lesson around it. Their homework was to write a short essay on whether, in an increasingly globalized world, national holidays were still necessary. A few days later, they would discuss it.
One student, Devin Slaugenhaupt, says he can already write several pages of analysis and argument in German. A sophomore in the School of Foreign Service, he has already achieved proficiency in Spanish. Though that satisfies the graduation requirement for his school, he still plans to continue studying German.
Students like him define success for Georgetown’s German faculty. After all, a department can’t control geopolitical trends or how many students want to major in it. While Georgetown’s department has only 20 majors, it enrolls a far greater number of students in its upper-level courses. Of the 375 students taking German, more than half stick with it into the higher levels of the curriculum. Making itself accessible and stimulating for nonmajors is how the department wants to remain relevant.
Mr. Pfeiffer, the former department head, is teaching an upper-level course now. Of his 17 students, five are majors. The rest study business or international affairs. While that class composition might do little to eventually replenish the ranks of traditional scholars like him, Mr. Pfeiffer sees other benefits: “It makes for a more interesting classroom.”
Dan Berrett writes about teaching, learning, the curriculum, and educational quality. Follow him on Twitter @danberrett, or write to him at dan.berrett@chronicle.com.
