Reader Cliff Arroyo asks about my vision for an ideal Spanish program at a university. I already know what that program looks like because I learned my Spanish in it.
At the university where I learned to speak, read and write fluent Spanish in under a year, the program looked as follows:
1. Language courses were limited to Beginners Spanish 1 and 2 and Intermediate 1 and 2. The best thing was that these 1 and 2 parts could be compressed into a single intensive course, so that language classes didn’t have to be dragged out for years.
2. There were no more language courses at all. All this advanced grammar, advanced conversation, Spanish for native speakers, Spanish for future nurses, Spanish for firefighters, Spanish for poor accent writers, Business Spanish, Spanish Linguistics, etc crap didn’t exist.
3. Students went directly from Spanish Intermediate to literature courses. I took a graduate-level course on Latin American boom right after the single language course in Spanish I ever took. It was intense but it worked. And it didn’t work just for me. We were overwhelmingly fluent by the end of the second year because nobody gave us a choice.
4. There were no “culture” courses either because that’s a waste of time unless you turn them into hard-core history courses, which is what I end up doing.
5. We had 40+ students in each section of language courses to limit the number of sections. In the only Spanish course I took in my life, we had 46. And look at the result. And by the way, I’m not the only person who took that course and ended up with a PhD in Spanish from an Ivy.
So to resume:
- Cut language offerings to a bare minimum.
- Eliminate gimmicky softball courses.
- Don’t waste the valuable time of scholars on teaching conjugations. Let students figure out conjugations on their own.
Clarissa's Blog 
Whilst that would definitely suit me, how does it work in terms of the sort of students who attend ‘lower ranked’ type institutions? Would it lead to the loss of departments, without a gentler introductory path to lead students into the major, or do you think it would encourage more to consider it?
Working in the UK system, a continual issue my modern language colleagues face is that the demand which creates student numbers for them, therefore keeps them in jobs, isn’t for single honours language/literature degrees, but for courses and minors that tag on to degree programmes like business, education, politics, history etc., and one of the drivers of that demand is that students don’t want to/don’t feel able to deal with fast-paced, immersive language learning and definitely don’t want to be expected to do stuff like analyse literature. And personally, I feel that losing language departments from regional universities like mine would be a terrible thing for the university and for the small, but important, number of regional students who DO want, or discover part way through their studies that they want, to have access to language studies.
I also feel that there is actually considerable merit in a scholar teaching the nuts and bolts of their discipline at the lowest level some of the time – it creates a continual revisiting of the hows and whys of the experiences of the students who join us in our higher level classes, and helps resist the two tier division of labour between ‘tenured’ teachers and ‘adjunt’ teachers – sure, both groups typically have different skills and different balances and all that, but the idea that some classes in a university are a ‘waste of time’ for some colleagues seems problematic to me. But I’m in STEM, and my ‘Spanish 101’ equivalent is ‘Basic skills in Beach studies’ – reviewing low level maths, statistics, observing, recording, writing, reading and not-blowing-yourself-up stuff that should have been covered by age 14 or so in school, but either was and is now forgotten, or wasn’t. Teaching these things means reaffirming the ‘why’ of them, and as long as it’s not every semester every year (sigh, that is probably my fate for the next 4 years, I hate my current boss), I think it has a lot of merit. Maybe it really is different in languages?
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“Would it lead to the loss of departments, without a gentler introductory path to lead students into the major, or do you think it would encourage more to consider it?”
“I also feel that there is actually considerable merit in a scholar teaching the nuts and bolts of their discipline at the lowest level some of the time”
“I feel that losing language departments from regional universities like mine would be a terrible thing for the university and for the small, but important, number of regional students who DO want, or discover part way through their studies that they want, to have access to language studies.”
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Clarissa, have you considered writing an opinion piece or even article (the opinion piece might be more useful, read by more people) on this issue? I think it would be very useful and could spark a very much needed conversation.
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Maybe you and I should co-author.
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We’ll talk about it in H-town and if we’re really lucky, compose a some sort of letter. The actual article, if it’s longer, sometime late summer 2017.
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Contad conmigo. This is an important subject.
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In my experience it is the students at “lower ranked” universities who really need (and excel) in this type of program. It does require a little more thought, planning, and effort on the part of the professor because you can’t assume they have the background or resources students at swankier places do (hence the need for tenured scholars, not $10 an hour part timers).
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Everybody starts learning language from the exact same place. There is zero difference, zero, between my students back at Yale and my students from East St Louis.
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Yes exactly, but which ones are getting the type of program you want? And whose parents can sponsor a second degree if the first one doesn’t work out? The differences I was referring to are things like how much money they can spend on books and viewing Europe as an annual vacation destination. I was not referring to any differences in actual language learning, as there aren’t any. I think it is important that all students have access to a good language program, no matter what university they are at.
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Absolutely, serious universities all do the kind of program I describe in my post. Language courses are few and are taught only by grad students, resident spouses, and an odd part-time instructor. And that’s the way it should be.
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You know, I think the root of our disagreement is that what you consider a language class is a type of class I don’t think should exist at all.
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What I consider a language class is a class called Spanish (French, Chinese, etc) 101, 102, etc. There can’t be any disagreement that these are language classes because it’s a fact of objective reality.
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That’s not true — a big university has oodles of sections and if they are good, they are not left up to non-experts like that. You may have some such people as staff but there are very well informed persons in charge, really working on it.
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Yes, there are coordinators. These are people who dedicated their lives specifically to language teaching. Nobody herds tenured faculty into teaching these courses. Their time is considered too valuable. As opposed to mine and yours, I guess.
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Only some big universities have coordinators. I don’t mean universities with big graduate programs. We don’t have one but there are at least 800 students per semester in courses corresponding to the first and second years.
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Shedding, would you like to come in as a third author on the piece? I would really like it if you could.
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I’m a little lost in this comment thread as to the piece, but I’m willing to try. Clarissa and I might end up in fisticuffs though 😉
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I am looking at the piece as a kind of conversation — both points of view could be presented. Mine’s a kind of middle term because in the kind of institution where professors teach 101 (no TAs), we also have to teach a broader range of upper level courses. So unless we could really take over, and all be of like mind, there are practical problems.
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Sure, sounds interesting!
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“So to resume:”
False friends! The English verb resume means ‘began again after an interruption’ and not ‘to sumamrize’…. (or summarise if you want to be all Canadian about it).
I agree with getting students from basic language courses to more advanced work ASAP.
But do think there should be more than Intro classes and literature…. I would never have gone into language studies if there were only basic language and literature classes. While I’ve always been a reader, the public schools beat any interest in the formal study of literature right out of me….
I think a separate course on dialectology is essential for Spanish given the large number of national standards (Argentinian and Mexican, for example, are at least as different from each other as either is from Spain).
I’m also interested in picky grammar questions that can’t be covered in detail in intro classes (that is advanced descriptive grammar).
I kind of think having professors teach intro classes is okay if done in very small doses and not part of their regular duties on any kind f regular basis (one semester every couple of years would be plenty). I think you could make an argument that that should count as service as much as teaching.
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Here is the thing. If there were large departments with many students that could afford to do this and that and something else, it would be one thing. But that never happens. With 4 professors and 25 majors (which is considered a large language program), you’ve got to pick a focus. Students have a limited number of credit hours in their major. And if half of them is eaten up by language and another half by Study Abroad and more language, they end up not doing anything else ever. As I said, the majority of people who graduate from my current program never take anything but language and Intro to another intro. And do you know how often each professor gets to teach literature? Once every four semesters.
Who can expect a broke state to keep paying for something like that? And for what purpose when there are tons of language schools and online language courses?
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On this, those are actually more advanced topics. When you try to teach them as intro courses or intermediate ones, students don’t have enough experience of the language to grab onto them in really useful ways. At basic levels, things like dialectology (examples of different dialects) are more appropriate if undertaken in non-rigorous, extracurricular contexts.
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I agree with the proposed program and I am a Spanish professor at I think a tier III (of IV) institution. The students are not less intelligent than students at a tier I, but they have more barriers to learning because of the dragging out of language courses and the softball courses. The reason we have those is so that we can staff the program with faculty not qualified to do more (people without PhD, people who don’t do continuing education, etc.). If we could have more professors, we could go more directly to substantive courses, and students would learn more. The teaching of culture can happen in literature courses. Even if you don’t “like to read” there are many reasons why literary readings are the fastest way to learn a language well at high levels. And there is no reason to suppose someone who cannot read a novella will be able to write a contract or other legal / business document.
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“The students are not less intelligent than students at a tier I, but they have more barriers to learning because of the dragging out of language courses and the softball courses. ”
“The teaching of culture can happen in literature courses.”
“Even if you don’t “like to read” there are many reasons why literary readings are the fastest way to learn a language well at high levels. And there is no reason to suppose someone who cannot read a novella will be able to write a contract or other legal / business document.”
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A relative of mine a few years ago was a Spanish major here at UD. She insisted that she did not like literature and was interested only in studying about Spanish culture. As a math professor, I was nonetheless horrified and tried to convince her that literature was important. I think she graduated with a single literature course. She speaks Spanish well and is often taken as a native speaker, but that does not, to my mind, mean that she was educated properly as an undergrad.
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“She insisted that she did not like literature and was interested only in studying about Spanish culture”
To be completely clear, I certainly think literature is very important in language studies, I just don’t think basic language teaching and literature alone are enough for a complete (ideal) department….
The very unideal that Clarissa is in is a very separate kind of situation.
I am in total agreement on the need to limit basic language classes to two years* and for specialists to mainly teach courses that their specalist training has prepared them for (and not glorified extensions of basic language classes with predigested material).
*for Spanish in the US some other combinations will take longer.
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Also, the mushrooming of courses for the so-called “heritage speakers” should stop. There is nothing to prevent children of immigrants from taking regular courses with the rest of the students. To the contrary, it will enrich everybody to have children of immigrants and children of non-immigrants to be in the same classroom.
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We’ve actually mainstreamed the heritage speakers, and that is one good thing.
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Ours were mainstream because there were so few. But now that we have more, people are joyfully I introducing separate courses for them. I just don’t get it.
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But anthropology and sociology and art history and history and music and so on are fields. This person might have done better with some Spanish classes, for the language, and a different major. And a Spanish speaking internship in the community. Things like this. Study abroad in a Spanish speaking country, but with classes in her major.
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It also depends on what you do with the lit class. My next one is going to be about voyages to the jungle. There is a lot of interest in that from various disciplinary points of view — and we’ll read literary works, which are works where the author has really worked on the language, and those are easier to read and teach language better than do other kinds of texts (which can be taught too, but aren’t actually wise choices as first readings).
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This is my point too! You just need to take back the language classes, including the basic ones, rather than letting them continue as is! I am not sure I will ever be able to express this in a comment in a way that makes sense to you, but that is why you need PhDs to teach language classes, so they don’t look like the language classes you are currently describing. It is uprooting the current system from the very beginning.
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Our language classes are perfectly fine. The look fine, they work fine, there’s no problem with them other than there are too many and they are too expensive.
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Ours aren’t good enough. More expert leadership of them is needed.
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We obviously have different definitions of fine, but I think if students are still taking language classes in their 3rd and 4th years, their beginning ones were not fine.
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They are taking them because there is nothing else. They are forced to take all these language classes because we don’t allow them to take anything else. And they need to graduate.
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Yes, but is part of the argument for having it be this way that they “can’t handle” a literature class until they have more language ones? Or “aren’t interested in literature”? What is the argument exactly for having so many language classes?
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The argument or the truth? 🙂 The argument seems to be that you can’t let them into anything but language courses until they write perfectly, without any mistakes whatsoever. And how many people have you met who write perfectly in any language? I’ve met none. Everybody’s writing can use some work.
So obviously this is a specious argument.
As for the real reason why TT and tenured professors, brilliant, productive scholars keep pushing and pushing and pushing for these endless prerequisites – I have no idea. This is a mystery that haunts me. I’ve been trying to find out the reason but nobody tells me. There must be something I’m not seeing or not understanding.
I’m tired of fighting this, though. I’ve been at it for 8 years and I’m the only holdout against more prerequisites and against preventing students from learning language through application. If everybody is in favor and only I’m against, then I am the problem.
I created a beautiful structure for our advanced language course where students learn grammar through original texts, short stories, poetry, journalism and through engaging with the political issues of Spanish-speaking societies. It was a lot of work to set it all up and weave everything together. But I ended up with a fantastic course. Really great.
Then I go on maternity leave and when I come back, I discover that people talked and agreed to excise the entire literature/ culture aspect and reduce the course from 4 to 3 credits. When I ask what the goal of the change is, nobody has an answer. So good-bye, my beautifully structured course and hello more grammar exercises.
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The problem of taking back the language classes is the huge number of them that there are in Spanish. As long as so many have to be taught by contingent faculty with very high teaching loads and without the kind of preparation in field / commitment to profession the regular faculty have, “taking them back” just creates conflict.
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We only have 3 part-timers and they are not the problem. They aren’t even invited to participate in these decisions.
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We have 3 professors and 6 instructors. The instructors make the decisions.
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Ha! It’s a very different setup, then. But curiously, the result is the same.
As we say, no matter what parts I steal at my factory, I always end up assembling a Kalashnikov. ☺☺☺
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Yes, you would have to do it in a way that includes buy-in from the contingent faculty–I don’t claim that any of this is easy, because there are major structural problems. However, the alternative is basically the demise of foreign languages, so that is why I think it is worth working on.
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If there is any support for this. We have just banged our heads against that wall for 20 years, with the result that we have worse c.v.s than we should and are hated more than we would otherwise be.
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Like you say, the actual argument of needing to have perfect language is 100% specious. In my personal experience, which may not be true for your department, the root of this argument is a lack of belief in the students. Yet this is exactly why I think it is so important to keep working towards your goal, despite the emotional frustration and feeling like you are going nowhere. The other problem is that teaching this way is a lot of work, as you know from setting up the course you describe–not everyone is willing to do this, unfortunately. It’s much easier to make up grammar exercises.
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It is both. I think the root problem is that it is a lot of work and it takes training, and that the excuse that is made is that the students are (allegedly) bad.
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My take on this:
At Université Laval, a francophone university in an all-francophone city, students are REQUIRED to have completed the Advanced English 3 level (or obtaining an equivalence within the TOEFL test) BEFORE being admitted in English Studies. (Note that this is a 3-year program.)
(The interesting thing for me is that I’m in Advanced English 4 currently.)
So, using the same rationale, I think that students in Spanish Studies (I don’t talk about McGill because it’s not the same context) should have completed their Intermediate 2 level at the end of the first year as a requirement to enter in the second year of the program.
I have something else to say about it, but it’s for the next time.
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Another thing I’d do is eliminate obligatory placement tests. If somebody wants to start at Intermediate level without ever having done Beginners, why not let them?
Also, dumping the byzantine system of prerequisites to prerequisites to more prerequisites. Let students decide what they want to take and when. If they fail, it’s on them.
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We actually do this, and the only time it is a problem is when the student who realizes they can’t skip a class can’t fit the lower one into their schedule. This probably is not a problem in Spanish though, since you have more classes.
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Although it’s not a bad idea, I afraid that it would engender even more remedial learning.
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Oops, remedial teaching, I should have said.
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You don’t change the teaching, it’s just up to the student to decide if they want to work for that level.
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Okay, here’s my take again on this:
At Université Laval, a francophone university in an all-francophone city, students are REQUIRED to have completed the Advanced English 3 level (or obtaining an equivalence within the TOEFL test) BEFORE being admitted in English Studies. (Note that this is a 3-year program.)
(The interesting thing for me is that I’m in Advanced English 4 currently.)
So, using the same rationale, I think that students in Spanish Studies (I don’t talk about McGill because it’s not the same context) should have completed their Intermediate 2 level (as a recommended prerequisite, not a mandatory one, as you have suggested) at the end of the first year as a requirement to enter in the second year of the program.
I agree that the Intermediate 2 level should be the only “recommended prerequisite” for literature courses from the second year of the program, but I think that, as a second language, students should be required to have completed an Advanced 2 level (with 1 intensive course or 2 regular ones) before they graduate.
I don’t think that an “Advanced Grammar” and a “Spanish Linguistics” are full of crap (although I don’t think those courses should be mandatory, but offered in option). Many students could be very interested by some more stuff in linguistics and in grammar.
I agree that “Introduction to Spanish literature” is a waste of time, unless you are not in a Spanish major.
“Spanish for native speakers” is useless, unless you’re not in a Spanish major.
All the other languages courses, unless it’s about grammar and linguistics, should be only for those who are not in a Spanish major.
And I agree that culture courses are useless.
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It’s not even Introduction to Spanish Literature. It’s Introduction to Reading Literature. 30% of that course is
dedicated to guess what? Grammar.
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So, this is even worse.
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Exactly. It’s even more ridiculous.
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Here is the key point: money. The reason we have fluff courses, and weak language courses, is so we can staff the program with faculty not qualified to do more, and buy canned language courses that we don’t really teach, just administer to students (a different matter). So the counterargument has to take this into account, show why it is more economical or as economical or if not that, worth the expense to do things in the ways being suggested here.
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This is due to a larger problem of American monolingualism which makes those currently in power unwilling to admit how important language/intercultural competence is becoming, and also unaware of what it actually takes to become competent enough to work in the language. Only 11% of the world speaks English, and localization is becoming more and more common. The economic justification is that fluffy and canned courses don’t get students to the levels they need to compete for these jobs, but understanding that justification takes you back to my first point. . .
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Yes. But that presuppses that the institution actually wants to address the issue seriously. It might just want to spit out graduates who have nominally met state requirements at the lowest possible cause, and not care about getting students to meaningful levels of knowledge.
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This is definitely true, but I don’t think that model will be able to last through my lifetime. What I want is for languages to be in the one that replaces it.
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Such an interesting topic! I am desperate to eliminate useless language courses at my institution, but the colleagues and I who want to do that are a tiny minority. I hope to eliminate a couple of them when/if tenured. BTW, have you seen that your alma mater wants to hire a specialist in xxth century Spanish visual arts and literature, or something like that?
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Have I seen or have I applied? 🤗🤗🤗 It’s in Spanish cultural studies.
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Hey, let’s both apply. I swear I will not mind if it goes to you over me. But I’ll mind if it goes to anybody else.
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I am not applying. Not my field. Not my research. And it is not the right moment for me to apply for such a job, unfortunately. Bad timing. So you amd I know who should get the job!
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@Shedding — as you may already know, I am interested in the kind of language teaching you are talking about because all the languages I studied, were taught in that spirit. Where I am now it is not, and I am told that in many places, it is not. I am told that the kind of language teaching you are talking about and that I like is bad, that the students can’t do it, and so on. Your perspective is so much happier… 😀
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It is a lot of work, but the results are worth it! I have much fewer structural issues to deal with than Spanish department though, although theoretically the language is “hard”.
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This is am important post. I posting a link to it at my blog
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Yes, let’s have a collective discussion. I already feel less alone on this.
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