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The changing culture of language departments.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Internationalization and globalization demand that departments of foreign languages and literatures respond to new societal demands by placing an emphasis on marketable skill sets, communicative language skills, and cultural competency. Yet many departments are reluctant to meet this call, thus creating difficult and potentially precarious academic conditions.

Introduction

The global economy and the resulting emphasis on international education are changing both the courses offered and the traditional culture of modern and foreign language departments at the post-secondary level. Indeed, internationalization and globalization [1] are invading the collective conscious of the profession and have dominated literally dozens of departmentally-oriented publications: "Foreign Language Education, Intercultural Communication and the Conditions of Globalization," "Foreign Language Departments as Leaders in the Globalization of the Campus," "Foreign Languages for a Global Age," "Internationalizing the Campus: A National Agenda," "An International Perspective in a Research University," "Languages and the Global University," "Public Policy and International Awareness: Time for a Realistic Assessment," to name only a few.

An initial reaction to the ubiquity of these terms should be a positive and optimistic one. However, it is difficult to reconcile this optimism with the anxiety currently pulsing through the profession; an anxiety that laments the precarious state of foreign languages: our weak position on campus, shrinking resources, and declining enrollments. So, how can this be? The seeming prioritization of international /global education should naturally and automatically extend to foreign languages, should it not? If indeed "there has never been a better time for the globalization of American campuses [and if] today offers unparalleled opportunity for language departments to achieve a more central role" within the university (Santirocco 13), then why all the doom and gloom? The following pages examine this curious disjuncture in light of its effect on the institutional culture of departments of foreign languages and literatures in higher education.

Internationalization and Globalization

For Neathery-Castro and Rousseau, globalization represents the increasingly uniform financial, economic, political, military, cultural, and linguistic behaviors of international economy and society. To be sure, this increasing interdependence among nations has had a profound effect on the goals and directions of higher education. Indeed, "internationalizing the campus is a phrase and concept central to many administrators' visions and discourses" (Johnson 26) and there is renewed importance given to the rhetoric of educating students for a global citizenship (Allen and Balkcum).This influence is not entirely new. For example, languages for specific purposes (LSP) and business-language courses have existed on college campuses since the 1920s (Uber Grosse and Voght). In 1990, Roch Smith declared that "it had been three decades since international education was incontrovertibly on the national agenda" (4) and the 1979 release of the President's Commission on...

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