US Plans to Hide Behind an Iron Curtain

Contrary to what Cold War ideologues might want us to believe, the US and the USSR had a lot in common. Now that the Soviet Union is dead, the United States is still faithfully implementing many of the most famous Soviet practices. To give an example, governmental bailouts to non-viable companies deemed "too big to fail" were a central feature of the Soviet economy. Now the US is taking its pro-Soviet policies even further in its plan to hide the country behind an iron curtain of its own making. Inside Higher Ed reports:

When a chart of all cuts in the 2011 budget passed by Congress on Thursday was made public earlier this week, international-education advocates received an unpleasant surprise: funding for foreign language and area studies programs within the Education Department could be cut by as much as $50 million. . . The biggest losses could come in the Education Department: if agency-level budget cuts lists on the House Appropriations Committee website are enacted, programs that emphasize foreign languages and area studies could lose up to 40 percent of their budgets. . . Programs that fall under the Title VI umbrella include National Resource Centers, grants to universities for modern foreign language study; the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships; Language Resource Centers, which research teaching and learning of foreign languages; and centers for international business education and research, among others. Many emphasize languages and regions that are considered strategically important or are infrequently studied. The Education Department also administers Fulbright grants for doctoral dissertations, faculty research, group projects and seminars abroad.

To say that American students need more exposure to foreign languages and cultures is an understatement of the year. In spite of all the available technology, my students' ignorance about the world they live in is daunting. Many arrive in college without even knowing the names of the continents. When I ask them to locate Latin America on the map of the world, many have no idea where to look. Quite a few cannot name the countries that share a border with the US. It is needless to say that I never see American students who speak any language other than their own. Many of them tell me that they took several years of Spanish in high school but that always turns out to have been a useless waste of time because of the extremely poor quality of instruction.

None of this is new to me. In the Soviet Union, we also pretended to study foreign languages in high school and the results were just as inadequate. Teaching of foreign languages on the college level was seen by the administrators and the government as an afterthought. Departments of foreign literature either did not exist or were a sad joke. Nobody could speak any foreign languages to save their lives. A country that lived behind an iron curtain closed itself off completely to languages, literature and culture of other countries.

Now that the countries of the former Soviet Union got rid of their iron curtain, the US is creating one of its own. 

Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!

Languages: Humanities or Communications?

Dear fellow lovers of foreign languages and cultures,

traditionally, language courses have been listed in course requirements under the rubric of Humanities. Do you think that should remain the way it is, or would it make more sense to list such courses under the rubric of Information and Communication? I'm only talking about language courses, not literature.

I'll be grateful to anybody who expresses themselves on this subject. This isn't just academic to me. It's a very important decision we will be making at my department, and I'd like to hear different arguments on the subject.

Thank you!

Why It Is Important to Learn Foreign Languages

Once in Montreal, a friend from Spain and I saw a shiny new BMW stop in front of us. A very chic lady got out. She was wearing a fur-coat, super high heels, and carrying a Birkin bag. Her hairstyle was elaborate and expensive, and her jewelry didn't look cheap either. 

My friend and I, however, were more impressed by the license plate of her car that said: "FEA 976." "Fea" means "ugly" in Spanish. The poor person had unwittingly become the laughing stock of a city with a huge Spanish-speaking population.

This is one of the many reasons why learning foreign languages is a good idea.

Languages

I really love having native speakers of Spanish in my classes. It's so rewarding to have them come up to me during the first week of class to ask where I am from and to see their astonishment when I respond that I'm from Ukraine. "But how is it possible?" they ask. "How come your Spanish is so perfect?" Learning Spanish is my greatest achievement, the one I'm proud of the most. English is not the same because learning it is not really my achievement. It's my father's.

Since I was little, my father kept telling me, "The most important thing for a woman is to have a profession, to be able to make a good living. Then, you won't have to wait for some guy to choose you. You will be choosing yourself. You will never have to put up with anything you don't like if you are independent financially." So he set out to give me and later my sister the most marketable skill he could think of in the country where we were born: the knowledge of a foreign language.

Foreign language learning in the Soviet Union was nothing short of pathetic. It still is in the countries of the former Soviet Union. My father miraculously taught himself English in an environment where there were no English-speakers for him to talk to, no television in English, and a dearth of reading material in the language. I don't know how he managed to learn to speak so perfectly but he did. Even today, I have a stronger accent in English than he does because he simply has none. (I know more slang words in English, though, so we are kind of even.) In order to teach his daughters, my father decided to speak to us only in English. Until today, he has not said a single word in Russian to my sister. This was an incredible sacrifice because the effort to speak a foreign language on a daily basis in a total lack of a language community is incredible.

This was also a venture that often bothered on being dangerous. When I was 9, my father took me to the beach on vacation. We rented a room from a nice lady who rented rooms in her house to a bunch of vacationers. Every night, my father got me to read a chapter from Winnie the Pooh in English and then discussed it with me. One day, however, our landlady complained. "I can't have people talking foreign languages at all hours of the night," she said. "What will people think?" For obvious reasons, speaking English was often seen as an indication that one was engaging in subversive activities. There was another danger to speaking English in public in a fiercely anti-semitic society. "Look, these people are speaking Jewish!" my father would hear when he talked in English to my sister on a bus.

Who could have possibly imagined how useful this knowledge of English would be to us in the future?

How I Learned to Speak Spanish, Part II

When I was admitted to the university, I was 22 years old. I knew I didn't have the time to go the usual route of taking Spanish 101, 102, and so on. So I lied to my advisor, told her that I'd studied Spanish before, and enrolled in Spanish Intermediate Intensive. On the first day of class, when our Salvadoran teacher came into the classroom and started prattling in his very difficult Central American Spanish, I realized that I was in trouble. When he announced that we were going to do an overview of the Preterite and the Imperfect, I realized that I was in even bigger trouble because these words meant nothing to me.

I knew that I had to learn to speak and fast if I wanted to get that PhD within a reasonable amount of time. I was an immigrant, I had no money. Any exchange program was out of the question because of the conditions of my visa and money constraints. Besides, my underage sister was living with me, and I couldn't just abandon her and flee to yet another country. There was no money for a tutor or an immersion program. But there was something a lot better, though: the rich and vibrant Hispanic community of Montreal. I made friends with Spanish speakers from many different countries. That wasn't easy for me. I have Asperger's and meeting people is not something I enjoy (to put it very, very mildly). But I made the effort and started visiting all kinds of events where Spanish speakers were present.

I had a neighbor from Colombia who was going through a convoluted drama with her boyfriend. She would ask me over and narrate the story of her life for hours. (I am extremely thankful for the fact that so many Spanish-speakers love to talk.) At first, I understood about 5% of what she was saying. Obviously, I couldn't say much in return, so I just looked compassionate and nodded. As a result, she started presenting me to her friends as a very kind person and the best listener she ever met. So more people started asking me over to share their stories. And I had even more opportunities to listen, look compassionate, and nod. Later, when I learned to speak and we became best friends I told my very first Colombian interlocutor, "Look, you have to retell me all your stories once again because the first time around I didn't understand a word of them." I was extremely lucky in meeting her because Colombian Spanish is considered the most correct in terms of pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary.

 

There was also a language exchange program affiliated with our university. These programs allow people who don't have money for language lessons to swap their language skills. Say, you want to learn Russian and I want to learn German. We meet, talk for an hour in my language and then for another hour in yours. As a result, everybody gets to speak and listen, the environment is casual and relaxed, and the learning process is enjoyable.

 

To compliment these activities, I also read in Spanish all the time. I had already arived by that time at what would become the basis of my language teaching philosophy: when talking and reading compliment each other, you get great results. So I read. I don't believe in adapted texts or easy solutions. So I decided to start with reading Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo. For those who know this book it must be very clear why that was an insane choice of the first book ever to read in Spanish. The first time I read this beautiful but extremely complex work of literature that not every native speaker understands on the first reading I had no idea what it was about. But I felt it was beautiful. So I read it once more. And the third time. And then something kind of became a little clearer. So I decided to read Miguel de Unamuno's Niebla. Again, those who know this novel are now thinking that I am a very crazy person because it's also a very complex book.

 

I also persecuted my Salvadoran Spanish teacher with questions. He would dread the sight of me appearing at his office yet again to announce: "I don't understand Preterito and Imperfecto!" He would explain for hours, bring print-outs, activities, transparencies. "Do you understand it now?" he'd ask, desperate for some good news. "No!" I'd respond brightly. Then, he would start all over again. Today, whenever I go back to Canada to speak at a conference, my teacher (who in the meantime went from being a graduate student to a tenured professor) always comes to listen. He sits there looking very proud and then comes up to me after the talk to ask, "So now do you understand the differences between Preterito and Imperfecto?" "Yes," I say. "But now I have to explain it to students who refuse to understand."

 

In short, I lived and breathed Spanish for this entire period of time. Within 18 months, I was teaching Spanish at a private language school. In 2,5 years, I walked into my very frist college classroom as a teacher of Spanish. (I'll blog about that experience one day because that course was something special.) And only 3,5 years since I started learning, I published by very first research article in Spanish. And not in some graduate journal, or anything like that. I published in Anales Galdosianos, a very prestigious, "real" scholarly journal. As I said, I'm very proud of my Spanish and I will boast all I want about it. :-)

 

It's been almost 12 years since I said my first words in Spanish. Of course, learning a language is a project of a lifetime, even if you are a native speaker. A language is a living entity, and we renegotiate our relationship with it on a daily basis. Learning a new language gives you access to an entire civilization, to a world of experiences, to a version of yourself that is completely different from what you are when you speak your own language.

 

For those who want to learn to speak a foreign language very fast and very well, I have the following suggestions:

1. Speak. You don't need a pricey immersion program, a trip, or an exchange visit to learn. Of course, if you can afford them, that's fantastic. Have fun and enjoy this great opportunity. Many people, however, simply don't have the resources to afford anything like this nowadays. My advice to you is to find  in your town a language exchange program like the one I described. If it doesn't exist, start one. Find a Spanish store or a community newspaper and place an ad for a free exchange of language knowledge. There are many immigrants who would love to teach you their language in exchange for practicing English with you. What should you do, though, if there are no speakers of your target language who live in your area? Not to worry, today's technological advances have solved that problem, too. How many people in the world would love to improve their knowledge of English in exchange for practicing their language with you? All you need to do is find them and talk to them through Skype or any other similar program. Even though you might have no money, you still have a very valuable commodity: your knowledge of English. Make use of it in your language learning.
2. Read. Reading in the target language is crucial because it builds up vocabulary and gives you what the Germans call "Sprachgefühl" (an intuitive understanding of how a language works.) When I was learning Spanish, I read for at least 6 hours a day every single day in my target language. As a result, I now have a vocabulary that is extremely rich. Not everybody has the time to read this much, of course, but reading at least a page a day will boost your language learning in a way that nothing else will.
3. Tell yourself stories. Try to narrate to yourself in the target language things that you see around you. Funny comics, an encounter with friends, a list of things you need to do, a curious blog post you have read: try retelling all this to yourself in Spanish. It's best to do it out loud, of course, but if that's not convenient, tell it to yourself in your head. This will teach you to think in the target language, instead of trying to translate every sentence (a horrible practice to be avoided at all costs.)

Good luck!

P.S. I know that these last two posts sound extremely self-congratulatory, but come on, people, it's New Year's. A person should be able to celebrate her massive achievements on such a festive occasion. :-)

My Methodology of Teaching Languages

A reader asked me a while ago to describe my methodology of language teaching. Every educator has their own methodology, of course. We keep working on it and modifying it as long as we teach. One's methodology is very dependent on one's personal characteristics and preferences. I will share the system I have devised in my twenty years of language teaching, but I want to reiterate that this is what works for me in my interactions with my students. I have no doubt that other educators do things differently and are very effective.

1. I rely heavily on the communicative method, although I always incorporate other methods or elements of other methods as well. The communicative method proposes that the best way to learn a language is through communication: talking, play-acting, doing conversational group activities, etc.

2. My method is completely student-centered. At most, I spend less than 3% of class time standing in front of the students and delivering information. The rest is group activities where students produce something while I'm walking around the classroom, observing them, helping out, asking and answering questions, and directing their activities.

3. Unlike some of my colleagues, I do explain the grammar. I believe that the capacity to explain even the most complex grammar phenomena clearly, briefly and in a very organized manner is one of my main strengths. As a non-native speaker of the language I teach, I have a system of explaining grammar that is very different from the one usually taught in textbooks. I explain grammar to students the way I explained it to myself when I was learning the language. It is crucial, in my opinion, to explain the philosophical underpinnings of each grammar phenomenon, and the students find that extremely useful. I believe, for example, that the subjunctive in Spanish (which is extremely complex) cannot be mastered effectively unless one realizes the philosophical reasons behind it. Spanish subjunctive is not just a set of rules, it's a way of being. The second you understand this, you will not make a single mistake in the subjunctive ever again.

4. Every task the students carry out should result in something they produce on their own, be it a paragraph, a sentence, or even just a word. For this reason, I never bring any multiple-choice activities to the classroom. They are counterproductive and useless in language teaching.

5. Language learning is very different from any other kind of learning. Students are terrified of making mistakes and making themselves look ridiculous to their peers. Mistakes, however, are unavoidable in language learning. Everybody is going to make mistakes all the time. This is why it's so crucial to create a safe environment in the classroom, so that students feel less shy or nervous. Language classrooms are usually quite small (our courses, for example, are capped at 25). So we have an opportunity to establish a personal contact with every single student.

6. Since group work is key, I put a lot of effort into figuring out the best composition of each group for each specific assignment. You can't, for example, put three very strong students and one much weaker student into the same group. The students who speak well will simply deny any opportunity to speak to the student who takes a lot longer to come up with responses. 

7. Visual materials are key. Asking students, for example, to memorize lists of new words is a complete waste of time. It is a lot more useful to bring them sets of pictures that accompany each new word. Preferrably, these pictures should be in color. There is nothing worse than an entire language class conducted in black and white.

8. Nothing is sadder than a language class where students sit for an hour with their noses stuck in the textbook. A good language class is noisy, full of movement, laughter, fun. I get my students to move around the classroom on a regular basis. I also consider a class where the students didn't roar with laughter at least once to be a complete waste of time. 

9. The importance of cultural content cannot be overstated. We don't want the students to forget that language isn't just a set of grammar rules and vocabulary lists. It's a living entity that is shared by a large group of people. A language classroom should become a little island of the language's culture. Here, the personality of the teacher is key. Students see us as representatives of the linguistic community whose language we teach. Simply put, they need to like us and want to imitate us in order to like the language. This doesn't mean, of course, that the teacher cannot be strict, demanding and a hard grader.  I have found that if you bring a big and fascinating personality into the classroom, the students will forget to care about tons of homework and low grades.

10. In my classes, we do not speak anything but the target language. Even in Spanish 101 after I explain the syllabus in English, there is no more English after that. At first students are terrified, but I have discovered that soon enough they begin to see our classroom as a fully Spanish-speaking environment and learn to enjoy that. I met a student in the street yesterday and tried talking to him in English. He didn't like that at all and brought the conversation back into Spanish. This was great, especially given that the course was over.

11. The four major skills (talking, reading, writing, and listening comprehension) should ideally be practiced in some form in every class meeting, especially if the class meets only twice a week. For example, a class that concentrates on reading and nothing else is not going to be as effective as a class that combines reading with other skills.

12. Every group of language learners is different. No matter how many times you teach the same language course at the same university, you will have to modify your materials significantly every single time. My syllabi in language classes are a lot more fluid than the ones in my literature and culture classes. You simply cannot predict whether, say, two compositions will make sense until you meet the new group and get to know them.

American Academics' Inept Struggle for Their Rights: SUNY Albany

Finally, the folks at SUNY Albany started to make their dire situation known to the members of the academic community. Sadly, they are doing it in a way that is unlikely to be very effective. Instead of creating a blog to inform everybody of what is happening on a daily basis and placing a petition there that can be signed on-line, they got ACTFL (our professional association) to circulate a letter on their behalf. Unfortunately, this letter is being circulated in a .pdf format, which makes it impossible for allies like me to place the letter on my blog. PDF files are also huge, and many people will not want to clutter their mailboxes with such a big file. They would have been a lot better off including their letter in the body of the e-mail itself. People are much more likely to read it this way as opposed to an attachment of any kind. Another thing that makes little sense is that they are sending the letter to departmental chairs and administrators, instead of regular faculty members who are a lot more likely to want to join the struggle.

American academics have a lot to learn from their Canadian and Welsh colleagues who don't make this many false moves in their struggle to defend their departments. The first step should always be going online. Start a blog, contact other bloggers, get people to tweet about your situation and link to it on their Facebook pages. The strategy of contacting the few select individuals high on the academic hierarchy is outdated and useless. What I find especially curious is that even though I've had over a hundred and fifty visitors from SUNY Albany to this blog, not a single one of them left a comment or got in touch. This attitude couldn't be more different from that of our Swansea colleagues who know how to interact with their allies in a productive way.

Only a few decades ago, American college campuses taught the world how to organize fruitful social protest. Today, it seems that while the entire world is putting these lessons to good use, they have been completely forgotten by the American academics and students themselves.

Barking in a Foreign Language

This post is written by a guest blogger, Kola Tubosun whose great blog you can check out here.

Prompted by two related observations in my mind at the moment...


One was the search term in my blog statistics today. Some random person had apparently been directed to my blog by searching for the term "barking in a foreign language". This is not so strange when I realize that I had once made a blog post about the cartoon that I found on the glass entrance to my department.

The second was this very comprehensive article, and discussion, in the New York times about why, or whether Americans will really, learn Chinese. I enjoyed reading it and picked up a few nuggets, one of which was the fact that the interest of many Americans in learning foreign languages came from political and economic expediencies: They learnt Russian during the Cold War, Arabic after 9/11, Spanish because of their neighbours, and now Chinese in the wake of China's global economic uprising. Thus said the writers of the article. Not me, even though I have learnt also from a few interactions on the matter that many American students now study Chinese for the purpose of gaining leverage in the emerging economic world.

The article doesn't mention Yoruba, Swahili, or any of the other minority world languages being learnt in Universities all over America, but that is not the point - I guess. As much as this point in the article could be seen as a generalization of perhaps a genuine interest of students in expanding their worldviews, I believe that there's something interesting about the said American foreign language fad. For a fact, the govenment of the United States has shown more interest in languages spoken in parts of the world with some economic, political or cultural relevance to its own survival. At the Fulbright conference in December, I had made friends with a guy called Osama from Yemen, a Fulbrighter on a similar programme. That was before the Christmas Day bombing attempt, and its subsequent link to Yemen. After the terror attempt, I asked a friend if she thought that Yemen will now get a lesser slot in subsequent Fulbright programmes because of the terrorism incendent, and she said NO. Quite the opposite, she said. If this all rings true, then Hausa will also soon become another language of interest for Americans in the coming years, because of the failed bombing attempt of Christmas day. This creed can then be summarized somewhat thusly:

"If he has tried to kick your ass, kick his ass too, and then learn his language. You might understand him more, and thus prevent any further aggression."      

Whether this is true, or whether it ever works as planned in the long term, is of course subject to debate.

From Clarissa:

I highly recommend Kola's great blog, which is not only intelligent, humorous and exceptionally well-written but is also peppered with my insightful comments.                                                                                

Who Can Teach Languages

Many people mistakenly believe that in order to teach languages it is enough to be a native speaker. Well, who cares what some sad ignoramuses think, you might object. Sadly, said ignoramuses can be found among university faculty more and more often. There are colleges that have disbanded their foreign language departments and have given the teaching of languages to the native-speakers among students. Needless to say, this system of language teaching cannot possibly work.

I have been teaching languages for more years than I care to mention. If I do, people might think I'm on the verge of retirement, which is completely untrue. I think that I kick ass at language teaching, and my students seem to agree unanimously. The only language among those I speak that I cannot teach, however, is my own. I am a native speaker of Russian, which is the language that I speak at home. I attempted not even to teach it, but to tutor somebody in it a while ago. It was a complete and total failure. I couldn't answer a single question my students asked me. "So why do you conjugate this verb like this?" they would ask. Or, "How many verb groups are there?" And even though I have been speaking this language my entire life, I had no idea what to tell them. I didn't know which grammar points would turn out to be especially hard to the students and how to make them clearer. I had no idea why I was speaking the way I was and couldn't explain it to the students.

Teaching languages is a skill that it takes people a long time to acquire. Being a native speaker of the language is completely irrelevant to whether you will be able to teach it. In their push to eradicate the Humanities, university administrators try to substitute tenure-track teaching faculty with underpaid, overworked, and often woefully underqualified part-time instructors. This measure seemingly saves money for colleges. Tenure-track and tenured faculty teach a limited number of hours, expect to have sabbaticals and course release time, and cannot be forced to teach 9 courses per semester with no TA.

This measure always turns out to be counterproductive. As a tenure-track faculty who only works two or three days a week, I have the leisure and the motivation to design complex, engaging, and original learning activities for my students. I have the knowledge necessary to ensure that every aspect of the activity has a pedagogic rationale. I am invested into making sure that the students do well, since in all probability I will see those same students in my higher-level classes and I want them to be prepared for that. I have time and energy to get to know all of my language students personally and help each of them overcome their personal struggles with the subject matter.

Aside from being a lame attempt at saving money, squeezing foreign language and literature courses off the campus has an important ideological goal. Our classrooms are always small and are organized around students talking, expressing themselves, and doing all kinds of creative things during the entire class. This is not a huge lecture in macroeconomics, where hundreds of students are sitting in complete silence for 2 hours, being indoctrinated by the professor and never getting a chance of formulating their own opinion, let alone expressing it.

At the same time, speaking another language requires adopting different ways of thinking, seeing the world, relating to your reality. It is a lot more difficult to zombify a person who has developed alternative modes of relating to the world. This is precisely why so many efforts are being made to prevent American students from learning about other languages and cultures.

Foreign Languages Programs

I am sick and tired of receiving these defeatist articles announcing the imminent demise of language and literature programs in higher education. The most recent of these articles, suggests that we avoid being seen as service programs by . . . finding ways to serve engineering and agriculture more effectively. Another idiotic suggestion promoted by this article is one practiced by the University of Utah (like anybody in their right mind would want to be anything like Utah):

Members of the public pay to join the club, for which every third week they meet in a bar for a 10-minute talk by a humanities professor on some provocative topic (yes -- only 10 minutes -- it's called an "intellectual hors d'oeuvre") and then enjoy (non-intellectual) hors d'oeuvres and drinks. These talks are regularly heard by 100-plus people who get to know more about the humanities.

"Our first course is Professor X, followed by beer and curly fries." Is that what one kills oneself for in graduate school? To be offered in ten-minute servings before a hamburger and a pitcher to a bunch of people who want to pretend they have a brain? Of course, this kind of public would never be able to deal with more than 10 minutes of intellectual material every 3 weeks. How sad.

This "we-need-to-save-the-languages" attitude is very frustrating. Like the recent introduction of invasive airport security scanners, it attempts to treat the symptoms without addressing the root of the problem. I don't even want to go over the entire list of things that demonstrate how urgently relevant the Humanities in general and foreign languages and literatures in particular are today. The only type of people who doesn't realize this is the one who attends the embarrassing intellectual hors-d'oeuvres.

The real reason why our students are reluctant to major and minor in foreign languages is that they are born and grow up in a culture that keeps telling them that they live in the best country in the world and that everything beyond the US borders is not worthy of interest. Other countries are presented as uncivilized, weird, and dangerous. The best thing to do about people from other countries, my students are told, is to build a wall or install a scanner to hide us from the bad, scary "them."

Taking courses that introduce them to other cultures can be a disconcerting experience for American students. Their preconceived notions about some vague superiority of the US over everybody in everything are shattered. Often, it's easier for the students to major in disciplines that do no require them to engage in any painful intellectual analysis.

There is hope for Texas, after all

Thank God, reason prevailed ate the University of Texas at Austin. This goes to show that if we resist these barbaric changes collectively, we can stop them. 

"U. of Texas Abandons Controversial Foreign Language Plan
The University of Texas at Austin has abandoned a controversial plan to cut
the foreign language requirement in its College of Liberal Arts from 16 to
12 credits. In an e-mail sent this week to the faculty, Randy Diehl, the
dean of the college, noted that at a faculty meeting to discuss the idea,
"[i]n three and a half hours of give and take, not one audience member
spoke in favor of the proposal.... In view of the overwhelming negative
reaction to the proposal, I have decided to withdraw it from further
consideration."

cited from 22 October 2009 Inside Higher Ed

Now I hope that Cal State at Bakersfield gives up on its shameful and outrageous plan to kill languages.