Perspectives
HEIDI BYRNES, Associate Editor
Georgetown University
THE ISSUE
The Role of Foreign Language Departments in Internationalizing the
Curriculum
A FOCUS ON “THE ROLE OF FOREIGN
language departments in internationalizing the
curriculum,” the topic of this issue of Perspectives,
would seem to be tantamount to (re-)asserting the
most obvious of the obvious. Of course, foreign
language (FL) departments have a central role in
an educational effort that has been on the “edu-
cation talk circuit” for quite some time now and,
indeed, has become so ubiquitous that concise
meaning has given way to a convenient mantra
and “me too” assertions on the part of many an
institution of higher education. So, in what sense
might the topic be worthy of another look? What
changes in the notion of “internationalization”
might powerfully have crept in as it gained the
status of a mainstreamed educational goal? What
has that development meant for FL departments
as academic units? More probing, what has it
meant for them as academic units representing
a disciplinary environment in higher education
that inherently “does internationalization”? Alter-
natively, with an even more questioning stance,
has it really meant much of consequence, both
for their self-understanding and for their rela-
tionship to the remainder of the academy, which
makes its own unmistakable claims to participat-
ing in that movement-like effort? Should it have
had or should it presently have such far-reaching
consequences? Finally, to echo a phrase that has
much resonance in our field: “Who owns interna-
tionalization” (not just language x), anyway?
You may have noticed that, as phrased, the
theme for this issue has specified no particular ver-
bal action. That leaves open whether FL depart-
ments already have a firmly established role; do or
The Modern Language Journal, 93, iv, (2009)
0026-7902/09/607–627 $1.50/0
C 2009 The Modern Language Journal

might play a role that yet awaits stage directions;
can or should affirm their particular role in the
ensemble of educational actors, in the process
gaining a much better understanding of their dis-
ciplinary persona; or, perhaps, must first assert
such a role for themselves so as to shape “the per-
formance of internationalization.” Various takes
of this kind and a sense that there is considerably
less certainty about them than might first appear
led to the MLJ Editorial Board’s choice of topic.
Not surprisingly, such perspective-taking charac-
terizes the six contributions of the column. Not
surprisingly, too, they offer further clarification of
the issues and challenges to some long-held no-
tions that implicate FL departments in the project
of internationalization of higher education curric-
ula and do so potentially right to their core.
As president and chief executive officer of the
Institute of International Education (IIE), the
leading not-for-profit organization in the field of
international exchange and development train-
ing, Allan Goodman highlights both the remark-
able need, within U.S. education, for a strong
international orientation and the efforts already
exerted and yet to be undertaken to assure a grad-
ual closing of the stark gap between that need and
actual capacity. Such efforts would go way beyond
the purview of FL departments if, as Goodman
proposes, every student should have a passport
and use it over the course of her/his undergrad-
uate experience. At the same time, such a man-
date goes right to the heart of the work of FL de-
partments if that projected overseas sojourn is to
involve “an immersive, intensive foreign language
experience.” The complexity of fulfilling the man-
date within the educational and fiscal realities of
contemporary higher education is well laid bare
in the mismatch between the language and cul-
tural area expertise that is now in demand, par-
ticularly for the less commonly taught languages
608
and cultures, and the scholarly expertise, expe-
rience, and institutional stature and status that
currently characterize those units, along with the
fragile presence of any FL learning throughout
the U.S. educational system. That the demands
should in large measure be framed by and, there-
fore, financed by security-related interests and
that other funding resources are largely exter-
nal, limited in scope, and unpredictable compli-
cates matters considerably. For, deep down, the
demands and forms of resource allocations show
little regard for the long-term commitments aca-
demic FL departments must be able to make to
escape the dangers of service unit trivialization,
a sine qua non for substantive contributions to
what is, after all, a core educational concern inas-
much as language and cultural learning or know-
ing in general are intended. There is little doubt
that “business as usual” is an insufficient response
on the part of FL departments. However, there
is also considerable irony in the fact that the
task of internationalizing the curriculum in terms
of FL departments’ unique educational contri-
bution frequently presents itself to them under
alien, if not to say, alienating circumstances and,
furthermore, does so within an environment that
is deeply marked by the status of English as the
“go-to” international language that both super-
sedes and potentially even distorts the presence
and role of other languages.
Small wonder that diverse responses exist to
that situation—more or less provocative, more or
less probing of the conduct of FL departments,
more or less tactical or strategic, more or less
delimited or expansive in suggesting courses of
action. Thus, Ryuko Kubota of the University of
British Columbia refers to the same data Good-
man highlighted to illustrate the enormous need
for internationalizing curricula but foregrounds
paradoxes in how that need is customarily framed
and the kinds of responses it tends to receive.
Surveying political, economic, academic, and so-
ciocultural dimensions she finds two major para-
doxes: (a) the paradox that the need to study an-
other language seems less and less compelling
in light of the international lingua franca sta-
tus of English and the fact that those who take
on FL study are disproportionally members of
an elite, rather than a minority group, who are
being trained to speak with the elites in other
countries, themselves influenced by Anglocentric
norms and (b) the paradox that internationaliza-
tion turns into a one-way street where interna-
tional students studying at U.S. universities are
expected to do all of the accommodating with
frequently limited support, under the undisputed
The Modern Language Journal 93 (2009)
regime of an increasingly homogenized English-
based academic culture. Either way, it is difficult
to attribute the intended benefits of internation-
alization to practices that curtail the experience
of foreignness abroad and the experience of di-
versity at home. As a result, the educational goal
of internationalizing the curriculum takes on de-
cidedly moral dimensions in the charge to remove
“barriers to economic, racial, ethnic, cultural, and
linguistic inequalities.”
Whereas stating matters in this lofty policy fash-
ion may all too easily appear to aid and abet
unlofty inaction on the part of FL departments,
James Gehlhar, Associate Vice Chancellor for In-
ternational Affairs at East Carolina University,
unmistakably makes the opposite argument: FL
departments must get engaged with colleagues
across their respective campuses and must do so
with a focus on where their interlocutors come
from in terms of their teaching, researching, and
dispositions. This is true regardless of the institu-
tional makeup, be that a long-established research
institution or an institution serving student popu-
lations that are often career and practice oriented,
precisely because such careers and practices are
themselves taking place in an internationalized
context. His eight suggestions for realizing such
a stance would go a long way toward making FL
departments and their faculty members’ work rel-
evant to others. That this seemingly “no-brainer”
approach should have been so difficult to take on
for too many years is cause for reflection; that it
should surface with such urgency during times of
serious fiscal duress is surely cause for action, late
in time though it may be.
Part of that called-for reflection is taken up in
the comments by Carol Klee, who can look back
on extensive department chair experience in the
Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at
the University of Minnesota and extensive expe-
rience in working on exactly the issues of inter-
nationalizing the curriculum. She now serves as
Assistant Vice President for International Schol-
arship and Director of the European Studies Con-
sortium at her institution. She rightly points to
the intellectual and academic-structural vicinity
of the current internationalization drive to a vi-
brant initiative roughly two decades ago—namely
the Languages Across the Curriculum (LAC)
movement—and lays out the lessons we learned—
or might have learned—from that experience.
Among these are (a) the perennially thorny is-
sue of the relation between FL language and
content learning, alongside the use of English;
(b) the equally vexing questions of course cre-
ation and faculty preparation, including graduate
Perspectives
student preparation, in light of stated course goals
and objectives; (c) appropriate course models
in a particular institutional setting; (d) the spe-
cial challenges of incorporating the LCTLs (less
commonly taught languages); (e) needed insti-
tutional anchors; and (f) the broadening of the
palette of decision making afforded by including
technology.
Giving yet another twist to the repeated refrain
of the enormous power of English, Tracy Strong,
UCSD Distinguished Professor in the Department
of Political Science at the University of Califor-
nia, San Diego, leaves little doubt that any dreams
of FL study being a “natural” for substantive dis-
ciplinary work are over, not only in the natural
sciences (where German, in particular, had previ-
ously claimed a special sinecure) but also in the
social sciences: Scholarly value and esteem has de-
cidedly moved toward rational, even mathemati-
cal models that gain their power precisely because
of a claim to nonhistorical, noncontextualized,
non-culture-laden validity. There is surely an inter-
esting parallel here to the heated debates about
cognitive-mentalistic or socioculturally informed
approaches in applied linguistics in general and
second language acquisition research in partic-
ular. It seems fair to say that those debates have
opened up the conversational space in applied lin-
guistics, but the social sciences seem to have taken
the opposite route, casting their lot with the power
of an acultural rationality that effectively excludes
language study as a useful, much less necessary
tool for theorizing and empirical research. Assum-
ing that the social sciences, along with the natu-
ral sciences, wield considerable power in the con-
struction of curricula across campuses, any hopes
for internationalization that involve FLs translate
into a surfeit of expectations being loaded onto
study abroad. In other words, not only is a cru-
cial look necessary at what happens in that con-
text (see the recent MLJ monograph on just that
topic by Celeste Kinginger, 2008), it is just as im-
portant to look at what happened before and what
can and should happen thereafter. Seen from
that vantage point, Strong’s recommendation pro-
vides ample food for thought. As a scholar in po-
litical philosophy, he recommends that language
609
instruction take what he calls an “anthropologi-
cal perspective,” the ability to gain a perspective
on one’s world, not with the argument typically
proffered in the humanities but rather to fos-
ter the all-important capacity for representative
thinking that is at the heart of democratic political
understanding.
In a final take on who owns the educational im-
perative of internationalization and on the conse-
quences for the FL field of reassigned “property
rights,” H. Stephen Straight of Binghamton Uni-
versity leaves little doubt that internationalization
of the curriculum is not and cannot be owned by
FL departments, even though they have crucial
roles to play in its formulation and realization.
Picking up the LAC thread mentioned in Klee’s
contribution, he points to a successful program
that follows the implications of such an approach
at his institution, where he has just completed a
10-year stint as Vice Provost for Undergraduate
Education and International Affairs. As is often
the case in such projects, the need for changed as-
sumptions and actions does not just rest with one
group, and most certainly not with “them” who
have it all wrong! As Straight points out, faculty
in all disciplines and in their respective curricula
must be engaged in the project of dramatically re-
shaping both the FL and the non-FL enterprise so
that education might gradually approach what he
calls a “cultures and languages across the curricu-
lum” understanding of internationalization that
would truly serve and enhance the kind of global-
ized social activity that characterizes our times.
That faculty in FL departments are called
on to consider internationalization in that light
amounts to taking on commitments and respon-
sibilities that only few have thus far considered
to be in their purview or in their power to affect
and realize. I thank all writers for their thoughtful
contributions.
REFERENCE
Kinginger, C. (2008). Language learning in study
abroad: Case studies of Americans in France. Mod-
ern Language Journal, 92(S. 1).
610
THE COMMENTARIES
Language Learning and Study Abroad: The Path to Global Citizenship
ALLAN E. GOODMAN, President & CEO, Institute of International Education
Those of us in the field of international educa-
tion frequently forget just how poorly informed
most Americans are about the world. Seventy
percent do not have a passport, about the same
percentage of college-educated Americans can-
not locate Iran, Israel, or Indonesia on a map to-
day, think that Sudan is in Asia, and do not know
the name of the president of Russia. Less than 1%
of all American college and university students are
studying abroad in a given academic year.
The net effect of all this was highlighted by
Doris Lessing when she accepted the Nobel Prize
in Literature: “It is common for young men and
women who have had years of education to know
nothing about the world.” What is the remedy?
When visiting a campus or speaking to conven-
tions of educators, I am often asked how I would
change curricula to prepare the next generation
for global citizenship. For many years, I took the
bait and discussed tinkering around the edges.
However, a recent survey by the American
Council on Education (ACE)—along with the
statistics cited above—suggests that more radi-
cal action is needed. Shortly after 9/11, ACE
asked its members if some aspect of preparing
for global citizenship were a part of their mis-
sion statement. About 28% replied affirmatively.
When ACE re-did the survey 5 years later, the num-
ber had increased, but to only 38% (www.acenet.
edu//programs/international/mapping2008).
So if I were president of a university today, I
would require all entering students to arrive on
campus with a passport and then use it during the
course of their degree. I would not specify what
they should study or where they should go, hop-
ing that well-meaning and increasingly globally
minded faculty and student advisors would assist
in identifying what might make the most sense
and when.
Presently, only a handful of universities in
America have the requirement to study abroad,
although there are signs that more may be in-
terested. In the few months since the launch
of the Institute of International Education’s
(IIE) “Get a Passport: Study Abroad” campaign
(iie.org/passport), more than 80 colleges and uni-
versities in 35 states have joined as Partner Cam-
puses. They are hosting passport days on campus,
The Modern Language Journal 93 (2009)
sending passport applications out with new stu-
dent packets, and subsidizing passport application
fees for students who study abroad, among other
excellent activities.
However, getting a passport is actually not my
radical idea. The radical idea is that I would also
require all graduates of the university where I
served to have an immersive, intensive foreign lan-
guage experience—to learn to speak and work in
at least one foreign language.
So why is a card-carrying political scientist (who
failed the French exam for his PhD seven times
and who is deeply grateful that he was allowed to
count statistics as a second foreign language) now
saying that foreign language is central to higher
education and preparing citizens for global citi-
zenship? Additionally, why am I recommending
this at a time when many colleges and universities
are dropping language from their undergraduate
entrance requirements and where language study
may be at its lowest point in the nation’s history?
For one, I believe that approaches to educating
global citizens that deemphasize the role of for-
eign languages ultimately fall short of the goals
they are intended to achieve. I am not willing to
settle for offering students a megacourse on glob-
alization with most if not all readings in English.
I greatly respect the efforts of my colleagues to
solve these problems with the resources at their
disposal, but one or a few courses or even a short
trip abroad are not enough.
In his book From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of
Western Cultural Life, the historian Jacques Barzun
wrote, “It is a noteworthy feature of 20th century
culture that for the first time in over a thousand
years its educated class is not expected to be at
least bilingual” (2000, p. 45). Not to address this
would be a costly mistake.
Learning and using another’s language above
all reminds Americans that we are not alone. It
is as simple as that. We share the world and its
problems. We cannot solve them all on our own
no matter how many Indians and Chinese speak
English. Languages convey much more than facts;
they enable people to reach conclusions in differ-
ent ways and are the standard bearers of cultures
and histories. It has never been more important
for Americans to know and remember that. Who
Perspectives
knows, maybe someone else’s way of reaching a
conclusion or stating a fact will change what Amer-
icans think, as well as the world we share.
Thankfully, there is a growing number of re-
sources to help.
Under the auspices of the National Secu-
rity Education Program, The Language Flagship
is creating an entirely new approach to lan-
guage learning, building an innovative partner-
ship among the federal government, education,
and business to produce global professionals with
a superior proficiency in critical languages.
Over the past 8 years, The Language Flag-
ship, working with more than 20 domestic and 9
overseas institutions, has developed programs in
African languages, Arabic, Central Asian Turkic
languages, Chinese, Russian and Eurasian lan-
guages, Hindi/Urdu, Korean, and Persian. Lan-
guage learning is offered to undergraduates as
an integral part of their majors, allowing them
to take general education or core classes in their
majors—chemistry, business, or political science,
for example—in the foreign language. Foreign
language learning becomes integral to the stu-
dents’ education as they speak, read, write, and
listen to the language in the context of their
broader academic interests. Programs include rig-
orous language study at home, content courses
taught in the target language, and an articulated
program of at least 1 year overseas that includes
an internship and/or community service expe-
rience, designed to ensure that the student can
negotiate academic and workplace culture and
solidify professional-level language skills. In this
new model, language teachers can play a greater
role in internationalizing the curriculum and the
campus, preparing graduates to succeed as pro-
fessionals operating in the language in which they
have achieved proficiency.
Programs such as The Language Flagship sug-
gest expanded roles for language professors to
operate at the intersection of language study,
education abroad, and other international cul-
tural experiences. Language teachers can en-
gage in building innovative models on their
campuses that combine language learning with
international experiences. They can seek to de-
velop other programs that incorporate language
study on the home campus with study abroad
opportunities. They can also help develop in-
novative partnerships with overseas institutions.
These can range from joint- and dual-degree
programs to smaller, targeted linkages that offer
distance learning or other technologically facili-
tated means to study languages and cultures and
interact with students and professors overseas.
611
Language teachers can also play a key role in
encouraging students to take part in the wide va-
riety of study abroad programs that is now avail-
able to students, through their home campuses
or through a range of other university or private
providers or consortia. They can work to increase
the number and diversity of American students
who go abroad, by helping them to seek out and
apply for funding opportunities such as the U.S.
Department of State’s Benjamin A. Gilman Inter-
national Scholarship Program, which offers schol-
arships for students with financial need who have
been traditionally underrepresented in education
abroad. More than 80% of Gilman Scholarship re-
cipients study a language overseas. Additionally,
the State Department’s Critical Language Schol-
arships, which provide opportunities for overseas
language study in 12 countries during the sum-
mer, are another important resource.
Language teachers can encourage study in lan-
guages and geographic locations that are of grow-
ing strategic importance to the United States and
to the students’ future careers. The National Se-
curity Education Program’s David L. Boren Schol-
arships and Fellowships provide funding for U.S.
undergraduates and graduate students to spend
significant time overseas studying less commonly
taught languages in parts of the world that most
Americans do not visit. Whereas less than 5% of
U.S. students abroad go for a full academic year,
more than 70% of Boren Scholars do so. Time
abroad directly affects the language proficiency
level one achieves. Ten years of language testing
demonstrates that Boren Scholars are nearly twice
as likely to achieve advanced-level proficiency if
they study abroad for 6 months or more than they
are if they only study abroad for 3 months.
Faculty can also play a critical role in engag-
ing study abroad students in continued language
study and cultural exploration after their return
to their home campus. Language faculty are well
positioned to encourage students and campus pol-
icymakers to ensure that study abroad of any du-
ration is integrated into the students’ longer term
academic goals and curricula. Neither language
learning nor study abroad should occur as stand-
alone experiences, and language departments
should be looking closely at ways to integrate these
experiences with the goal of developing multi-
faceted global citizens.
For students who can only go abroad for a
short-term experience—or who cannot go abroad
at all for one reason or another—innovative lan-
guage teaching and cultural experiences on cam-
pus can play a critical role in gaining exposure to
other cultures. The Fulbright Foreign Language
612
Teaching Assistant (FLTA) Program, in particular,
offers opportunities for students to interact with
native language speakers on their own campuses.
The FLTA program enables institutions to expand
or enhance their foreign language offerings. In
academic year 2009–2010, more than 400 FLTAs
will live, study, and teach at American colleges and
universities all across the United States. Language
faculty on these campuses can play a key role in
assisting student teachers to assimilate into their
campus and community and in mentoring novice
teachers, facilitating the exchange of knowledge
and ideas between these young teaching profes-
sionals and their students.
The teaching assistants who participate in this
program have the chance to learn American
teaching methodologies that can be implemented
in their language teaching in their home coun-
tries. They also have a valuable opportunity to ex-
perience the American way of life firsthand, using
and improving their English language skills daily.
The language teachers at U.S. colleges and uni-
versities that host these teaching assistants from
more than 40 countries play an important role in
helping them to become truly global citizens and
contribute to mutual understanding.
Internationalization of Universities: Paradoxes and Responsibilities
RYUKO KUBOTA, The University of British Columbia
As globalization advances, internationalization
is becoming an important initiative for many uni-
versities around the world. Although the 2008
report by the American Council on Education
(ACE) stated that internationalization still re-
mains a low priority in many U.S. universities
(Green, Luu, & Burris, 2008), my experience as
a faculty member was the opposite. From 1995 to
2008, the U.S. research university where I taught
engaged in such activities as revising its curricu-
lum, increasing the number of students partici-
pating in study abroad, and upgrading facilities
to showcase global education. At my current in-
stitution in Canada, internationalization is also a
major initiative to be implemented through aca-
demic integration of global issues and raising the
university’s international profile by increasing in-
ternational student enrollment.
An integral aspect of internationalizing higher
education is developing language and cultural
competency. In reanalyzing the 2003 ACE data
reported in Mapping Internationalization on U.S.
Campuses, Green (2005) presented an index for
The Modern Language Journal 93 (2009)
The recent financial crisis has demonstrated
once again just how interconnected our world is.
In the belief that global problems need the global
exchange of knowledge to forge solutions, the in-
stitute where I am president remains deeply com-
mitted to promoting international dialogue and
collaboration. Sponsored by government agen-
cies, foundations, and corporations, IIE programs
enable future leaders from all backgrounds and
in all sectors to gain access to world-class educa-
tion and international experiences that will help
prepare them to be global citizens. These pro-
grams are especially reaching out to minority and
marginalized individuals in the United States and
overseas to involve more people than ever before.
We welcome the active participation of foreign
language professionals across the country in this
important endeavor.
REFERENCE
Barzun, J. (2000). From dawn to decadence: 500 years of
Western cultural life, 1500 to the present. New York:
HarperCollins.
measuring the level of internationalization of re-
search universities. Whereas the benchmarks for
academic offerings include questions related to
foreign language learning, such as whether a for-
eign language is required for admissions and grad-
uation, how many foreign languages are offered,
and whether academic credits are granted for
study abroad, there is no mention about the de-
gree to which academic support is provided to in-
ternational students according to their linguistic
and cultural needs.1
Insufficient attention to academic English lan-
guage support for international students is indeed
what I witnessed in working on two different cam-
puses that strive to internationalize education.
I argue that this gap signifies the paradoxes of
the current internationalization initiatives that
are heavily influenced by market-driven neolib-
eral and neocolonial politics supporting free
trade in services, competition, and Anglo domi-
nance of language, culture, and academic knowl-
edge, which ultimately hinders the development
of translingual and transcultural competency in
Perspectives
foreign languages for English-speaking students
promoted by the 2007 report by the Modern Lan-
guage Association (MLA Ad hoc Committee on
Foreign Languages, 2007). This essay surveys the
political and economic contexts of international-
ization of higher education and discusses para-
doxes and responsibilities posed to foreign lan-
guage professionals.
POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC FACETS
OF INTERNATIONALIZATION
In exploring issues of internationalizing higher
education, two questions arise: Why do we need
to internationalize higher education and how has
the current initiative come into being? To the
former question, de Wit (2001) offered four ra-
tionales: political, economic, academic, and so-
cial/cultural (see also Bassett, 2008). Of the four
rationales, the latter two would have direct rel-
evance to foreign language learning; obviously,
it is assumed that learning a language broad-
ens students’ intellectual horizons and fosters an
understanding of diverse cultures and societies.
Conversely, the first two rationales seem less trans-
parent. The economic dimension, especially the
recent marketization of higher education and a
neoliberal competitive paradigm, is pertinent to
the discussion of how the current internationaliza-
tion initiatives have developed. Related to the eco-
nomic dimension are emerging rationales, such as
international branding and income generation,
at both institutional and national levels (Knight,
2008).
One contentious issue since the early 2000s has
been the General Agreement on Trade in Services
(GATS), an initiative of the World Trade Organi-
zation to diminish trade barriers of service indus-
tries, including higher education, which poten-
tially increases academic mobility by allowing insti-
tutions to operate their educational services over-
seas through distance education, offshore cam-
puses, or faculty traveling abroad (Bassett, 2008;
Knight, 2008). Most professional organizations of
higher education in the United States are against
GATS, fearing increased federal control (because
the trade agreements are made at the federal
level) and diminished quality assurance. However,
this does not mean that they are against interna-
tional trade in services. In 2001, ACE and the
Council for Higher Education Accreditation—
two major organizations in the United States—as
well as the Association of Universities and Col-
leges of Canada and the European University As-
sociation signed the Joint Declaration on Higher
Education and the General Agreement on Trade
613
in Services,2 in which they made a commitment to
reduce obstacles to international trade in higher
education, not by means of GATS but through
improving communication and quality through
institutional agreements. One of these commit-
ments is internationalization of higher education,
including recruiting international students, pro-
moting faculty and student exchanges, and coop-
erating in research.
Despite these commitments, the events of 9/11
negatively affected the enrollment of interna-
tional students in American universities. Fearing
the negative impact on national interests, the
U.S. government invited 120 college leaders to
a summit in 2006 in which new scholarship ini-
tiatives and relaxation of visa restrictions were an-
nounced. For the first time, international student
mobility was identified at the federal level as an
area of intense competition with the United King-
dom, Australia, and Canada, which could pose a
threat to the economic and political interests of
the United States (Gürüz, 2008).
This brief overview suggests that the increased
emphasis on internationalizing higher education
in the past decade has been influenced consider-
ably by a global trend toward expanding trade in
services and increasing international competition
for human resources in a knowledge economy.
The importance of internationalization is indeed
increasingly discussed in economic terms. Stu-
dent mobility and language learning are caught in
this trend. For instance, in advocating for increas-
ing the number of international students in the
United States, the Association of International Ed-
ucators (NAFSA) discussed the economic benefits
that tuition fees and living expenses paid by inter-
national students bring to the U.S. economy—
approximately $15.54 billion during the 2007–
2008 academic year.3 Additionally, advocates of
foreign language learning typically refer to per-
sonal and broader economic benefits, such as
obtaining a better job and raising local business
profits (Kubota, 2006). Although one can hardly
escape economic realities in the capitalist world,
a heavy focus on economic ends obscures the ed-
ucational significance and sociocultural meaning
of language learning.
Furthermore, neoliberal global competition
implies that there will inevitably be a winner and
a loser. Yet, the players in the competition are
not on an equal playing field in the first place.
Rather, they are positioned hierarchically in the
economic, political, racial, cultural, and linguis-
tic relations of power in the globalized world,
which create “traps of recolonization” (Mok, 2007,
p. 438). Although internationalization of higher
614
education sounds amicable to advocacy of foreign
language learning, these global conditions create
serious paradoxes.
PARADOX ONE
The first paradox stems from the undeniable
fact that English already is the dominant language
in various sectors in the world and is spread-
ing that dominance even further, as evidenced
in higher education. This poses a challenge for
advocating foreign language learning and inter-
nationalization efforts in general. Coupled with
intensified competition for international rank-
ing of universities, academics outside the English-
speaking world are ever more pressed to publish
in high-impact English language journals, rather
than publishing in local languages or national
venues (Mok, 2007). Although the MLA report
mentioned the decline of non-English research
sources in citation indexes as limiting American
students’ intellectual engagement in foreign lan-
guages, this trend is simultaneously deeply im-
plicated in the global spread of English and
the neocolonial hegemony of an Anglo-oriented
knowledge economy. Additionally, English, as an
international language, is increasingly becoming
the medium of instruction for many, if not all,
courses in those countries (de Wit, 2001; Mok,
2007). Just as globalization is often associated
with Americanization, the internationalization of
higher education globally has intensified the ho-
mogenization of academic culture through Anglo-
based academic standards and ideologies (Knight,
2008; Mok, 2007).
This creates a challenge for encouraging
English-speaking students to learn foreign lan-
guages through study abroad, not to mention the
fact that one quarter of American students already
choose English-speaking countries as their desti-
nation for study abroad.4 Although the MLA re-
port envisioned that American students will “func-
tion as informed and capable interlocutors with
educated native speakers in the target language,”
those educated native speakers are often English-
speaking global elites. What kind of cultural and
linguistic experiences would English-speaking stu-
dents gain from interacting with these individu-
als? How should they be prepared to negotiate
the linguistic repertoires and cultural identities of
the interlocutors who are likely to be influenced
by Anglo-American hegemony?
Furthermore, it is striking that the MLA report
paralleled the neoliberal market-driven world-
view that neglects the world’s underprivileged
populations. If we envision bettering the global
community by critically addressing economic,
The Modern Language Journal 93 (2009)
racial, ethnic, and linguistic inequalities, would
it not be important to develop strategies to com-
municate with undereducated people in the target
society? At home, those who participate in study
abroad are still predominantly White students.
Whereas students of color made up of 29% of
all students on America’s campuses in 2006,5 they
made up only 18% of all U.S. students who stud-
ied abroad.6 Under the internationalization ini-
tiative, would foreign language learning continue
to help the racially and economically privileged
accumulate a larger amount of cultural capital?
How does the practice of exporting Whiteness via
study abroad impact the racial and cultural poli-
tics of the world?
PARADOX TWO
The dominance of English affects not only
native English-speaking students but also interna-
tional students in English-speaking countries. Ac-
cording to my observations from teaching at two
research universities, there is an elitist assump-
tion that international students should already
come with perfect English language proficiency
and that the university has little obligation to
further support their academic development in
their second language. Foreign language profes-
sionals would agree that language learning is a
long-term process and that continuous language-
focused development is beneficial, as the MLA
report promoted. The sink-or-swim situation that
international students confront in academic con-
tent courses is exactly what the report criticized.
Yet, the prevalent view is that English language
support is remedial rather than developmental,
that experiencing foreignness abroad is more valu-
able than engaging in diversity at home, and that
foreign language learning for socioeconomically
privileged monolingual English speakers is to be
commended, whereas English language learning
for international or bilingual students is no more
than expected, all of which reflect elitist double
standards (Kubota & Abels, 2006).
The underlying assumption is that academic in-
ternationalization is intended to benefit already
privileged domestic students only, which fits the
current economics-based discourse of the inter-
nationalization of higher education. More specifi-
cally, this discourse reduces the full-tuition-paying
international students to commodities that are ex-
ploited to benefit the university financially and to
increase its international branding and profile.
Conversely, institutions in non-English-speaking
countries typically provide American students, for
instance, with educational services by creating aca-
demic programs to cater to their needs. Trade in
Perspectives
educational services for internationalization nei-
ther presumes nor produces equal partnerships—
the principle of competition under a neoliberal
economic paradigm clearly contradicts an equal
share of power as a result of the trade. All of
these observations indicate that the internation-
alization of higher education may actually be pro-
moting academic neocolonization both at home
and abroad.
RESPONSIBILITIES
In referring to the free trade in academic mo-
bility, Altbach and Knight (2007) commented,
“Current thinking sees international higher edu-
cation as a commodity to be freely traded and sees
higher education as a private good, not a public
responsibility” (p. 291). If foreign language de-
partments are only concerned with private goods,
they might continue to improve and expand aca-
demic offerings and study abroad experiences.
After all, they already exhibit a visible profile
in internationalizing efforts. However, if they are
concerned with public responsibility at both do-
mestic and global levels, they might critically re-
flect on the political and economic dimensions
of internationalization and examine how they are
implicated in unequal relations of power among
languages and cultures and how they may affect
language ideologies, linguistic expectations, and
educational practices both domestically and inter-
nationally. Foreign language professionals might
examine the academic, linguistic, and cultural ex-
periences of both domestic and international stu-
dents within and beyond their academic unit and
ask whether any gap exists in the institutional sup-
port for academic development, how the gap can
be narrowed, and how translingual and transcul-
tural learning can be promoted across diverse lin-
guistic and cultural groups on campus.
Fostering translingual and transcultural compe-
tence is an integral part of the academic and so-
cial/cultural dimensions of internationalization.
Yet, in the current paradigm, these dimensions
may not carry the same weight as economic and
political rationales (Knight, 2008). The foreign
language professional community exists within a
larger community of higher education that is in-
creasingly pursuing an economic interest of in-
come generation by bringing in diverse students
from abroad. Foreign language professionals are
confronted with the question of whether they can
afford to simply promote the translingual and
transcultural competence of domestic students
without taking into consideration the political and
economic power dynamics in the globalized world
615
that are transforming cultural, linguistic, and aca-
demic practices. It is necessary for the foreign lan-
guage professional community to ask whether it
should only contribute to fulfilling institutional
and national interests in accumulating economic
and symbolic capital, or whether it should take on
responsibility for creating a more morally attuned
global and local—or glocal —society by removing
barriers to economic, racial, ethnic, cultural, and
linguistic equalities.
NOTES
1 The more recent ACE survey on internationaliza-
tion of various types of institutions of higher education
does include a question about individual academic sup-
port for international students (70% of the institutions
answered in the positive; Green et al., 2008).
2 See http://www.aucc.ca/_pdf/english/statements/
2001/gats_10_25_e.pdf.
3 See http : / / www . nafsa . org / public _ policy. sec/
international_education_1/eis_2008.
4 See http://opendoors.iienetwork.org/?p=131556.
5 See http : / / www . acenet . edu / AM / Template . cfm ?
Section = Search & section = Publications2 & template =/
CM/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentFileID=5786.
6 See http://opendoors.iienetwork.org/?p=131562.
REFERENCES
Altbach, P. G., & Knight, J. (2007). The international-
ization of higher education: Motivations and real-
ities. Journal of Studies in International Education,
11, 290–305.
Bassett, R. M. (2008). The WTO and the university: Global-
ization, GATS, and American higher education. New
York: Routledge.
de Wit, H. (2001). Internationalization of higher education
in the United States of America and Europe. Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press.
Green, M. F. (2005). Measuring internationalization at
research universities. Washington, DC: American
Council on Education.
Green, M. F., Luu, D., & Burris, B. (2008). Mapping in-
ternationalization on U.S. campuses: 2008 edition.
Washington, DC: American Council on Educa-
tion.
Gürüz, K. (2008). Higher education and international stu-
dent mobility in the global knowledge economy. Albany:
State University of New York Press.
Knight, J. (2008). Higher education in turmoil: The chang-
ing world of internationalization. Rotterdam, The
Netherlands: Sense Publishers.
Kubota, R. (2006). Teaching second languages for na-
tional security purposes: A case of post 9/11 USA.
In J. Edge (Ed.), (Re-)Locating TESOL in an age of
empire (pp. 119–138). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan.
616
Kubota, R., & Abels, K. (2006). Improving institu-
tional ESL/EAP support for international stu-
dents: Seeking the promised land. In P. K. Mat-
suda, C. Ortmeier-Hooper, & X. You (Eds.), Politics
of second language writing: In search of the promised
land (pp. 75–93). West Lafayette, IN: Parlor
Press.
Of Course They Want Us at the Curriculum Internationalization Table
JAMES N. GEHLHAR, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC
Virtually every educational institution in virtu-
ally every land nowadays proudly declares its un-
shakable commitment to the internationalization
of its curriculum and, thereby, to the preparation
of its graduating seniors for significant, seamless
participation in a world of ever-fuzzier borders.
The publicly stated goals of my own educational
institution, where I serve as Associate Vice Chan-
cellor for International Affairs, are representative
of many across the land that strive to position their
graduates well to compete successfully in the com-
plex marketplaces of today’s world.
Given that achieving a firm, working grasp of
a second, or even third, language would provide
the obvious foundation for anyone hoping to ac-
quire a true understanding of the world beyond—
or even within—our borders, the pivotal role of
language departments in shaping and informing
campuswide curricular internationalization must
certainly be obvious to all.
However, is such a notion indeed obvious to
all? Do language department chairs and faculty
routinely (and with great consternation) discover
that their email inboxes and their phone answer-
ing devices are yet again clogged with requests
from colleagues across their institution’s disci-
plinary spectrum for counsel about how best to
infuse or incorporate the world at large into their
courses and curricula? More to the point, do pro-
fessors in other units truly know any more about
their foreign languages department than that it
falls somewhere between “football” and “fraterni-
ties” in published directories? Do they realize, for
example, that Russian Prof. X on their very own
campus has won world renown for her research
into the 19th-century novel or that Italian Prof. Y
is constantly on the international lecture circuit
because of his groundbreaking studies of certain
aspects of medieval poetry?
That the landscape of colleges and universi-
ties consists of “silos” is by now a cliché, albeit
one that rings much too true. (Perhaps ivory
towers within ivory towers would be more apt.)
The Modern Language Journal 93 (2009)
MLA Ad hoc Committee on Foreign Languages. (2007).
Foreign languages and higher education: New
structures for a changed world. Profession 2007 ,
234–245.
Mok, K. H. (2007). Questing for internationalization of
universities in Asia: Critical reflections. Journal of
Studies in International Education, 11, 433–454.
Across the board, however, denizens of those aca-
demic bastionettes seem generally to be quite
happy with the situation, at least until tight bud-
gets or other outside forces threaten to impose
change.
Regardless of their academic discipline, all de-
partments and professors would do well to es-
tablish closer relationships with colleagues across
their entire campus and inform themselves about
who those colleagues are and what they are teach-
ing, researching, and thinking. Additionally, it
particularly behooves members of language de-
partments to do so. Language professors, whose
ramparts are oft perceived as being among the
most unassailable on any campus, have so very
much to offer their colleagues and institutions
in their internationalization efforts that a con-
certed effort on their part could produce very
far-reaching effects. It may indeed be in their own
best interest to do so. Faltering economies and
uncertain investments are currently forcing insti-
tutions across the globe to make uncomfortably
fundamental budgetary and personnel decisions,
even about which departments, programs, and
subjects will survive. Departments that have not
actively made their value to the academy known
or worked to establish recognition for their work
may not be seen as sufficiently relevant when im-
portant determinations are made.
I offer the following suggestions to language
departments and faculty wishing to ensure their
relevance and centrality to all deliberations about
how the curriculum is to be internationalized.
All of the suggestions demand establishing new
pathways beyond their offices and accustomed
classrooms.
1. Engage yourself fully in the life of the academy.
Despite already having an overwhelming sched-
ule both on campus and off, faculty must be
active—even indispensable—participants in com-
mittees, task forces, and events that involve peo-
ple from across campus. Doing so is always both
Perspectives
a great learning experience and a great outreach
opportunity. Faculty who thus venture out gain a
true appreciation for the rich fabric of individuals,
subjects, and ideas that make up a modern-day ed-
ucational institution. Further, anecdotal evidence
abounds that professors who do so enjoy much
greater long-term job satisfaction and feel more
connected to the institution as a whole.
2. Become a poster child for the word synergy. Ac-
tively seek opportunities to catalyze the classes, the
research, and the aspirations of others through-
out your institution, regardless of how esoteric
your own specific area of academic specialization
is or how far removed it may be from the un-
derstanding and appreciation of anyone else on
campus (perhaps even including your departmen-
tal colleagues down the hall). The broader the
range and variety of campus colleagues you have
(as in my first suggestion), the more interesting
and potentially rewarding are the results. All too
often, professors are reluctant to venture into aca-
demic relationships that take them beyond their
immediate (and widely lauded) expertise, ones
in which they may even be forced to ask foolish
questions.
3. Become a key to your institution’s achieving its
published mission statement. A perusal of curricula,
department by department across your campus,
should quickly bring possibilities to mind. Offer,
for example, to create language courses geared
toward students in specific majors—for example,
Engineering French, Business German—or those
embarking on specific projects. You could also as-
sist in organizing programs abroad for students
or faculty in a certain subject area, sometimes as-
sisted by outside funding such as Fulbright-Hays.
With subject-specific national accreditation bod-
ies increasingly pressing institutions to provide
students with more intercultural opportunities,
you could suggest capitalizing on the cultural ex-
pertise that you must have acquired over the years
and collaborate on the creation of classes about
cultures and peoples outside the United States
in conjunction with language instruction tailored
specifically to, say, education or business students.
To provide direct assistance to people on your
campus who are trying to internationalize them-
selves and their research, offer a late afternoon
noncredit class in your language expressly for fac-
ulty and staff. On these points a colleague has
opined that although languages must continue al-
ways to be taught and studied just for languages’
sake, they must in any successful institutional
internationalization effort also become adjunct
to the teaching and learning in all disciplines.
Language learning thus applied could become
617
integral to a host of subjects across campus rather
than just another listed requirement that students
and advisors must somehow complete.
I recognize that the activities suggested here
may, once again, require professors to stray quite
far both from their acknowledged academic ar-
eas of expertise and from their own long-held
ideals of what rigorous academic life must be.
As someone whose PhD research centered on a
stylistic analysis of the development of Persian
and Ottoman Turkish as literary languages, I fully
understand the possible reluctance of dedicated
academics to step out of their comfortable and
possibly lifelong niches. Broadening your hori-
zons and applying your expertise in new and un-
expectedly serendipitous ways, however, can prove
to be exceptionally stimulating and rewarding.
4. Involve yourself in your institution’s honors
college or honors program. Where better for lan-
guage departments to be actively, creatively, and
influentially engaged? Because they work with
an academy’s presumably best and brightest stu-
dents, honors colleges and honors programs tend
also to gather the best and brightest professors
on campus. An honors college, in its course of-
ferings and surrounding activities, ought also to
represent the ideal incarnation of the institution’s
mission statement and desire to internationalize.
5. Join scholarship selection committees or
education-abroad screening committees. As with
honors college work, serving on such committees
puts you and the foreign languages department
in touch with some of the most interesting
and engaged students and faculty. Of greatest
immediate interest to faculty wishing to interna-
tionalize the campus and curriculum would be
those committees that screen student applicants
for Fulbright, Boren, Rhodes, or Marshall awards,
or ones that interview students who are intending
a semester or year of enrollment in classes or
credit-bearing internships abroad. Additionally,
being on the selection committee for your insti-
tution’s premier, full-ride scholarships provides
you and your department with international-
izing influence over top students, faculty, and
administrators.
6. Teach courses that introduce first-year students
to your institution. The bridging courses that most
U.S. institutions currently offer to entering stu-
dents, designed to introduce them to campus op-
portunities and mores, afford language faculty
yet another internationalizing opportunity. Fac-
ulty generally may either lead one section (often
with a team-teaching option) for an entire term
or offer a cross-cultural component during single
sessions of sections led by other professors. Such
618
courses can situate you ideally to influence stu-
dents’ entire academic and career paths.
7. Get to know people in departments and offices
having “international” in their title. Such people
have their fingers on the international pulse of
your institution. They are already involved in
many aspects of internationalization and so could
be of great assistance in finding your best role in
curricular and other matters.
8. Finally (now that you have laid this ground-
work), join a committee or task force group actu-
ally working on internationalizing the curriculum.
Sound language acquisition by students must be
central to any educational institution’s interna-
Internationalization and Foreign Languages: The Resurgence of Interest in
Languages Across the Curriculum
CAROL A. KLEE, University of Minnesota
In the late 1980s, interest in internationalizing
the curriculum of postsecondary institutions in
the United States resulted in the development
of a new initiative—Languages Across the Cur-
riculum (LAC)—with support from a number
of funding agencies, including the National En-
dowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Fund
for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education
(FIPSE), the Center for International Education
at the Department of Education, and several pri-
vate foundations, such as the American Council
on Education. A variety of LAC models were devel-
oped, but all had as a primary goal the expansion
of opportunities for students to use their language
skills in courses outside language and literature
departments. Although LAC programs evolved at
a large number of postsecondary institutions dur-
ing the 1990s, once external funding ended many
LAC programs were forced to reduce the number
and types of courses offered, and other programs
ceased operating.
Recently, in response to what the Modern Lan-
guage Association (MLA, 2007) has described as
“the current language crisis that has occurred as
a result of 9/11” (p. 1), calls for the development
of LAC are once again prevalent. The MLA re-
port on Foreign Languages and Higher Educa-
tion (MLA, 2007) urged language departments
to respond to the interests and needs of students
from other fields, including students who have
studied abroad, by developing courses that ad-
dress more subject areas than are found in the
traditional major, including interdisciplinary col-
The Modern Language Journal 93 (2009)
tionalization efforts. Although language depart-
ments will always lead in the formidable task of
developing students’ understanding and appreci-
ation of the languages and literatures of peoples
within and beyond our borders, any genuine in-
fluence over campuswide curricular matters may
depend on the extent to which those depart-
ments and professors have succeeded in making
themselves truly relevant to the academic lives
of people and departments of every disciplinary
stripe. In the current climate of uncertainty, with
programs and budgets constantly under attack,
language departments ignore this at their own
peril.
laborative courses taught with faculty members
from other departments. The report noted that
such interdisciplinary courses are usually taught
in English but could include a credit-bearing
discussion session taught in the target language
(p. 5), one of the most common LAC models of
the 1990s.
In a recent presentation on “Future Directions
for Title VI and Fulbright-Hays Programs” William
Brustein (2009), Vice Provost for Global Strategies
and International Affairs at The Ohio State Uni-
versity, asserted that “foreign language prepara-
tion has to extend beyond students matriculating
in our departments of foreign languages and liter-
ature” (p. 10). Although he agreed with the MLA’s
recommendation of a broader and more coherent
curriculum that includes interdisciplinary courses
in alliance with other departments, he proposed
that the curriculum include courses in a variety
of other fields, such as engineering, economics,
and mathematics (p. 11)—that is, courses not nor-
mally taught within departments of languages and
literatures. To attain this goal, he recommended
that universities facilitate foreign language (FL)
training for faculty members in all disciplines and
create new LAC programs. He affirmed that Ti-
tle VI centers should have a major role in efforts
to promote the development of students’, as well
as faculty members’, proficiency in a second lan-
guage (L2). Bousquet (2008) has also noted that
Title VI centers “play a key role in innovative lan-
guage teaching and learning, through funding
of research, publications, instructional materials,
Perspectives
pedagogical training for LCTL [less commonly
taught languages] instructors, and intensive sum-
mer language institutes across the country” (p.
304) and provided a possible model for a collab-
orative, integrated curriculum.
Given the renewed interest in LAC, what lessons
have we learned from earlier efforts that might
guide new initiatives? What issues need to be con-
sidered by administrators interested in developing
such programs at their institutions?
First and foremost, the primary objectives of
LAC programs must be defined, taking into ac-
count specific institutional contexts. At some
institutions—for example, State University of New
York (SUNY)–Binghamton, which has a success-
ful Languages Across the Curriculum (LxC)
program—the primary objectives are to “provide
opportunities for students to make meaningful
use of (and enhance) their comprehension skills
in languages other than English [ . . . and] to in-
crease students’ understanding of the global net-
works that shape all cultures” (LxC Language
Resource Specialist application form). Students
in LxC-supported courses offered in English
complete LxC assignments in the L2 in place
of assignments in English and participate in
small group discussions led by international stu-
dents, called Language Resource Specialists. In-
formation on the program states that LxC “is
not a language-instruction program but rather
a course-content enrichment program” (LxC
Web site: http://lxc.binghamton.edu/FAQ.htm).
Likewise, programs at other institutions with one-
credit discussion modules in another language at-
tached to a course given in English make few, if
any, claims regarding students’ language develop-
ment in LAC modules given the limited amount
of time on task (i.e., generally a maximum of
10 pages of reading and a 1-hr discussion in the
L2 each week). Instead, the primary objective of
these programs is to demonstrate to undergradu-
ates who have completed at least four semesters of
FL study the benefits of using documents written
in the target language for the perspectives and
enhanced understanding they can provide of the
course content. The hope is that students’ expe-
riences in such courses will motivate them to seek
further opportunities to use and develop their tar-
get language skills. Other programs, most notably
those in which courses in a variety of disciplines
are delivered in an L2, require at least 3 years
of postsecondary language study. Generally, these
programs, such as the Foreign Language Immer-
sion Program at the University of Minnesota, focus
almost exclusively on content learning and very lit-
tle on the development of L2 competence. If one
619
of the objectives of these programs is to follow
MLA recommendations and produce “educated
speakers who have deep translingual and tran-
scultural competence” (MLA, 2007, p. 3), then
a better balance between content learning and
language learning is needed, a topic to which I
return below.
This leads to the next major issue: Who should
teach LAC courses and what type of preparation
should they receive? At small liberal arts colleges,
such as St. Olaf, Agnes Scott, and Goucher
College, pairs of faculty, one a specialist in a
discipline outside the department of languages
and literatures and the other a faculty member
specializing in the L2, co-teach LAC courses.
This format, which is mentioned in the MLA
report, provides students with cross-disciplinary
perspectives, but it is time-intensive for both
faculty members. At large public institutions,
resources for team teaching are scarcer and
discussion sections in the L2 are often led by
graduate teaching assistants rather than by fac-
ulty. Given the transient nature of the graduate
student population, ongoing teacher preparation
is necessary to ensure that the teaching assistants
know how to select appropriate L2 texts and
help language learners process texts effectively
in an L2. One of the most innovative programs
in this regard is found at the University of North
Carolina–Chapel Hill, which not only provides
ongoing teacher preparation in LAC, including
a graduate-level course on “Teaching Languages
Across the Curriculum,” but also offers a Graduate
Certificate in Languages Across the Curriculum
Instruction (http://www.unc.edu/areastudies/
degreeprograms/lac-graduate-certificate.html).
Some LAC models, notably the one described
by Brustein (2009), involve faculty from a vari-
ety of disciplines teaching in the L2. At the Uni-
versity of Minnesota, we have found that some
faculty members in departments outside of lan-
guages and literatures are quite adept in making
the curricular and instructional adaptations nec-
essary to teach in an L2, whereas others either be-
come frustrated with the proficiency levels of the
students or are not willing to make instructional
adjustments for L2 learners. For programs to be
effective, ongoing faculty development efforts are
needed, and the additional time needed to de-
velop courses in the L2 must be compensated.
There is a variety of models available for such pro-
grams, primarily from the field of English as a Sec-
ond Language. For example, at California State
University–Los Angeles, an institution in which
70% of freshmen are nonnative English speakers
and 82% place in developmental English, Snow
620
and her colleagues developed the “Learning En-
glish for Academic Purposes” program (Snow &
Kamhi-Stein, 1993), which included training for
faculty to guide them in introducing special in-
structional techniques to improve general edu-
cation courses with the aim of helping students
master both the course content and academic
English.
Languages Across the Curriculum programs
that have been successful have intellectual institu-
tional homes, often in a Title VI Center at larger
institutions, which
facilitates maintaining other components important
for continued success: on-going program administra-
tion, stable staffing and course rotations, institutional-
ization of incentives and recognition for participation
for both faculty and students, and access to on-going
financial support and some degree of protection in
times of institutional budget-cutting. (Klee & Barnes-
Karol, 2006, p. 33)
The other characteristic of successful programs is
the attention they give to the match between stu-
dent language proficiency and program require-
ments (Klee & Barnes-Karol, p. 33).
Several challenges need to be resolved as new
models of LAC are instituted in the coming years.
First and foremost, more attention is needed to
help students develop their language skills while
they learn content, which has not been a fo-
cus of most LAC programs and is an issue with
which most departments of languages and litera-
tures continue to grapple. One model to support
advanced language development in conjunction
with LAC courses is the adjunct model developed
at the University of Ottawa, where L2 speakers
of French can take courses such as Introduction
à la psychologie, L’histoire du Canada depuis les
découvertes, or La sociologie de la famille, with native
French speakers, along with a specially tailored
French language course. Wesche (2000) noted
that the “adjunct language courses are organized
around the language content and students’ func-
tional language needs in the discipline course
(e.g., specialized terminology and written genres,
strategies for understanding lectures, practice in
researching and writing term papers [in the L2])”
(p. 202). This is the same model used in English
as a second language programs for immigrants
such as the Commanding English Program in the
General College at the University of Minnesota
(Murie & Fitzpatrick, 2009). This type of model
does not require that specialists in disciplines out-
side of the department of language and literatures
focus on language development, which is beyond
their expertise, but rather places that responsibil-
The Modern Language Journal 93 (2009)
ity on applied linguists, who have the academic
expertise to develop adjunct courses.
The other major challenge for LAC is how to
make courses in a wide variety of disciplines avail-
able to learners of LCTLs. Tom Adams, a retired
Project Director of the NEH, has noted that most
of the LAC success stories across the nation are for
Spanish, a more commonly taught language with
relatively robust enrollments at all proficiency lev-
els (personal communication, June 1, 2006). Be-
cause enrollments in LCTLs tend to be lower and,
as a result, LAC sections offered in LCTLs of-
ten do not draw sufficient numbers of students,
new solutions are needed to provide LCTL stu-
dents with LAC opportunities. Fortunately, new
technologies have emerged that can make LAC
courses more viable in spite of small enrollments.
Two developments in particular are encouraging
in this regard.
First, the Yale Center for Language Study has
been developing software called CRAFT (Com-
panion for Reading Authentic Foreign Texts;
Gano & Garrett, 2005) that provides support for
academic material in an L2 through the applica-
tion of listening and interactive tools to this new
context. In reading a history text, for example, as
students move from page to page in the reading,
a CRAFT toolbar remains open and accessible to
provide them with vocabulary, definitions or visu-
als, translations of idioms, or explanations of diffi-
cult syntactic constructions they encounter in the
reading. This software allows faculty to develop
online reading materials for LCTLs that will allow
self-study or small-group study, much in the way
it is done at SUNY–Binghamton, to supplement
work in an English-language disciplinary course.
Languages Across the Curriculum can also ben-
efit from distance learning courses, particularly
the LCTLs, where such courses can be transmit-
ted to several different institutions. Students in
these courses can engage in activities with online
partners, in synchronous and asynchronous en-
vironments, using the FL in negotiating and ex-
changing information to complete assignments.
Students at different institutions can view and
discuss course readings and/or films and do se-
lected interactive course activities together. An-
other model is used at Ohio State’s Chinese
Flagship program, where each Chinese language
learner is paired with a Chinese native-language
mentor who is an expert in his or her chosen field
of study: business, political science, geography, or
engineering. The two partners meet weekly for a
year, as the learner does background research to
create two Chinese language presentations about
topics in his or her field. These mentors must
Perspectives
be trained to teach the Chinese language along
with academic content, but this model has been
extraordinarily successful.
For LAC programs to function effectively, ap-
plied linguists are needed in departments of
language and literature to guide these efforts.
Brustein (2009) has correctly noted that language
and literature departments at large research insti-
tutions have frequently resisted efforts to allocate
tenure-line positions to applied linguists, as the
national reputation of these departments corre-
lates primarily with research publications on lit-
erary topics. However, the input and guidance of
applied linguists is essential to address the lan-
guage learning needs of advanced students, to
provide in-service training for faculty and grad-
uate students interested in LAC, and to develop
software and curricula to deliver distance learn-
ing, content-based instruction in LCTLs. As post-
secondary institutions increasingly recognize that
language study is essential to the internation-
alization of higher education, LAC programs—
when thoughtfully designed, implemented, and
supported—can provide students with increased
opportunities for L2 development as well as al-
lowing for deepened understanding of other
disciplines.
REFERENCES
Bousquet, G. (2008). A model for interdisciplinary col-
laboration. Modern Language Journal, 92, 304–306.
Brustein, W. (2009, March). Future directions for Title
VI and Fulbright-Hays programs: Current status
Language Learning and the Social Sciences
TRACY B. STRONG, University of California, San Diego
I write not as a member of a foreign language
department but as a political scientist much of
whose work deals with material in “foreign” lan-
guages, primarily French and German. Such con-
cerns are not necessarily true only of my subfield
(political philosophy) but can also be the case
for those who study comparative government and
international relations. I am thus first concerned
with this issue as it affects the social sciences. I also
write as the past Study Center Director of a Uni-
versity of California Education Abroad Program
in France (Lyon and Grenoble, to be precise).
The situation in relation to the social sciences
is, alas, not good and, in my experience, getting
worse. I do not need to remind readers that when
621
and new directions. Paper presented at Title VI
50th Anniversary Conference, Washington DC.
Gano, B., & Garrett, N. (2005). Technology and the
teaching of “foreign languages across the cur-
riculum.” In R. Jourdenais & S. Springer (Eds.),
Content, tasks and projects in the language class-
room: 2004 conference proceedings (pp. 115–121).
Monterey, CA: Monterey Institute of International
Studies.
Klee, C. A., & Barnes-Karol, G. (2006). A content-based
approach to Spanish language study: Foreign lan-
guages across the curriculum. In B. Lafford & R.
Salaberry (Eds.), Spanish second language acquisi-
tion: State of the art of application (pp. 23–38). Wash-
ington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
MLA (Modern Language Association Ad Hoc Commit-
tee on Foreign Languages). (2007). Foreign lan-
guages and higher education: New structures for
a changed world. Retrieved on June 2, 2009, from
http://www.mla.org/flreport.
Murie, R., & Fitzpatrick, R. (2009). Situating language
and academic literacy development into a cur-
riculum of first-year college courses for genera-
tion 1.5. In M. Roberge, M. Siegal, & L. Harklau,
(Eds.), Generation 1.5 in college composition: Theory,
research, and pedagogy (pp. 153–169). New York:
Routledge.
Snow, M. A., & Kamhi-Stein, L. D. (2002). Teaching
and learning academic literacy through Project
LEAP. In J. Crandall & D. Kaufman (Eds.), Content-
based instruction in higher education settings (pp.
169–181). Alexandria, VA: Teachers of English to
Speakers of Other Languages.
Wesche, M. B. (2000). A Canadian perspective: Second
language teaching and learning in the university.
In J. W. Rosenthal (Ed.), Handbook of undergradu-
ate second language education (pp. 187–208). Mah-
wah, NJ: Erlbaum.
I was in graduate school, we had to walk through
three miles of snow to get to class . . . but in point
of fact all graduate students in political science
were required to learn two foreign languages, re-
gardless of their field inside political science.
The reasons for this were several. In political
philosophy, it seemed relatively clear that one
could not adequately deal with, say, Rousseau un-
less one could read him in French. In addition,
there was an expectation that one would have mas-
tered at least some part of the relevant secondary
literature in other languages. This was especially
important given the fact that the translation of
secondary texts into English from other languages
remains far less prevalent than it is in, say, France.
622
More importantly, when I was in graduate school,
one could not really be allowed to study the poli-
tics of, say, China, without both reading and con-
versational skills in Chinese.
The situation began to change shortly after I
left graduate school. It changed in particular in
direct relation to the rise of statistical and ratio-
nal choice methods in the social sciences. I take
them separately. Rational choice is premised on
the claim that the nature of choice is roughly the
same anywhere—that a greengrocer from Wiscon-
sin can be understood to make choices in roughly
the same manner as a peasant in Vietnam.
Rational choice is not without interest and is too
often rejected on the basis of what I would think
simply to be ideological aversion. For picture this:
There is a peasant who owns a small plot of land
down by the river; he has another on a hill, half
a day’s walk away that he got from his deceased
brother; he has a third on the edge of the forest;
he lives on a fourth on the outskirts of his ances-
tral village. Why this apparently highly inefficient
distribution of land? A nonrational choice (some
called it “moral economy”) interpretation would
be that these pieces of land are morally and per-
sonally significant to him and to his society. This
distribution prevents any one from emerging as
preeminent and keeps social relations on an even
keel. Against this, the rational choice answer is
“Nonsense. No need for that cultural mystifica-
tion. The reason is just insurance.”
The rational choice answer is not stupid. How-
ever, it simply does not require that one speak or
read, say, Vietnamese to be able to claim to under-
stand (or explain) the behavior of peasants in the
circumstances described earlier. Additionally, as
these methods developed and moved, first with a
nose, then a head, now most of the body, into the
social science tent, language acquisition became
less and less necessary. Older approaches are now
often derided as “area studies,” a practice deemed
obviously “unscientific” in that “science” (suppos-
edly) requires the development of laws that are
universal in scope. I should note that there were
resistances to these developments: Alasdair Mac-
Intyre (a philosopher and sometime political sci-
entist with five languages) wrote a prescient essay
(1972) in which he answered “no” to the question
“Is a Science of Comparative Politics Possible?”
But he blew in the wind.
The second development reinforced the first.
The development and increasingly widespread
use of sophisticated mathematical models most of-
ten drawn from microeconomics (itself presumed
a science on the notion of the rationality of agency
as revealed in choices), when coupled with and
The Modern Language Journal 93 (2009)
abetted by the exponential growth of computing
power, led to the rise of very extensive databases
(e.g., all votes, on all issues, over the history of
the U.S. Congress). It is thus increasingly the case
that a PhD student can take one or another of
the preexisting massive databases, develop a so-
phisticated model relating independent variables
(e.g., the level of education) to dependent vari-
ables (e.g., voting patterns), run the data through
the model varying the independent variable, and
come up with an “explanation” of the dependent
variable (e.g., “A college degree accounts for X%
of the variance in voting on the question of same-
sex marriage”). It is no longer unusual for some-
one with no knowledge of, say, Japanese to apply a
model to a dataset about Japan and publish an ar-
ticle comparing a Japanese political question with
an American one. Somewhat problematically, if
“democracy” is one of the variables, then for sta-
tistical purposes it has a single status: A country ei-
ther is “democratic” or not as far as the database is
concerned; that “democratic” might mean some-
thing very different in country X than in country Y
is irrelevant, as this is simply a coding matter. Most
often, for purposes of coding, “democratic” would
mean something like “contested elections and a
more or less free press.” Contemporary statistical
techniques permit increasingly complex and so-
phisticated applications.
Statistics are said to be “skills” courses (al-
though with the rise of what is called “formal
theory,” they increasingly form a field of their
own inside social science). Statistics are, or are
thought to be, language-neutral. However, they
also take time to learn. Among other required
courses, my department, for instance, requires of
all its graduate students a course premised on the
belief that there are methods common to all sub-
fields, a course in research design (focusing on
dependent and independent variables), a course
in statistical methods of a moderately advanced
kind (if you have not had statistics before, you
would have trouble jumping into it), and a course
in game theory (rational choice modeling). The
study of most fields in political science requires
additional, more advanced versions of some of
the above.
The consequence of this is that there is no time
for languages. Accordingly, social science depart-
ments across the country have often reduced or
eliminated their language requirement. Students
still sometimes take languages but less or nothing
is required. The graduate school I attended many
years ago now requires statistics as well as com-
petence in one language (where “competence” is
defined as the ability to translate “approximately
Perspectives
750 words of a political text in one hour with
the aid of a dictionary”). Language is now con-
ceived of as a skill, like learning to do multiple
regressions. Another major graduate school re-
quires one language and 1 year of statistics; by pe-
tition, however, students may take two languages
and no statistics or 2 years of statistics and no lan-
guage; a third major school has, since 2001, no
language requirement whatsoever but does have
an “Introduction to Data Analysis” requirement
for all. My own present institution has no language
requirement.
The decline in language acquisition in social
science is thus a consequence of changes in what
counts as “cutting edge” in the discipline—and no
department wants to be left behind.
To this I must add that it is the case, of course,
that one can require of an individual student that
he or she learn a foreign language: “You cannot
write a thesis on Carl Schmitt without learning
German” or “You can’t write about the favelas
without learning Portuguese” (each said severely).
Students do this, but on an individual basis; lan-
guage learning is skill acquisition, not part of an
education or what was once called a formation.
Given, however, the general thinness of language
instruction in undergraduate and high school set-
tings (alas, there is still not much political the-
ory that requires Spanish), for most this means
starting from scratch, which, given 2 years to
comprehensive exams, adds to the pressure and
tends to turn students away from topics with such
requirements.
Additionally, at UCSD we may have a particular
situation in that the first 2 years of all living lan-
guages are taught by the Linguistics Department
(and are thus taught by native speakers mostly em-
ployed as lecturers). In practice, this has proved
difficult for academic needs, especially those of
graduate students, as the courses are mainly fo-
cused on usefulness for living in the country. Thus,
one learns “dove la stazione dei treni?” but not how
to read Machiavelli, nor a commentary on Nor-
berto Bobbio. I have great respect for our Lin-
guistics Department, but the fact of the matter is
that it is interested in linguistics and not literature.
As faculty slots are awarded in great part on the
basis of undergraduate enrollments (despite what
I say later, undergraduates do take some language
courses), it is in the interest of the Linguistics De-
partment to retain control over these introductory
courses. The consequence, however, is that enroll-
ments in taught-in-the-language upper level and
graduate courses in the Literature Department
are very low, and, consequently, the departmen-
tal clout necessary to maintain low-enrollment
623
courses and to add additional faculty in each lan-
guage division is limited. With few (and fewer)
faculty, come fewer students. There are now, I be-
lieve, no graduate students in German.
Thus, the situation for graduate students in so-
cial science is bad and likely to get worse. On the
undergraduate level, the situation is not much
better. UCSD is organized into colleges, each with
different requirements. Two of them require four
quarters (less than a year and a half, which can be
taken Pass/Fail) of a language or the passing of
any of a number of standard exams (e.g., SAT II
with a 700). Four others have no requirement at
all. Put bluntly, with a lack of preparation in high
school, fairly extensive general education require-
ments and demanding major requirements, and
a lack of perceived need, language instruction is
not at the top of anyone’s list. Students are often
“urged” to take languages, but time is short and
demands are many.
The one bright spot in my experience was the
UC Education Abroad Program. I turn here to
my experience as Study Center Director. The pro-
gram I directed was an “immersion” program.
Students had had 2 years of French. When they
arrived, they found their own apartments (we
helped with lists); they lived on their own; they
took regular courses at the Université de Lyon or
the Université de Grenoble and/or the Institut
d’Etudes Politiques in French; we spoke to them
only in French and likewise accepted answers only
in French. At the end of a year, most of them were
fluent in French, could write in French, got into
trouble, got out of trouble, fell in love, drank too
much, had some sense of an explication de texte (no
mean feat), acquired UC credit with a letter grade
for the courses they took (very important), and,
best of all, had acquired a perspective on their
own U.S. education that was usefully critical. (I
do not think that the programs that take students
to France for a term or two, giving them “Satisfac-
tory” grades as credit for courses in English with a
language course on the side, are worth more than
extended tourism.) In effect, the experience of
the students in the program I directed was some-
thing like that of the average French university
student, who would be expected to spend at least a
semester in another country. The French students
I got to know, however, all required two languages
other than French.
Where do the problems start? At the gradu-
ate level, the social sciences have developed in
a manner to which the learning of language is
increasingly less relevant. The United States is
big: Generally, one does not in a day’s travel en-
counter another country with another language.
624
Additionally it has a hegemonic view of English.
This is unavoidable: French is hegemonic in
France, but 4 hours on the TGV puts you un-
der another hegemon in Düsseldorf, a very dif-
ferent experience. The reality of other languages
is unavoidable. The matter is made worse by the
gradual spread of English as a lingua franca, es-
pecially in the natural sciences (although given
what I said earlier, I suspect that the social sci-
ences are catching up). Germans know German
and English; Americans know English: advantage
to the Germans. The French students I spoke of
expected to need two other languages.
I have painted with a broad brush; there are
many exceptions. I do, however, think this to be
the trend for the institutional and disciplinary
reasons that I sketched. What might foreign lan-
guage departments do? I speak as an outsider and
see little hope for an internationalization of the
curriculum in relation to language without two
developments. First would be something like a re-
quirement that all undergraduate students spend
at least a term in a language other than English.
There is no need here to explain the problems
with that proposal. This would mean requiring
enough language instruction so as to make it pos-
sible for the student initially to at least tread water
in another country. At the graduate level, there
is little hope in the social sciences except on an
individual basis. Thus, I have an excellent grad-
uate student this year in Frankfurt on a German
Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) fellowship
studying early German romanticism—the more
of this the better, but it is not an institutional
solution.
Second, there was a time when those who at-
tended a university learned Latin. I am not here
lamenting the elitism of times gone by. In my view,
an important consequence of this curriculum was
not so much that one learned to read Caesar and
Sallust (nothing wrong with that) but, more im-
portantly, that one acquired what I might call an
anthropological perspective on one’s own society.
The Role of FL Departments: Enabling and Fostering Ubiquitous Use of
Languages
H. STEPHEN STRAIGHT, Binghamton University (State University of New York)
Internationalizing the curriculum of U.S. col-
leges and universities includes as one of its many
goals a major increase in the number of col-
lege graduates and postgraduate degree recipi-
The Modern Language Journal 93 (2009)
An important achievement of learning a foreign
language is learning a perspective on one’s world
that is not one’s own. In turn, the acquisition of
another perspective or even the recognition of
the legitimacy of another perspective is, to my
understanding, a very important component of
a democratic political understanding. I suspect,
then, that language instruction in which the sub-
stantive material focused not on “here’s what they
do in France” or even “look how wonderful Mau-
passant is” but on “here is how the French see
religion in America” would generate the kind of
interest that is aroused when one tries to better un-
derstand one’s home land. Make students curious
about what is their home. This is one reason why
we will still read de Tocqueville. Hannah Arendt
(2000) caught it well in an essay on “Truth and
Politics”:
I form an opinion by considering a given issue from
different viewpoints, by making present to my mind
the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I
represent them. This process of representation does
not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand
somewhere else, and hence look upon the world from
a different perspective; this is a question neither of
empathy, as though I tried to be or to feel like some-
body else, nor of counting noses and joining a ma-
jority but of being and thinking in my own identity
where actually I am not. The more people’s stand-
points I have present in my mind . . . the stronger will
be my capacity for representative thinking. (p. 556)
This is what language learning can and should
do for a democratic polity.
REFERENCES
Arendt, H. (2000). Truth and politics. In P. Baehr (Ed.),
The portable Hannah Arendt (pp. 545–575). New
York: Penguin.
MacIntyre, A. (1972). Is a science of Comparative Pol-
itics possible? In P. Laslett, W. G. Runciman, &
Q. Skinner (Eds.), Philosophy, politics and society
(pp. 8–26). Oxford: Blackwell.
ents, across the full range of academic fields of
study, who possess functional skills in a wide va-
riety of languages other than English (LOTEs).
The Modern Language Association’s embrace of
Perspectives
translingual and transcultural competence as the
overarching goal of the foreign language (FL) cur-
riculum coheres well with this broader curricular
goal (MLA, 2007), but the FL curriculum proper
can only get us part of the way.
No matter how successfully the new FL curricu-
lum incorporates the study of topics beyond the
traditional literary and cultural mainstays of the
FL major, that curriculum will rightly retain its
primary aim of preparing the next generation of
FL teachers and scholars, albeit expanded to in-
clude non-literary/cultural content. To serve the
larger desired role of LOTEs in college education,
FL departments must not only expand their own
departmental curricula (call it “the curriculum
across the languages”). They must also enable and
foster the meaningful use of multiple languages
in every nook and cranny of undergraduate and
graduate curricula throughout their respective in-
stitutions, large and small (call it “cultures and
languages across the curriculum”). Our national
need for more college-educated bilingual citi-
zens demands a new range of activities by FL
departments.
As founding director of a successful Languages
Across the Curriculum (LxC) program (see
http://lxc.binghamton.edu) (1991–1999) and
vice provost for undergraduate education and
international affairs (1999–2009) at Binghamton
University, a highly selective mid-sized research
university, I have found it difficult to get others
to grasp the potential impact and importance
of a full-blown effort to turn out graduates
who know their field of study equally well in
two languages. There are, unfortunately, few, if
any, examples of such efforts. Even in Europe,
universities call themselves “bilingual” merely
because they offer their degree programs in both
their national language and English, but with no
requirement or even expectation that individual
students pursue their studies in both languages.
The United States has a high number of recent
immigrants and language-loyal ethnic minorities,
and interest in language study and study abroad
among college-bound high school graduates is
at an all-time high (see http://www.gseis.ucla.
edu / heri / PDFs / press / pr012408 - 07Freshman.
pdf, with UCLA Higher Education Research
Institute Cooperative Institutional Research Pro-
gram survey data showing yet a further increase,
from 43.2% in 2002 to 52.3% in 2007, in college
freshman interest in learning about other world
cultures). College students come desirous but
ill-prepared to study languages and cultures, but
they find the current college curriculum unre-
sponsive to, and even incompatible with, their
625
needs. By changing our approach to cultures
and languages, especially at the college level, the
United States could lead the world in the delivery
of truly multilingual higher education. However,
I see little evidence of institutional commitments
to such a goal.
Misunderstandings of the basis for my per-
sonal commitment to multilingual education,
and to the related Cultures and Languages
Across the Curriculum (CLAC) movement
(see http://clacconsortium.org/), abound. One,
some attribute my commitment to a nostalgic
and discipline-serving wish, by a literature B.A.
and linguistics PhD, to restore FL enrollments to
the level they were back in the 1950s and 1960s,
when the rate of language study by college stu-
dents was twice what it is today. Two, others see
my stance as a stealth tactic by an anthropology-
professor-turned-administrator to reshape the FL
curriculum in the direction of nonhumanistic of-
ferings in the social sciences, business, engineer-
ing, and other “applied language” areas with lit-
tle or no appreciation for (or preservation of)
the literature-and-culture emphasis of the existing
FL curriculum. Three, even the most sympathetic
non-FL listeners sometimes think that I am hop-
ing to subvert existing non-FL curricula in the
direction of “culture and language” learning at
the expense of their rightful non-FL disciplinary
content. I will now identify the kernels of truth
while exposing the errors in each of these misper-
ceptions.
First, yes, I hope that language enrollments will
rise to their former proportion of total enroll-
ments, but the languages studied and the pur-
poses for which we teach them will need to look
very different from what they were when I at-
tended college and graduate school (1961–1970).
Back then, students outside of the FL departments
studied languages primarily to obtain access to
scholarly work in the humanities, sciences, and
social sciences.
In many specialties in the humanities and fine
arts, languages still play this role, to maintain
familiarity with literary and philosophical work
that in many cases must be read in the original,
and fieldwork-oriented disciplines in the social sci-
ences continue to need languages as tools for the
gathering of primary data and communication
with research participants. However, in a way that
revives their origins as components of “general
education” while adding to that a recognition of
their increasing importance in a shrinking world,
languages can and must now serve as the keys to
open up the entire curriculum to global cultural
content and engaged international activities. Our
626
need for increased language skills is too important
an imperative to be assigned exclusively to the fac-
ulty and students in the language departments of
our universities.
Second, yes, I have been requiring students in
my classes, both undergraduate and graduate, to
use their language skills, even in languages com-
pletely unknown to me, for going on 30 years,
and I welcome any and all uses, no matter how
elementary. To that degree I plead guilty to the
charge of sometimes trivializing the goal of “mul-
tilingualizing” (to coin a term) their education;
my students sometimes cite sources or use exam-
ples that provide no significant evidence of cul-
tural insight or linguistic sophistication. However,
the best of them have made use of non-English
sources to a degree that even my most conser-
vative FL colleagues would respect (e.g., a term
paper on the historical origins of Italian dialects
employing a dozen books in Italian, or a research
proposal probing the effects of bilingual educa-
tion on long-term academic success and bicultural
identity citing several autobiographical accounts
in Spanish). Most of my students expressed sat-
isfaction for my having made my institution’s
FL requirement(s) meaningful in a way that no
other course had ever done. In the end, that
support is all I needed to continue what I was
doing.
Similarly, it was my students’ positive response
that made me seek ways to help other faculty make
multilingual opportunities available to their stu-
dents. The most visible result was the establish-
ment in 1991 of Binghamton University’s unique
LxC program. Originated jointly with Ellen H.
Badger, director of Binghamton’s Office of Inter-
national Student and Scholar Services, and de-
veloped with the help of Marilyn Gaddis Rose,
distinguished professor of comparative literature,
LxC works with faculty to carve out of an existing
semester-long course syllabus, a 10–15% portion
for which students substitute LxC participation
for the default assignment. LxC then sets up study
groups of 6–12 students, each led by international
graduate students with native skill in the desired
LOTE and knowledge of the course subject mat-
ter sufficient to devise and implement a series of
study-group assignments discussed by each group
for an hour a week for 12 weeks. Study-group dis-
cussions take place in English when necessary, but
every assignment focuses primarily on FL “texts”
(in any medium) of relevance to the course con-
tent. In the past 18 years, LxC enrollment has
averaged about 400 per year, for a total of about
7,200 participants. LxC may be a low-level CLAC
The Modern Language Journal 93 (2009)
example, but it has been well received by faculty
and students alike.
Third, yes, even to the charge of trying most
of all to change the non-FL rather than the FL
curriculum, I happily plead guilty. For example,
some faculty claim that there’s no room in their
course for materials in languages other than En-
glish unless they are the scholar-produced versions
originales of something their students can read
in English. These faculty need to realize that, at
a minimum, the popular misunderstandings of
scholarly conclusions that they critique in their
lectures undoubtedly have interesting and cultur-
ally revealing parallels around the world that their
students could find, if only given the chance. Fur-
thermore, all faculty can enrich the examination
of virtually any topic by including treatments of it
from non-Anglophone sources.
At the other, more scholarly, extreme, faculty
teaching graduate courses need to seek out stu-
dents who can employ resources in LOTEs to en-
sure that world scholarship includes and advances
non-Anglophone scholarly traditions. They also
need to encourage students to pursue research in
non-Anglophone contexts, to avoid the shrinking
of our cultural and linguistic intellectual purview
at a moment when the world’s cultural and linguis-
tic diversity is effectively expanding at the greatest
rate in history.
Of course, even faculty for whom readily avail-
able sources (e.g., competing accounts of current
events in newspapers, or contrasting expositions
of basic concepts in encyclopedias) could provide
students with revealing cultural “takes” on course
topics find the prospect unnerving. I refer these
colleagues to pedagogical research that confirms
that CLAC pedagogy, like multilingual learning in
general, brings high returns with only a modicum
of instructor-led effort—although at the price of
a (probably overdue) loss of instructor-centered
control. CLAC invites and, in the end, requires
student-centered pedagogy, as students become
the “experts” on materials the instructor may not
fully understand.
Faculty in every discipline need to design and
adopt learning activities that demand skills in
LOTEs, including such activities as mining cor-
porate reports for cost–price differentials in an
accounting course or critiquing newspaper edito-
rials on abortion in a course on medical ethics.
Students at every level need to expect and value
not only exposure to international differences in
accounting practices and moral discourse but also
the maintenance and improvement of their lan-
guage skills, and not just in courses they may take
Perspectives
in the FL department or experiences they may
have abroad. In turn, administrators need to un-
derstand and respect the reallocation of human
and other resources that both FL and non-FL de-
partments will need to make to attain these ends.
What, specifically, can FL departments con-
tribute to the achievement of these goals? FL fac-
ulty and students must, of course, determine how
best to achieve cross-curricular aims within their
chosen field of study, but they can and should also
play a crucial role in achieving them for the en-
tirety of academe. This will require that they reach
out to faculty and students at all levels and in all
fields of study.
For example, non-FL faculty do not understand
how to pair native-language (i.e., English) back-
ground or comparative materials with FL mate-
rials to achieve maximum pedagogical impact,
and non-FL students lack confidence in their abil-
ity to employ their elementary or intermediate
language skills outside (or even inside) a care-
fully selected FL class. Non-FL faculty and stu-
dents need the help of their FL counterparts
to make the use of multilingual skills an ac-
cessible and universally expected component of
postsecondary education. Other examples of po-
tential FL department contributions include the
following:
1. Persuading FL faculty to find out from their
students in the very first semester of study what
other courses, or what field(s) of study, they are
pursuing and include course content relevant to
those individual areas of interest. Support and re-
ward faculty who develop FL course content rele-
vant to these student-centered needs.
2. Helping FL faculty find for their students,
and encourage the students to find and effectively
employ, accessible (both findable and compre-
hensible) FL materials in their various areas of
study. Deploy graduate students, if any, and ad-
vanced FL majors as assistants in this task.
3. Consulting with faculty in the fields of study
identified in examples 1 and 2 regarding the
use of FL materials. Assign FL faculty to the
627
development of new courses, trailer-style supple-
ments, or course-integrated modules, in response
to non-FL faculty input regarding appropriate FL
complements to their disciplinary curriculum.
4. Strategizing with each other and with non-FL
departments and the education-abroad office to
determine how these three initiatives mesh with
opportunities for in-country study, research, or
service to result in high-level cultural and lin-
guistic learning. Residence abroad in a LOTE-
speaking country contributes, minute-for-minute,
more to the acquisition of translingual and
transcultural competence than anything else,
but only with the right preparation and follow-
through, which FL faculty can uniquely provide.
5. Advancing the established and emergent
principles and practices of CLAC as highly promis-
ing ingredients for the achievement of the “global
citizenship” goals of 21st-century education. To-
gether, FL and non-FL departments can strive to
make the use of all of the languages students know
and constant receptiveness to global perspectives
unquestioned expectations in every field of study.
Only by increasing worldwide respect for cul-
tural differences and by deepening people’s un-
derstanding of the linguistic nuances that express
and perpetuate those differences (while also offer-
ing the best means for reconciling them) can the
world reasonably hope to conclude this century
as a vibrant, just, and peaceful global community.
To add but one word to H. G. Wells’s observation,
“Human history becomes more and more a race
between international education and catastrophe”
(1920, p. 594).
REFERENCES
MLA (MLA Modern Language Association Ad hoc Com-
mittee on Foreign Languages). (2007). Foreign
languages and higher education: New structures
for a changed world. Profession 2007 , 234–245.
Wells, H. G. (1920). The outline of history, being a plain
history of life and mankind. New York: Macmillan.