My colleagues, relatives, and even students often ask me why I, a full professor with a doctorate in comparative literature, teach beginning French year after year. I admit, I sometimes wonder about it myself. My first love has always been literature; I had never intended to teach language. I believed that only native speakers should teach foreign languages at the college level -- and besides, teaching beginning-language courses struck me as unrewarding.
I began teaching French because I was conscripted. When the French instructor in the department of English and foreign languages -- which I had just joined -- resigned suddenly, the department head quickly changed my job description. That was 17 years ago. Now I am the department head and can teach almost anything I want to: poetry, British literature, senior seminars, even graduate comparative-literature courses. So why do I stick with personal pronouns and irregular verbs?
My reasons are different from those of Alice Kaplan, a professor of French at Duke University, who wrote about her teaching experiences in 1993 in French Lessons: A Memoir. She sees her primary teaching goal as fluency. Her perfect student was one who returned from France speaking flawless French -- even though Kaplan didn’t entirely approve of the student’s making Belgian jokes. Her ideal students follow her into elite graduate programs in French and become French-speaking academics at major universities.
My students, by contrast, do not go on to graduate programs in French or become French professors. In fact, they do not even major in French; the small-town, midsized state university where I teach doesn’t offer a French major. Few of my students will visit a French-speaking country, and only a handful will read a French book. After they leave my class, they will probably never use their French, much less perfect it. Still, that does not mean that my efforts, or theirs, are wasted.
It seems clear to me that those of us who promote language learning have made a serious mistake in arguing for its usefulness. Computers can translate material at the stroke of a key, even if the translation is not perfectly idiomatic; research data originally published in a foreign language are available almost instantly in English; people in other countries -- even waiters and hotel clerks -- speak English. The main reasons for studying a foreign language are not practical ones. Rather, the study of language is a humanistic enterprise, a way to deepen our understanding of what it means to be human.
I had a chance to go over some of the reasons for studying languages the other day, when one of my students suddenly interrupted our discussion of definite versus indefinite articles to ask why everyone getting a B.A. at our university has to take a foreign language. “And why four semesters in the same language?” another chimed in. “One or two, OK, but why four? Will we be able to speak it fluently when we’ve finished?”
Forget articles -- I leapt to my soapbox.
In such conversations, I answer my students honestly: Two years will not give them true facility in a language. Think about it, I tell them. We meet for three hours a week -- five, if we count your lab hours. We’re at it for 14 weeks a semester. That comes to fewer than 150 hours a year. You could match that in just 10 days of immersion in a French-speaking country, which obviously wouldn’t make you fluent.
No, you will not be proficient speakers of French. What four semesters will give you is time to experience how another language works, how it differs from your own, how different cultures are affected by their different ways of speaking. You can’t really understand that until you’ve experienced it -- and the best way to experience it is to study another language. In fact, even a semester or two can be extremely beneficial.
I have realized that the first lesson my students learn may be the most important: One language cannot be translated directly into another. That is one of the most basic features of language, and language, in turn, is one of the most basic features of being human.
“Why do they say it that way?” -- with the implication, “Why don’t they say it our way?” -- is one of the first things I hear in every beginning class. It’s a crucial question. Learning another culture’s way of saying, seeing, being is the true experience of multiculturalism. From that new perspective, students can, with a little guidance, begin to see how their own language has both shaped and limited them.
I find that students who have been exposed to a foreign language before they get to college haven’t necessarily had those insights. It seems that those are ideas that students have to be ready to grasp, like the humor of Moby-Dick or the irony of Socrates. That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t study languages before college; there’s no question that the ability to learn languages, particularly to mimic sounds, is at its apex before the age of 12 or so. But it does mean that students have much to learn in a university language classroom -- they just may be learning something quite different from what they expected.
By the time I’d gotten that far into my soapbox routine with my students, their hands were popping up: “And you know, reading novels, a lot of times there’s French in them, and now I can read it. That’s cool!” “My history professor couldn’t remember what the expression laissez faire means in French, so I got to explain it to the whole class.” “And if we do go to France, it’ll be a lot easier to learn French there with what we already know, won’t it?”
Yes, yes, yes, mes chéris. I may be preaching to the choir, but at least the choir gets it.
One reason I teach French, then, is that in doing so, I am teaching much more. But I also have personal reasons for teaching language, reasons I’ve been discussing lately with my colleague Leslie Stanley-Stevens, a sociologist.
In a beginning course in French, the instructor can bask in the ease and security of right and wrong -- in stark contrast to my world-literature course, my husband’s philosophy courses, or Leslie’s class on gender in society. Alice Kaplan describes the raw, risk-taking side of language learning, and I see her point. But I also see the language classroom as a haven, a place where my students’ previous learning, received dogma, carefully protected single vision don’t get in the way. Neither do mine.
Exactly, Leslie says, and your French class is the place where you can be the all-knowing authority, the one whose answer cannot be challenged. (Leslie is sitting in on my beginning-French class.) But that is not it at all -- although I have to admit that Alice Kaplan would take Leslie’s side. No, for me it’s the opposite. My students and I are in this together -- non-native speakers, Americans, facing the imposing, unflinching, impervious patrimony of French.
I say something similar to my world-lit students: We’re all struggling, confronting the new words and new worlds of challenging writers. That’s not entirely true; in reality, I’m far ahead of them. But in the case of my French students, I’m not. I’ve been studying the language for only 35 years or so, hardly a head start at all. I am humbled by the French past subjunctive in a way that I am not by Euripides and Dante and Proust.
I have one other reason, purely personal, which I don’t generally divulge to university administrators or state legislators. Teaching French -- like teaching anything -- is one of the best ways to continue learning it. In other words, I do it for myself. It’s taken years, but it’s taken. On a recent trip to France, my mother recognized with mortification that my French, largely acquired in the classroom, had surpassed her own -- native, but long unused. When we returned home, she told family and friends that what she’d gotten out of the trip was humility. She had been relegated to sitting silently while her American-born daughter engaged in French conversations that she simply couldn’t follow.
I noted that I had the huge advantage of being up on the subjects in question: the pluses and minuses of the Internet versus the Minitel, or the popularity (and popular mispronunciation) of “Nike” among French teenagers. Still, I couldn’t help feeling pleased.
So I keep teaching French, a four-semester cycle, year after year, trying out different books and new approaches, noting the vastly different levels of linguistic ability among my students. I occasionally find myself flinching at the sounds they produce; but then I remind myself that by the end of the fourth semester, the ones who have some facility for languages will have learned about the same amount as those in previous classes, and the ones who don’t will still have learned something important.
And I wait patiently for that day, some time late in the second semester, when one student will ask piteously, “Why does ‘il faut’ mean ‘it’s necessary,’ but the negative ‘il ne faut pas’ means ‘one must not’? And why does ‘on doit’ mean ‘one must,’ when ‘on ne doit pas’ means ‘it isn’t necessary’?” I am sympathetic to her plight, but before I can respond, another student will jump in with a response of her own: “Well, why does ‘librairie’ mean ‘bookstore’ and ‘bibliothèque’ mean ‘library’?” And then the voice of an angel, my perfect student, with a perfect central-Texas accent: “Yeah. Why do we say it that way?”
Mallory Young is a professor of English and French, and the head of the department of English and languages, at Tarleton State University.
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