Moran Technology Consulting, an Illinois firm, has recovered notes from its audit of Ohio University’s recent hacking incidents—documents the company said, just weeks ago, that it had destroyed (The Chronicle, August 24).
Officials with the company combed their archives and used data-recovery software to locate the missing material, according to the Associated Press. The recovery is great news for beleaguered Ohio administrators: Two former technology officials, both of whom were recently fired, have sued the university, arguing that the notes should have been made public instead of being shredded. —Brock Read
85 Responses to Documents on Ohio U. Data Thefts Have Been Recovered
patrick_murtha - February 22, 2012 at 8:09 am
Professor Pullum anticipated unkind comments, and while it is almost superfluous to fulfill his expectation, let me be the first to do so. Just a few thoughts. Given the “disastrous memory burden” that learning any subject in depth requires, why bother learning anything at all? This is an essentially anti-intellectual argument.
“You can’t prepare yourself for a future career in diplomacy or marketing by equipping yourself in advance with a random language, because you have no idea where you’ll be sent.” Not only is this instrumentalist, it is also wrong. Has Professor Pullum never heard of learning how to learn? I gain one language when I am young, I gain others more easily later. For heaven’s sake, go back and read your Plato, man!
If Professor Pullum truly gained no insights into French or European culture, no new ideas, by studying French for years, then what can I say? This: he was one lousy student. I am hardly a very good linguist – I’m much better at reading other languages than speaking them – but not a day goes by when I don’t draw on insights and ideas I gained from studying French and Latin in middle and high school, Russian in college, Spanish and some other languages on my own.
“This whole idea that cultural insights emerge from learning new words is just bunk. Cultural insights come from studying culture.” And you are going to study other cultures without an inkling of their languages how, exactly?
“She never needed to interpret the subtleties.” If you are missing subtleties, how could you possibly be sure that you are as successful as you might have been if you had picked up the subtleties? It is highly unlikely that you are. We all have to work within our limitations, and I am not saying that one must be hyper-fluent and culturally fine-tuned before approaching another country. But the words that Professor Pullum has carefully chosen clearly suggest that Anglophone bluntness works in cross-cultural encounters, that subtleties are frills. He is wrong about that.
Finally, it is pretty clear that many Americans, and perhaps other Anglophones, don’t much want to learn international languages. That is part of what language instruction in their universities is up against. But providing those folks with reasons not to feel guilty about their indifference certainly seems an odd line for a professor of linguistics (or a former President of Harvard) to be pursuing. I’m not sure that I like sounding like Peter Wood, but every time I read a piece like this, the notion that the enemies of the university have Trojan-horsed themselves inside the university gains credence in my mind.
judithryan43 - February 22, 2012 at 8:18 am
It’s strange to see the discussion on this point dominated by monolingual people. You have to have had really deep immersion into a foreign language and its culture to begin to see how very much it changes your way of thinking.
pullum - February 22, 2012 at 8:30 am
On the first point Murtha makes, it’s not anti-intellectualism to point out that memorizing the shapes and stroke-orders and meanings of something like 4,000 Chinese characters just to reach a normal literacy level is a truly disastrous burden on rote memorization capacities. While the orthographies of Spanish or Finnish or Korean can be grasped in outline within an hour and pretty much mastered within a day, learning to read text in Chinese characters takes years, and is burdensome enough that many experts (Victor Mair of the University of Pennsylvania, for example) regard the Chinese character orthography as a really significant drag on the Chinese economy that is holding the whole country back. It is extremely facile to compare the memorization of thousands of logographs with mastering something that has intellectual content like logic or calculus.
The rest of Murtha’s comment seems to betray a failure to read or understand what I said. I am of course opposed to instrumental motivations for language learning, but strongly in favor of “learning how to learn” by coming to understand something of linguistic structure in general terms. And providing people “with reasons not to feel guilty about their indifference”? Please. I am worried that the reasons often given in favor of language classes are so sappy that there is a danger of handing the budget-cutters too easy a victory.
patrick_murtha - February 22, 2012 at 8:52 am
Who says that Chinese characters don’t have intellectual content? They certainly have cultural content. And wishing, even idly and hypothetically, that Chinese would be more like other languages so that people might “pick it up” more quickly betrays not only a sense of Euro-cultural superiority, but also ignores what is one of the primary benefits of learning Chinese, that it exposes Westerners to a radically different way of thinking about language and writing. Those Chinese tones are a pain in the buttocks, too, aren’t they? Well, perhaps these things are no more of a burden that English spelling, which also calls for a large amount of rote memorization, but has resisted all efforts to “reform” it, because, like Chinese characters and tones, it expresses something fundamental about its language and culture: English’s history of polyglot infusion and influence.
Learning languages past the age of ten isn’t easy. Nothing worth learning is easy.
tappat - February 22, 2012 at 9:11 am
Your experience with French is like Summers’ experience of the world: entirely monoligual, unskeptical, confident, the way privileged ignornace makes a person. Just as the monligual English thinker may well confidently feel that he has a control of circumstances when he sees only business men in China, sick people in Africa, and violent people in the Middle East, the person who sits through enervated litertature classes, classes that have been enervated not least by becoming language courses, cannont sense how his one language so radically limits him as to make him entirely susciptle to the control of others. Of course, brute force has a great influence, and the language that the brute possesses will always have great influence, but this has never been in dispute. What has been understood, and, really, what continues to be understood among those who can comprehend the fact, is that he (or she) who complements brute force with cosmopolitan and humane literary learning knows when others are influencing his (or her) thinking and actions as well as when he (or she) is influencing others, in ways other than through force. Humane people desire more gentle and friendly relations than can be achieved by monoligual brute force. Those who do not have such desires, such as those who simply want to exploit business conditions in China, administer their health protocols in Africa, or insist upon their peace processes in the Middle East, do not know how they are being constrained but only feel that the friendly and humane are troublesome and, indeed, contemptibly weak, even in their arguments.
dank48 - February 22, 2012 at 9:31 am
It seems to me the problem is accepting the premise that learning foreign languages needs defending. Have you looked at a college catalog lately? Compare the offerings to those of fifty years ago. Some of the newer courses and even fields of study are intellectually defensible.
And then there are others. To pretend that [fill in the ludicrous example you prefer] deserves a place at the table when foreign languages, of whatever continent of origin, don’t is simply bizarre. (One might even say that such grotesqueries are symptomatic of our time.) What are colleges and universities for, what are any schools for? The notion that we need defend learning anything–arithmetic, geometry, logic, music, astronomy, rhetoric, grammar, not to mention art, history, geography, economics, chemistry, physics, biology, and languages, inter alia–is indefensible.
When we’ve gotten to the point where an intellectual loose cannon like Summers can spout anti-intellectual blather like this and can be taken seriously rather than laughed off the stage, we’re in pretty pathetic shape.
BlueLoom - February 22, 2012 at 9:55 am
I speak as a non-academic, but as one who has studied and speaks/understands to various degrees 5 languages. One of the great advantages I have found in learning other languages is how much insight such learning has provided me into my native tongue (US English). Perhaps you academic types don’t view this as a valid concern, but it was certainly a great help to me in a long career as a writer and editor.
jcvmorgan - February 22, 2012 at 10:04 am
“‘learning how to learn’ by coming to understand something of linguistic structure in general terms” is so far removed from actually learning to speak a language with any fluency whatever as to be a joke. Even though the specific language studied in school and college may not be that of the country/countries where one works, having trained the brain to convert anglophone thoughts into another language enables a person to do the same with the language needed. And the mere impact on those living in those countries of the effort taken to address them in their terms is a huge benefit – socially, professionally, intellectually… .
magyar - February 22, 2012 at 10:11 am
I hope Professor Pullum will forgive me for pointing to what he actually said. I only do so because it seems to have been overlooked by most of the commenters so far.
He first quoted Larry Summers: “[ it is] less clear that the substantial investment necessary to speak a foreign tongue is universally worthwhile.” Note, Summers did not say that it was never
worthwhile, nor did he say that it had no benefits: “…there is no gainsaying the insights that come from mastering a language” means quite the opposite.
Professor Pullum then states his own position thus: “I certainly do not want to argue against [foreign-language classes]: I wish I could have done more language courses myself,” a point repeated at the end of the piece: “I’m not an opponent, […] Like most educators I feel instinctively that foreign language instruction is a Good Thing. And as a general linguist, I am of course aware of the intellectual value of the insights into language structure you get from attempting to acquire another tongue.”
Professor Pullum’s essential point, set out in the main body of the article, is that “the arguments given for foreign-language instruction in universities, though advanced with passion, are often rather weak”. He goes on to list those arguments and what he sees as their weaknesses.
To my mind, repeating those same arguments in a comment, however passionately, adds nothing to the discussion. Perhaps more note could have been taken of Professor Pullum’s last remark, that “to defend foreign-language classes against budget-cutting [will] need much more serious arguments than vague gesturing toward globalization and wispy talk about the wonder of words.”
I’d like to think about what those arguments might be before jumping in with an opinion.
patrick_murtha - February 22, 2012 at 10:31 am
Yes, Professor Pullum seems to believe that gaining insights into linguistic structure, which is certainly a very good thing, is far more valuable than learning actual languages. I think that is highly debatable, both intellectually and practically speaking. Let’s have both.
magyar - February 22, 2012 at 10:34 am
I’m truly struggling to understand your point. Are you saying that everyone should learn Chinese? Or, are you saying that everyone should learn a second language? If so, which one should they choose and how should that choice be made? Does the imperative to learn another language only apply to English-speakers? What about us, here in Hungary: should we learn a second language? Which one? Again, how should we choose?
The point, it seems to me, is that there are undoubted benefits to learning languages (exactly as Profesor Pullum said in the article) they are just not the benefits that so many supporters of foreign language teaching argue for. Just out of interest, what second language do you think most Hungarians choose to learn, and why?
Mary Davenport Davis - February 22, 2012 at 10:38 am
Interesting–as with most of Mr. Pullum’s writing, I’m vaguely irritated and yet find myself considering the topic with more detail and precision than I otherwise would.
My experience with language learning is diffferent from most, in that I study ancient history and religious literature. When I was twenty-four, I had studied some 6 or 7 dead languages and no modern languages at all. So I’m, alas, still waiting for the putative benefits of world harmony and understanding, and my chances of being sent off for a job in diplomacy are slim at best.
The single biggest benefit for me of learning languages lies in the constant, grueling discipline it imposes. It is a huge amount of work, and, if you were taught with old-fashioned pedagogical methods, as I was, it is not very interesting much of the time. Once you have learned a language, you are faced with the constant unwinnable struggle of maintaining your mastery of the grammar and vocabulary. But then you go to do your homework one night and find yourself translating the words of one of the greatest literary minds ever born, and suddenly you have access to genuis that you could not have come by in any other way. Reading something in translation gives you the flavor of the doughnut but not the raspberry jelly in the center.
After that happened to me a couple of times, I started to realize that sometimes you really do have to work THAT hard, and that most of the time it turns out to be worth it. I think this is one of the most valuable lessons of my life.
patrick_murtha - February 22, 2012 at 10:42 am
Professor Pullum is not just saying that the existing arguments are weak, he is saying that they are worthless (“bunk”). He does not promise at the end of the post that he will be offering a Part 2 in which he puts forward better arguments, so I think it is entirely appropriate to respond to what he has written already.
One strength of the arguments that Professor Pullum condemns as weak is that they are easy to explain to the business-minded, who whether we like it or not get a lot of say in education and its funding nowadays. Any arguments that are not on the table already are going to necessarily be subtler and harder to sell. Imagine trying to convince a CEO of the practical benefits of understanding general grammatical structures! They are not going to get that. But being able to talk to someone in their own language and gaining an edge that way, that they are going to get.
Professor Pullum’s dismissiveness of the benefits to cross-cultural understanding that arise from the study of languages is not only flat wrong in my view, but cheerfully and provokingly philistine in its tone. He wanted to provoke. He knew he would provoke. He provoked. What he gained by it all is not clear.
patrick_murtha - February 22, 2012 at 10:49 am
I am not arguing that everyone that everyone should Chinese, although it is great when people learn Chinese (which is, after all, the world’s most spoken native language) or any other tongue. However, Professor Pullum is arguing against American students studying Chinese at all. He says that the case for getting thousands of American undergraduates to proficiency in Chinese is weak – and notice he says thousands, not millions, as if having thousands of students of Chinese in a country of 300 million is somehow burdensome to us all. No, “drawing on the pool of Chinese native speakers already in the U.S. might be much more sensible.” Problem solved!
To answer your other questions: Yes, I believe everyone should learn at least a second language. Learning English is certainly a practical first choice for many non-Anglophones. I believe that all American students should be required to study Spanish from kindergarten on – the United States is historically a bilingual nation, whether some people like that fact or not.
I teach humanities subjects – history, philosophy, social sciences, literature, art history – in English at a Mexican university high school where students are bilingual upon entry, continue to study English aggressively, study other languages including required French and Mandarin in the top track, and frequently express an interest in becoming even more polylingual than that (one of my students is taking Japanese at a private after-school academy, for example). In Korea, I also taught students for whom gaining proficiency in three or four languages was the norm (as it has always been for educated continental Europeans). Anglophone countries are just not keeping pace with the rest of the world in language pursuits, and I think it has negative intellectual and practical effects. I don’t envision the vast majority of American students being able to compete globally with the Korean and Mexican students I have been teaching.
nadienne1 - February 22, 2012 at 10:59 am
I don’t think it’s possible to quantify the value of foreign-language-learning. The problem–the hurdle we’re expected to clear, and this applies to all of the humanities–is that we are expected to quantify this value.
salchaktoka - February 22, 2012 at 11:24 am
Either one values learning that isn’t immediately connected to making a buck or killing an infidel, or one doesn’t. America seems to have decided for the latter. Living with the consequences isn’t pretty, and it will only get uglier.
kgodwin - February 22, 2012 at 11:26 am
As a monolingual person, I’ll grant you that deep immersion in a foreign language and culture changes your way of thinking. You just aren’t going to get that in a foreign language class.
3rdtyrant - February 22, 2012 at 11:33 am
The cognitive superiority gained by second-language acquisition is sufficient argument. Cultural or not, most multi-lingual people are better citizens of the world than they were, and that’s certainly a good thing.
tyrus63 - February 22, 2012 at 11:37 am
I can’t deny that I find many of Geoff Pullum’s arguments here rhetorically exaggerated, but also essentially correct in identifying the basic weakness of the environment of argumentation for foreign-language learning. Really, however, I think the question of the benefits of learning (pro- or con-) is somewhat displaced, especially in the case of the quote from Summers with which he begins; there are a myriad of individual reasons why any given person can find language-learning valuable or worthless in their specific case, and hence the relative sterility of such arguments.
But I don’t think it is presumptuous to say that really, in a substantial way, both Geoff’s piece and the responses are a little-disguised argument about the value–and cost–of foreign-language INSTRUCTION, and the labor-and time-intensive resources that colleges and universities and their students devote to it. There may be very good arguments for continuing to invest in these, but general pieties about broadmindedness and the values of the hard discipline that come from inculcating Latin grammar just aren’t making it.
Geoff personally may or may not come down on the right side of the question of language-learning–I strongly suspect that he may well, despite the ironic pose of the piece, know a lot more language than 1000 words of French and the structures of general grammar–but he does point out a real problem. Few universities have the capacity to support more than a limited number of language-instruction programs well, and perpetuating the present number–much less adding new instruction corresponding to the vastly expanded global scope of the cultural disciplines of the contemporary university–means continuing to invest resources there. Language instruction these days is clearly losing the battle, and it needs stronger
defenses than are presently being mounted if it is going to survive in
its presently recognizable form–or else it will need to find a new structure
and rationale that makes it relevant and sustainable in new ways. I suspect a vigorous combination of both is needed.
For myself, I’ve found multiple language-learning exceedingly useful both professionally–which makes complete sense for a professor in Comparative Literature–and also for my personal engagement with the world. So I am far from a hostile party. Rather, I am desperate to hear better, more cogent, and also more institutionally intelligent arguments for a troubled sector of the university–and its instructional mission–than I presently am hearing.
dmheikin - February 22, 2012 at 11:47 am
Pullman’s phrase “memorization capacities” bothers me because it seems to assume that capacity is finite. But among the many, many reasons I am learning Chinese is a belief/hope that I can expand my brain’s capability by learning something so foreign as Chinese–even at age 64.
Further, Pullman’s comments about Chinese not being worth the effort are wrong. For instance, the stroke order (that he specifically names) is not difficult at all because it is fairly consistent, and the characters, too, are formed by predictable re-combinations so learning 4000, though more time consuming that French, is doable.
My son regularly conducts business in China with much success due to his facility with the language from which he also learned about the cultural value Chinese place on building relationships, something that can not so easily be achieved through the use of interpreters as Pullman seems to imply.
I agree with Pullman that we need more explicit and concrete reasons for language study and I hope my own examples help in that cause.
katisumas - February 22, 2012 at 11:50 am
Dear Geoffrey Pullum
How about this:
“Tom A. Schweizer, Jenna Ware, Corinne E. Fischer, Fergus I.M. Craik, Ellen Bialystok. Bilingualism as a contributor to cognitive reserve: Evidence from brain atrophy in Alzheimer’s disease. Cortex, 2011; DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2011.04.009″
In this article and further research since, it has been shown that bilingualism (and tri. etc ) slows down the damages of Alzheimer.
Of course knowing a bunch of words in one language isn’t going to do it. You’d have to be able to speak it and acquire an inner sense of its grammatical structure. Actually, learning to speak a different language than your first one helps give you an inner sense of the structure of your first language, in this case English.
So while Americans will suffer from Alzheimer 10 years before they actually should, all those foreigners who learned English, and/or Chinese, and/or Spanish in addition to their native language will be able to maintain their cognitive functions much much longer. As far as I understand from some other articles (all online) it has to do with the command center of the brain shown in the fact of being able to switch from one to another, or perhaps because of the locus of language becomes greater? Of course kids brought up bilingual (or tri- etc) to begin with have quite an advantage.
Also knowing a bunch of words (“dictionary knowledge”) doesn’t mean you know the culture of the place where that language is spoken. To get to know some of that culture, you need to go THERE and converse with people who don’t have knowledge of English or whose knowledge is rudimentary. You’d be amazed of what you learn about that country if you’re actually able to talk to ordinary people who live there. And incidentally, they wont be able to make fun of you behind your back because you will understand what they’re saying.
You might also be able to read their literature and you sure can learn a lot about a culture through its literature and media in general. Just think how much cultural info. you get from a novel!
Of course you could read books in translation except that English speaking countries translate hardly any books from other languages, in contrast to other countries where English and other foreign language books are readily translated and made available to the reading public. The dearth of translations of foreign works into English reflects your and others’ attitude about even learning the rudiments of a second language…
There was such a scandal at the end of the sixties/early seventies when it was discovered that the CIA was funding area and language studies in US universities. At the time I joined the indignant chorus. I would have never ever have believe then that I would come to regret the demise of those programs.
patrick_murtha - February 22, 2012 at 12:03 pm
This is a much better and more thoughtful post than Professor Pullum’s (the title of which, “How to Argue for Foreign Language Instruction,” raises a question that he then fails to answer except to indicate, not the way we are doing it). Professor Pullum’s “ironic pose” is tiresome; your forthright consideration of the issue is assuredly not that, but instead most helpful.
I think that the entire humanities side of publicly funded American universities is “losing the battle,” and that department will be pitted against department in a truly ugly way to squabble over the declining funding and resources. So you are right, it is clearly not a time when an expansionist program of language instruction is going to be possible in those institutions (let alone the fact that the level of student demand is well below what it should be). It will be difficult enough to hold onto what we’ve got. K-12 programs are also being gutted. I haven’t got a solution, but it does make me glad that I have been teaching in international environments that are congruent with my own educational values. After years of struggling with the declining state of education in America, it is frankly a joy to work in countries where the value of education is a given, is not the subject of a debate whose terms are set by anti-intellectuals, is not a political football. Plato is alive in Mexico. Plato is alive in Korea. Plato is flat-lining in the United States.
katisumas - February 22, 2012 at 12:09 pm
No the orthographies of Spannish or Finish cannot be mastered within a day. I assume you thin this is so because they both are derived from the Latin alphabet like English is. If you can master all the diacritical marks of Finnish in one day, you’re ready for a reality show! Korean has a different alphabet altogether even though it’s nowhere near as difficult as Chinese. So perhaps you could take a look at it and see if you can “master” it in one day?
You’d be amazed at the capacity of human memory. How do you suppose Chinese people come up with all those scientific breakthrough and literature and films and and and….
I suggest you take a second look at Chinese characters. The strokes reocur in them so that the meaning of each character most of the time can easily be understood even if you haven’t seen it before. You learn the meaning of the strokes before you learn the combinations.
But we are not talking about writing. We are talking about speaking. We are wired to learn any human language, and up to age 14, we can learn any new language without being burdened by a foreing accent. It seems a shame for English speaking people to let atrophy one of our species’ most wondrous asset, particulary in that we in the US seem to be on our way to getting way way behind the rest of the world where most people routinely speak more than one language. (I wonder if this could be one explanation why Chinese now file more patents than Americans? Not because they use a different language for their research but simply because they make more use of their brain by speaking more than one language?)
katisumas - February 22, 2012 at 12:16 pm
My fellow Magyar, no Patrick Murtha isn’t saying that everyone should learn Chinese. He’s saying that everyone COULD learn Chinese if they wanted to.
Learn any foreign language that appeals to you, though I can see you already made a choice since you write in excellent English even though your native language must be Hungarian which is very different in its structure from any Indo-European language (as you no doubt know, it is part of the Finno-Ugric group of languages that includes Finnish and Estonian as well as the language of some Siberian tribal groups…. Dont you find this fascinating? Most Hungarians do.)
epearlstein - February 22, 2012 at 12:25 pm
There is a difference between a school offering languages and requiring students to study them.
The question to be debated is whether the years of study of a language are worth the sacrifice of what else might be studied in that time.
tfelden - February 22, 2012 at 12:25 pm
Many years ago, foreign language study was not viewed as having anything to do with communicating with anyone at all. Foreign language was studied as a way to train the mind, teach individuals to think, and viewed as something more akin to Mathematics than a tool for speaking to anyone. (The Latin many of us studied is a case in point.) Cognitive science and linguistics have something to say about how important the language-cognition connection is and what happens to the capabilities of someone who speaks multiple languages. The colleges and universities who promise prospective students that they will learn critical thinking are legion. Yet by which tools do we do this and why do we so often fail? Are we looking for too direct and maybe too unsophisticated a method? And is foreign language study one of multiple approaches to rectify this?
As a nation and as individuals we can probably get by, at a superficial level, being largely ignorant of other languages and cultures. (Although just remember our history in Iraq and how badly we were served by not having speakers of Arabic among our Foreign Service and military staffs.) But at an only slightly deeper level, this purported success at operating globally in an English-only mode crumbles. Visit any global corporation with a need to send its managers abroad for extended periods of time and ask how many of those managers return well before their assignment is up, because they simply cannot handle the cultural challenges. Ask what this lack of linguistic and cultural understanding costs and what it costs not to have global operations that smoothly share a deep understanding across national/cultural borders. Just look at how we struggle to understand China as we work to forge successful relationships at so many levels with a culture so different from our own.
The breadth of perspectives and very literally the way we think is decisive in the way we conduct ourselves on the world stage and in the way we do business. Creativity is consistently among the primary traits employers seek in employees. Why? Because people who think in very different ways make highly creative teams, and the next great idea will capture the market. Genuine foreign language ability has a role to play here. So, yes, I believe there are ways to make the case for foreign language study that deviate from our traditional arguments. Among the challenges we face as we do so is the fact that decision-makers have not necessarily experienced “the life of the mind” and the depth and richness of experience it brings that we value so highly. We must accept that in-group arguments will not have the political bite to help us succeed. Irritating as we may find Geoffrey Pullum’s article, it is a remarkably good example of what we’re up against and we would do well to think hard about the arguments that would sway someone like him.
As for the femme/woman/wife issue in French, I’d look into that again. J
nordicexpat - February 22, 2012 at 12:30 pm
What diacritical marks of Finnish are you talking about?
tfelden - February 22, 2012 at 12:53 pm
The ultimate outcome of your argument is that schools should not require anything of their students and that raises the question of why one should go to school at all. I also don’t see the study of languages (or study of anything) as a sacrifice but an opportunity, but that goes to a very deep philosophical difference in thinking. Your perspective is very U.S. American and a point in G. Pullum’s case.
Curmudgeon Aday - February 22, 2012 at 1:29 pm
My take on Summers and FL: http://wp.me/p1XzIC-45
Sandro Barros - February 22, 2012 at 1:34 pm
I love how provocative this article is, and how it calls for attention that we somehow MUST defend the study of languages or any knowledge within the curriculum solely on financial pragmatism. Never mind linguistic imperialism, expecting others to understand us but not the other way around, etc. On this regard, my favorite comment was: “Either one values learning that isn’t immediately connected to making a buck or killing an infidel, or one doesn’t. America seems to have decided for the latter. Living with the consequences isn’t pretty, and it will only get uglier.”
raymond_j_ritchie - February 22, 2012 at 1:36 pm
Finding a rational justification for learning a foreign language sounds a good idea but you may find you are pushing it to find one that holds much water. One might have trouble finding one that is not tainted by gatekeeping snobbery.
I am an Australian monolingual biological scientist. I have never met a scientist who could not speak English even here in Thailand where I now work. The popular image of international scientific conferences where everyone is wearing headphones is quite wrong. No translation facilities are ever available because they are not needed. I deal with thousands of scientific papers a year. I have never encountered a paper in a foreign language that I needed translating. It is not because I throw the English only switch on Wiki or Google Scholar. There is nothing to find. The botanical latin description requirement for new plant species has just been scrapped. Botanical latin is hardly great literature: it was just a list of descriptive phrases, not even proper sentences. It hardly contributed to the preservation of classical languages.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, the fundamental problem with foreign languages is which one to learn. Only the UN-official languages plus one have any real justification: English-French-Spanish-Russian-Mandarin. German is the other but for historical reasons it is not on the UN list. I have worked in labs where I was the only native English speaker and no two people shared a common first language. Everyone got along fine. In science, English is surprsingly politically neutral.
Anglophobes take note. Scientific English is not English-English, American, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, Singaporean or South African English nor is it the form of English used where it has become the standard second language such as Holland, Germany or Scandinavia. It consists of about 1000-1500 words in very simple sentences plus specialist terms. You have to write papers in the knowledge that nearly all your readership are using English as a second language.
Richard Grayson - February 22, 2012 at 2:04 pm
学习一门外语
salchaktoka - February 22, 2012 at 2:37 pm
Of course not, but that’s not the point. Europeans have it easier, of course; one can hardly sit in a train for half a day without crossing at least one linguistic boundary, after all. And they work harder at it, too; even in non-college-preparatory programs the kids have several years of at least one foreign language, while in college-preparatory programs they may have several years of multiple foreign languages.
All of which means that Americans should be working even harder to catch up, rather than resting on their isolationist laurels. But no, instead we reject the notion that “deep immersion in a foreign language and culture” is worth the time and money, and often prefer to regard the thought as subversive.
fizmath - February 22, 2012 at 3:17 pm
The best reason to master a foreign language is that it makes it easier for you to flee to another country if the economy and human rights sink to a lower level than they are at right now.
edwoof - February 22, 2012 at 3:18 pm
Part of the problem is that we actually call this area of study ”foreign languages” (Dr. Summers said “foreign tongue”) which is a significant cultural insight as no other country refers to other languages as “foreign.” One significant reason to learn Spanish and soon Chinese is that these languages are in no way foreign and knowing the basics of these languages are required in navigating around the US. I have a few special amendments to the standard starbucks latte and when I’m in Houston, I find if I can say it in Spanish, I’m more likely to get what I want.
Speaking of getting what one wants, I once encountered a former student, a business major, who was studying a German textbook in the local coffee shop. “Oh, you’re learning German now,” I said. He replied, “Yeah, I’m going to do a semester abroad this year and I want to be able to hook up.”
And that is a perfect argument for “Foreign” Language Instruction.
magyar - February 22, 2012 at 3:21 pm
It is very hard to discern what your point is, Patrick-Murtha, and part of the reason, I think, is that you haven’t really read the article properly: at least, you misquote and misrepresent what Professor Pullum says. He didn’t say the arguments were bunk, he said: “This whole idea that cultural insights emerge from learning new words is just bunk.” None of the comments so far have produced any evidence to the contrary. It sounds to me as though you are expressing your general disappointment with the state of higher education in, I presume, the USA, rather than making a cogent case for language learning.
I would suggest that the vast majority of people who learn English as a second language have little interest in finding out about American, British, Australian, Canadian, and so on, culture, even if such a thing was possible through learning a language. They are making a practical choice to do with basic communication.The idea that Anglophones will learn fascinating details of the lives of Europeans, for example, by learning french, German, Spanish, or, indeed, Hungarian is slightly insulting and suggests that you regard foreigners as exotic and mysterious and to be studied as specimens.
epearlstein - February 22, 2012 at 3:34 pm
Mr. tfelden is reading a lot more into my sentences than I said. And if he thinks he’s reading my mind, he’s wrong.
Ben Hemmens - February 22, 2012 at 3:38 pm
Two reasons for learning foreign languages occur to me. The first is that while you might not achieve fluency during your school or college course, you may get enough grasp of the structure to be of help if you ever do have to achieve a command of the language later on. When I moved to Germany 17 years ago, I wasn’t really thinking about learning to speak German and I didn’t have the money for lessons there. Over a decade had passed since I had had German lessons in school. But I learned rapidly in everyday situations and by the time I did present myself to a language school, I scored 35 out of 35 in a multichoice grammar test. So don’t undervalue knowledge that you may think is buried or lost. The same applies to much other material we consider perfectly worthwhile to teach in college; for me as a biochemist, the wide survey of biology and the physics for idiots we had in our first couple of years have been useful again and again over the years.
The other reason is that the global anglophone juggernaut isn’t an entirely friction-free machine. Non-native speakers of English almost always report that the hardest people to communicate with are not non-native speakers from other countries, but the English native speakers themselves. This is because the native speakers are too often blissfully unaware of what it’s like to have to communicate in a non-native language, and completely fail to tone down their lexically rich, idiomatic, too fast, too humorous, heavily accented English so the the others can understand what they’re getting at. Just being exposed to the task of trying to use a different language should, hopefully, make people a little bit aware that English, the global lingua franca, is not the same as English as spoken with abandon by native speakers.
And here’s a third reason:
I’d like to ask the woman who “worked successfully on four continents … despite being fluent only in English.”, how does she know? Maybe it was a success in terms of not getting sacked, but was it a success in terms of exploiting the available opportunities for whatever mission she was on? I’ve seen this kind of monolingual English speaker operating again and again, and they are often oblivious of what’s going on around them to a degree that I can only imagine must be bad for business sometimes. People are simply getting on with things behind their backs and leaving them out of the loop. You can’t tell me that’s always good enough.
salchaktoka - February 22, 2012 at 3:44 pm
umm, hate to say this, but you just nailed it. Now if only Québec would separate from an increasingly Harperite Canada, flight would be possible for at least some of us without having to deal with those authoritarian abominations known as airports.
patrick_murtha - February 22, 2012 at 4:02 pm
I am glad that Professor Pullum has a fan. You say that I am not reading him properly; I suggest that you are not reading my comments properly; I guess that makes us even in a way.
I’m always amused when someone is accused of “misquoting.” I haven’t even used ellipses in any of the quotes I’ve taken from Professor Pullum. I’ve tried to be attentive to his use of words, according that respect to a linguist and CHE columnist. And you know what? His words and his tone are damning. It is true that he makes half-hearted gestures towards even-handedness (“Like most educators I feel instinctively that foreign language instruction is a Good Thing” – there’s that ironic pose, with the capitalization!), but they come off as nothing more than an anticipatory defense. It is also true that he uses “bunk” in the specific instance you mention, but that word carries force and colors the rest of the piece, as it becomes clear that he is arguing (or mock-arguing, who knows) that the standard justifications offered in favor of foreign language instruction are – bunk? drivel? poppycock? sentimental nonsense? soft? liberal? Take your pick. Professor Pullum uses strong words for what he wishes to assert strongly, and weak words in other situations where he is merely being polite, like any capable writer.
Professor Pullum’s assertion that the study of words does not lead to cultural insights doesn’t need refutation; it is self-evidently false, and is a bizarre thing for him to have said. What were all those philologists, the founders of his discipline, doing in the 19th century?
If I am reading Professor Pullum’s personality type correctly, he is the sort who is impatient with the specific except insofar as it leads back up to the general. So individual languages, they’re nice and all, but linguistics is what matters. The idea that there might be a unique beauty and value in the specific (such as the Chinese character system) is distasteful to him; it’s vague, it’s poetic, it’s Whorfian, and he’s not having it. Our Geoff, he’s a hard-nosed guy!
Your attempt to make the urge to learn another language into an exercise in cultural condescension is novel, to say the least.
Having taught ESL, I am well aware of the motivational spectrum of learners, and English’s status as a lingua franca is undoubtedly a dominant motivation for many, as I never fail to tell my friends back in the States.
dank48 - February 22, 2012 at 5:08 pm
. . . no other country refers to other languages as “foreign.”
How would you translate “Fremdsprache”?
Ben Hemmens - February 22, 2012 at 5:08 pm
a significant cultural insight as no other country refers to other languages as “foreign.”
German: Fremdsprachen
French: langue étrangere
Italian: lingua estraniera
Russian: inostranniy yazik
Slovenian: tuj jezik
etc.
magyar - February 22, 2012 at 5:13 pm
I’m trying to make sense of your reasons, Ben. The first one seems to be: learn a language in case in ten years or so you go to live in the county where that language is spoken. How would that have worked if you had learnt Spanish at school?
The second, far from being an argument for learning another language, is a good argument for native English speakers to learn ‘globish’, or the form of English used as a lingua franca.
The third of your two reasons falls down just a bit, too. Which of the many languages she encountered should that woman have learnt? What if she had chosen German but never ended up in a German-speaking country?
dioscorides - February 22, 2012 at 5:16 pm
Presumably, languages = literatures, and literatures = the subtle and internalized structures of how words and sentences and the larger blocks of thought are structured. That old (and I think valid) assertion that studying (better ‘learning’) Latin at an early age provides an embyronic intellect with a weirdly instinctive understanding of ‘structure’ – let alone where modern medicine and science gets much of its technical vocabulary – remains a basic argument for an early exposure to a ‘foreign’ tongue. Often I hear from graduate students in both the sciences and humanities that grade-school and middle-school Latin became a kind of substrate to comprehension of ‘languages’ in their multiple forms, including the abstractions we like to call mathematics. And to be sure, the best and perhaps the only way to learn a modern language is to “live in it” not as a tourist but truly “in it” for about a year or so, and once one begins to think (and dream) in that ‘foreign’ manner, the always-variable subtleties and nuances soon become instinctive. Perhaps administrators should emphasize long-term opportunities for our monolingual students to ‘study abroad,’ learning the basics of ‘getting around’ as they increase command of the chosen special field. Not surprisingly, studying medicine in Germany or Russia or China enables comprehension of health and disease in ways sometimes familiar, often very unfamiliar, to what we take for granted. And if my students are illustrative, these variables almost always engender lifetimes of rampant curiosity, the absolute foundation of innovation and fresh probings of ancient questions.
patrick_murtha - February 22, 2012 at 5:27 pm
His reasons make perfect sense, and were very clearly and cogently expressed. You are just playing the obtuse card throughout your comments, for whatever reason. If I was a suspicious soul, I would wonder about your identity. I hope Professor Pullum forgives you for sounding oddly like Professor Pullum.
nordicexpat - February 22, 2012 at 5:31 pm
Could you give me an example of a word that expresses a concept you wouldn’t be able to understand if you didn’t know that language? I know several languages pretty well, but I can’t think of a concept that is so intimately connected with one particular language that it is unthinkable in the others (and yes, a particular language may express a concept in a single word that another language would need more than one to express, but that is a different issue).
magyar - February 22, 2012 at 5:41 pm
‘No other country refers to other languages as “foreign” ‘ Really? That’s news to me. In Hungarian we do just that: idegen nyelvek.
patrick_murtha - February 22, 2012 at 5:54 pm
But the number of words matters! Of course virtually all concepts are translatable in some sense, but linguistic-cultural systems have very different emphases, and if a language expresses in a neat word or phrase what another language can only express tortuously in a number of awkwardly combined words, that matters. It’s why we borrow a word like “Schadenfreude.” “Pleasure in the misfortune of another” just doesn’t have the same ring to it, you know?
Just as obviously, the treatment of time and tense, person and gender, ad infinitum, differs considerably from language to language and often amounts to a subtly or grossly different world-window. Clearly you can tell that I think the Whorfian hypothesis still has a lot of meat on it, although I’m not going to spend thousands of words on the subject in a comments section. But to me, it’s simple. Languages are different. That means they are not the same.
tfelden - February 22, 2012 at 6:10 pm
I would not presume to read anybody’s mind and apologize if my comment came across that way. But one important question before all who teach is what we want students to learn and how we can help them learn it. So the question of how they should best spend their time is vital and I believe the debate over foreign language learning goes right to that point. If we focus on factual content of learning, then the for-profit technical colleges and schools that focus very much on one major have it right. If we believe that learning how to learn and the pursuit of intellectual curiosity over a lifetime are paramount to our efforts, as is the case in many liberal arts colleges, then we must approach these goals with a variety of tools. Many of these will be indirect and may not even be part of the curriculum, and languages have a role to play in that.
Ben Hemmens - February 22, 2012 at 6:23 pm
Yes, two of my reasons involve speaking the specific language you learned at some point. I tried to stick to things I know about from my own experience.
Does it help to have had classes in a different language than one you end up having to use? In the sense that one learns something about the fact that languages work in different ways, chop up word meanings differently, have different grammars etc., yes – though this kind of thing might be just as well, or better, taught in a kind of general linguistics 101 / language awareness course. That would certainly have caused less pain than the first non-English language I was taught, Irish.
“Globish” is something more specific than simple international English as actually used. Again, maybe you’re right and it would be better to teach people explicitly how to simplify their English. But the human side of having to try and communicate in another language – leading hopefully to a little empathy for people who are trying to speak to you in yours, as a foreign language – is of a value more than zero, I think.
By the way, I don’t find Prof. “Pullman” (as repeated posters seem to call him) obtuse. Better reasons for teaching foreign languages should be being advanced; he’s perfectly right to challenge people to come up with them.
Ben Hemmens - February 22, 2012 at 6:48 pm
Maybe one argument is that historically speaking, it’s not the people who are bi- or multilingual who are the oddballs, it’s the monolinguals. Now no college language course can make someone fluent in another language but it should be able to give them a tiny peep into a world where there is more than one way to say things – the world where the majority of human beings have lived for the majority of history. It’s out there, beckoning. If they communicate nothing else, that would be a benefit.
The insularity revealed by having to even discuss whether college graduates should be able to speak multiple languages is a bit boggling from the perspective of being in Central Europe in a country with borders to 7 other countries, all of which have different languages.
And just to preempt accusations of promoting the benefits of multilingualism, what I’m taking about here is just the awareness that multilingualism exists, rather than achieving it. Just as it might be of value to know that the world is round, even if you never leave home.
patrick_murtha - February 22, 2012 at 6:57 pm
Oh, I don’t think Professor Pullum is obtuse; I think he’s wily and deliberately provocative. Not anyone I want to have lunch with, but I will certainly admit that if he meant to generate discussion here, he got some!
Commenter magyar, on the other hand, I think pretends to be obtuse, as a rhetorical strategy. Either that, or as an English learner, he reads too literally and doesn’t pick up tone.
magyar - February 22, 2012 at 7:20 pm
I think you’ll find that the use of capital letters for Good Thing is a cultural reference in itself. I assume that you haven’t read Sellar and Yeatman’s ’1066 and All That’.
I suppose that our differences of opinion can be put down to your lack of fluency in Hungarian. How could you possibly understand the subtle nuances of what I say without being familiar with my foreign culture?
patrick_murtha - February 22, 2012 at 7:55 pm
When all else fails – snark! Buy hey, I get the appeal of that and can be guilty of it myself.
manuela81 - February 22, 2012 at 8:30 pm
There are many imprecisions and claims that lack any evidence in your post.
1. “The subtle and internalized structures of how words and sentences and the larger blocks of thought are structured” exist independently of literature. Languages without a writing system also have morphology, syntax, pragmatics, semantics, etc.
2. There is absolutely no evidence (and I’ve wasted a lot of time checking not so long ago) that learning Latin has any of the cognitive advantages that you claim it has. If by “instinctive understanding of structure” you mean understanding of syntax, it is hardly instinctive in the case of a language that is always learned through explicit instruction, and in any case the same understanding can be reached by studying any language, or, indeed, by studying syntax in general.
3. You don’t need to know Latin to study medicine or modern science.
4. There is no evidence of any causal relationship between learning Latin and understanding mathematics. There are a couple of fairly old studies that show some correlation between studying Latin and doing well in maths, but a) they don’t show that this correlation could not exist for any language, and mostly, b) they show just that, correlation.
jffoster - February 22, 2012 at 10:15 pm
Well, Mr. Tyrant, I’m multilingual. But I am most certainly not a “citizen of the world”. I don’t carry a World Passport, don’t vote in World Elections, and don’t recognize the International, i.e. World, Criminal Court. So I’m one of those not covered by your “most”, and I certainly don’t regard being a “citizen of the world” as a good thing. “Breathes there a man with soul so dead, …&c.?
nordicexpat - February 23, 2012 at 12:53 am
Well, I wasn’t going to comment, but here goes. Pullum’s argument really comes down to two points:
1) Economic arguments for studing a foreign language for two years at university may not be as compelling as those who advance them may think, since companies might simply wish to hire native speakers of the countries where they wish to do business in who have English as their L2 rather than native speakers of English who have acquired an elementary knowledge of the other language.
2) There’s no real evidence that the strong form of the Whorfian hypothesis that one learns to think differently simply by acquiring basic/intermediate words and syntax of an L2 (i.e., what the average undergraduate would learn after studying a foreign language for two years) is correct.
Does anyone have any real evidence that either 1 or 2 is correct? And does anyone think that the exposure that one gets to an L2 in a university classroom is sufficient for acquisition?
magyar - February 23, 2012 at 5:22 am
How refreshing to see a comment that examines what the article actually says.
Ben Hemmens - February 23, 2012 at 7:19 am
1) Companies hire both people with English as L2 and native English speakers who have good foreign language skills, and regularly send the latter to language schools in their foreign locations, which costs money. Whether or not it makes sense (and what companies do may not necessarily make more sense than what universities do), the demand exists.
2) Indeed, but there may be benefits to general thinking that make more sense than what is usually bandied around under the “Whorfian” label. Consider the following possibilities:
a) Taking courses in 2 or 3 foreign languages might be more effective at creating some general linguistic awareness than a head-on explicit course in linguistics would be. (Just as experience playing soccer and rugby might be better preparation for learning to play gaelic football than a general course on ball games. Even playing tennis and squash would give you a better start in hurling than this theoretical course.)
b) Even if I take courses in languages a, b and c and later need to learn language p or q to a functionally useful level, the – possibly fragmentary and not very explicit – experience with a,b and c still significantly facilitates the acquisition of p or q. E.g. you experience that languages can be much more highly inflected than English and therefore become aware of different levels and types of inflection as possible strategies in languages, without having an explicit linguistic name for the phenomenon.
And then there’s the point that you don’t learn about culture by learning words. This is flawed. How do you learn words? These days, not without exposure to authentic texts from the target language – which of course contain a lot of culture; and often by exposure to teachers who are native speakers of the target language, and bring a lot of culture with them. So without invoking any Whorfian magic, language instruction contains some cross-cultural training by default and often contains a good deal of it by design – and it wouldn’t surprise me if it contains a lot more of it nowadays than it did in one English school around 1960.
Ben Hemmens - February 23, 2012 at 7:34 am
This may mostly be true, but in what language(s) is the internal politics of your institution carried on? Those crucial back-stairs chats about who gets what new lab or instrument and who is being groomed for a tenured position and how someone is going to pull strings in the ministry?
I worked in a building next to a Max-Planck-Institut in Germany. Just like you describe, the everyday language of the workplace was English. The language of power and intrigue was, however, German. I think you’ll find the people aspiring to longer-term appointments in such places often acquire very good competence in the local language.
jffoster - February 23, 2012 at 10:30 am
Mr. Hemmens’ 2a reads:
”Taking courses in 2 or 3 foreign languages might be more effective at creating some general linguistic awareness than a head-on explicit course in linguistics would be.”
And pigs might fly. Re this and your 2b, a general course of say one or two quarters or semesters in Linguistics with well designed homework and take home tests can give you experience of a much wider range of “different types of inflection as possible strategies lin languages” than can 3 semesters of beginning courses in three different languages.
Ben Hemmens - February 23, 2012 at 10:41 am
Yes, except it’s unlikely to leave an impression on, say, engineering or business majors of what it’s all for.
Though I think it’s a bit artificial to confine ourselves to college courses. Surely what matters is the total amount of exposure to languages someone gets in the course of their entire educational career. I didn’t do any languages in college, and Prof. Pullum also includes high school in his consideration of his own experience.
kgodwin - February 23, 2012 at 11:32 am
It is the point of the article, which focuses on foreign language programs in US schools. No matter how hard we try, we aren’t going to be able to replicate the model the Europeans have…there’s just no way to make a foreign language seem immediately relevant to a native English speaker here in the US the same way it seems immediately relevant in Europe.
After a few more decades to fall out of our place of privilege in the world, I suspect learning foreign languages will have more appeal to us. Right now, though, we’re in a place of power and privilege, and we can get away with asking everyone to speak English to us.
nordicexpat - February 23, 2012 at 11:44 am
The conversation keeps getting turned back to the value and/or benefit of multi-lingualism, when the original post was about the problems with the arguments for (required) foreign-language instruction at universities. We’re not going to get anywhere if we talking about two different things.
Ben Hemmens - February 23, 2012 at 12:07 pm
What else could language instruction be for if not to facilitate – directly or indirectly, sooner or later – the acquisition of functioning language skills?
raymond_j_ritchie - February 23, 2012 at 3:22 pm
You have a point but it is not necessarily primarily a language related problem. Many american executives cannot adjust to Australia and I have no doubt some cannot handle Canada. It is a cultural problem. When I was a post-doc in the USA one of the things that surprised me was just how alien they were. I put my foot in it many times, mainly through carelessness. I forgot I was in a foreign country. Americans are not Australians with a TV accent.
In Asia your “natural” assumptions can lead you astray. A counter-intuitive example. In some Asian countries learning the language does not make things better, it makes things far worse. It scares the pants off them and is considered intrusive eavesdropping.
raymond_j_ritchie - February 23, 2012 at 3:50 pm
I am a nerdy asocial low status male. I am probably Asbergers but I am 58 and the disease did not exist when I was growing up. So the scheming in Germany was done in German. So what. Do you seriously think that learning german would get you a seat on their teutonic plans? The scheming in Australia is done in English but I have never been invited to engage in their silly games. I do not miss it. In the end being ignored by the alpha males is actually a blessing.
sleepwalker - February 23, 2012 at 3:55 pm
One cannot improve on Murtha’s critique, here and throughout, but a simple amplification is in order: Prof. Pullum’s “part 1″ ought to have been entitled “How NOT to argue for foreign language instruction.” We do await part 2.
Summers is wrong both about preparation for international business and for the foreign service (top-level diplomats are often of course appointed, patronage positions). Those points require no buttressing. He is also wrong about Chinese characters. By drastic simplification, the PRC has raised its literacy rate geometrically.
Ben Hemmens - February 23, 2012 at 4:02 pm
I agree absolutely. I went one further and removed myself from the whole business, and now work as a freelance translator and editor. But I suspect we are not very representative.
Ben Hemmens - February 23, 2012 at 4:06 pm
Zuversicht
Anlage
Geborgenheit
withatwist - February 23, 2012 at 4:14 pm
Hmmm, lots of interesting commentary here. Really, though, the whole discussion is moot as long as we don’t absolutely require at least 5-6 years of the same foreign language of every single intermediate/secondary school student, starting no later than age 11/12. The major cognitive benefits of learning the L2 at age 18-24 in college are diminished, and the potential for actual fluency non-existent for all but the most gifted students. It isn’t only about learning a language to be able to perform in business/science; it’s about an overall cognitive benefit.
But requiring so many years of a foreign language of every student would also mean requiring our foreign language teachers (college teachers included) to be able to prove actual competence, and this is one area where I have no problem with very rigid standardized testing — ACTFL Advanced High/Superior or ECRF C1/C2 should be the requirements to teach a foreign language. Most states’ teachers are only required to reach an ACTFL Intermediate High level. That’s the level a student should be at after 3-4 semesters at the college level if they work reasonably diligently. Think: Would we let someone teach math without having demonstrated actual specialist knowledge of it?
We also need to re-think how we approach the teaching of language at the college level if we want any real effects at all. The communicative “I’m-going-to-talk-at-you-in-French-and-you-will-magically-learn-it” approach is absolutely ridiculous when dealing with post-puberty people, but it’s the method suggested by pedagogy specialists. Except those pedagogy specialists are usually PhD’s in French who were hired ABD to direct undergraduate language programs and not actual pedagogy specialists. Ask any cognitive scientist: Our brains can’t absorb language like that once we pass the critical age, which is more or less puberty. After that point, we have to approach language from an analytical angle which scaffolds and structures the language as a system. Yes, we still have to use it actively, but I just can’t get behind the idea that implicit grammar, etc., is effective with a group of 20-somethings who have barely mastered the insides and outs of their own language. Teach the structure and build around that.
Ben Hemmens - February 23, 2012 at 6:24 pm
I wonder what you mean by instrumental vs. non-instrumental motivations.
Ben Hemmens - February 24, 2012 at 5:52 am
No, you’re not. But many college courses only give the students a tiny beginning of a subject. Physics lecturers suffer without end under the (for them) superficial guff they have to teach to biochemistry students. But some of them will end up doing some NMR or mass spectroscopy or work on reaction mechanisms where the balance of different outcomes depends on some physical characteristic of part of a molecule, and then this old material gives them a start on teaching themselves what they need to know to manage these things.
dank48 - February 24, 2012 at 12:45 pm
A case could be made that learning a foreign language is worthwhile because it is hard. People do it anyway. Why?
magyar - February 24, 2012 at 12:50 pm
“Commenter magyar, on the other hand, I think pretends to be obtuse, as a rhetorical strategy.”
You were the one who kept mentioning Plato and now you object to a Socratic method of inquiry.
(I am flattered to be compared to Professor Pullum but we are not the same person. I am from Budapest; he, I believe, is from Edinburgh.)
shyanmei - February 24, 2012 at 2:16 pm
How passion could obscure the true meaning and intention of the writing!
lucero - February 25, 2012 at 7:38 am
1) It really depends. I have seen both–in certain countries they cannot produce enough high tech or business executives, so companies that need workers who speak those languages will consider Americans who are fluent in the language. I know of students who have studied abroad and are fluent in critical L2 who are getting job interviews for it, at least. You are right, no one is really going to want someone who cannot function in the L2.
We’ve gone backwards in the teaching of second languages IMO, despite all the research. When I was in college (1980s) the results after 2 years in a foreign language course (meeting 5 days a week and a lab) were better than now. Many students came out able to speak the language then. And there was no technology, other than cassette tapes and movies. Student motivation and the hours dedicated to the study (and student intelligence) determine acquisition at the university level in my experience. I studied 3 foreign languages in college, 2 of them new to me at the time, and in 2 years of one I reached a high level of fluency and I wasn’t the only one. That program was definitely sufficient for acquisition. The other new language I only studied for a year and it was a romance language and I was already fluent in one so I was functional within a year.
lucero - February 25, 2012 at 7:43 am
I hate to have to agree with you, I’ve been thinking the same thing lately. Fortunately with my language skills, I have several options and my ear is on the ground for potential jobs and opportunities. My passport is ready just in case.
lucero - February 25, 2012 at 8:03 am
This is not really true with regards to who is directing language programs in universities. There are pedagogy specialists and those with PhDs in Applied Linguistics/Second Language Acquisition. I’m not going to say either that all the research they have done is sound, but it does exist, and at many universities those are the people who are directing the language programs.
In my experience the problem is that in some languages, particularly those perceived as easy OR those taught in U.S. high schools (French and Spanish) they get many students who are unmotivated, already pre-disposed against the language from negative experiences in high school, want an easy A, or who just resent the foreign language requirement. The students don’t want to be there and they don’t want to study. Trying to get these students to acquire language is like pulling teeth–it is close to impossible. The biggest factors are the amount of time you put into it–exposure to the language and also motivation. Most college students forced to take a language are not motivated and therefore do not want to do more than the 3-5 hours that they sit in class. Only someone very naive would think you could learn a language with 3-5 hours a week. If you are in the country where it is spoken, regardless of your age, you have the opportunity to interact with that language at least 8 hours per day and you are also motivated if you are there by yourself and the only one who doesn’t speak the language. You have to acquire it to be able to function. In one week of exposure in the country where a language is spoken, you are getting more interaction than an entire semester of language (if you are a lazy unmotivated student) and you also want to learn it. Big difference.
If students want to learn the language AND they commit to studying/practicing outside of class, they can acquire much more of the language. Not saying that they all can get beyond Intermediate High, but many of the students don’t even get that far after 2 years of language. It is actually the motivated ones–the majors–that are the ones testing at Intermediate High. The others are probably terminal novices.
Ben Hemmens - February 25, 2012 at 8:52 am
Here are my thoughts in heading form
1. Language instruction is ok, if of limited direct effectiveness, for the purpose of stimulating language acquisition
2. People often do manage to learn the “right” language (or get sent to the right place).
3. Multilingual employees are in demand
4. Globalization also means localization
5. Language instruction involves non-Whorfian learning about culture
6. Instruction in a few languages is often better than instruction in linguistics
7. It’s good for people to know that multilingualism is the norm
cwgs_ssh - February 27, 2012 at 11:31 am
hozho
grape_vine - February 29, 2012 at 3:32 pm
I’m kind of surprised no one seems to touch on the national security angle of learning foreign languages (I hesitate to use “foreign” because Spanish is the de facto second language in the States). But we Americans now live in a world where everyone knows what we’re saying and we don’t know what they’re saying. You can’t legislate how people speak (tip-o-the-hat to V. Havel and his play “The Memorandum”), so you need to learn to live in the world as it is. If I were king of America, Spanish would be taught from Kindergarten, options for Arabic and Chinese offered in middle school, and other language options in high school (and college).
anon1972 - March 2, 2012 at 10:13 am
Here are just a few from Russian (transliterated for your convenience):
toska
poshlost’
tomlenie
pestret’
alet’
belet’
Any translator will tell you that these words are “untranslatable” and can only be rendered approximately and, usually, gracelessly, in English, with noticeable loss of meaning. So yes, it has enriched my CONCEPTUAL vocabulary significantly to learn Russian (and I could give similar examples for each of the other five languages I’ve studied in reasonable depth).
anon1972 - March 2, 2012 at 10:16 am
As a Russianist, I daily mourn the demise of those programs! We had it good during the Cold War….
pgstover - March 10, 2012 at 2:00 pm
In reply to nordicexpat’s earlier post, most Chinese concepts related to Confucianism are best translated using “word clusters” or even anecdotes. There is so much meaning freighted with words like: junzi, ren, li, zhi, de, xiao, and tiandi among others that is absolutely impossible to translate them into English (or any other language) with only one word. One must take into account the construction of the character, its history and development, and the context with which is used. So if one is to attempt to understand Chinese civilization and culture of the past 2,500 years, the best place to start is with an understanding of how the langauge works. Even if it is extremely difficult to become fluent, it is simplistic to cast off the immense benefits of achieving a deeper level of understanding of the langauge and culture of one quarter of the world. One doesn’t need to acquire 4,000 characters to begin cross-cultural understanding. I stand with Patrick Murthas comments on the article. My fear is that it only feeds an Amer/Euro-centric position that ignores the benefits of attempting to not only acquire another language, but achieve empathy and comprehension of other cultures.