The article recently shared by Sabrina deserves our attention. It concludes with a letter we can cut and paste and send to administrators, which I have already done. Below is what I wrote my principal and I include the letter:
The below introductory paragraph and letter to university admin are the conclusion to the article “Where are the Language Experts?” by Bill VanPatten, 2015. The full article is attached and the link here:
http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.aatsp.org/resource/resmgr/hispania_open_access/hispania_98.1_vanpatten.pdf
The survey found only 6% of a university language department are experts in language acquisition and there are 0% language experts at Ivy League schools. We are safe to assume that percentage drops (dramatically) in high school, middle school, and elementary school language departments.
Please read below and forward to others.
Thank you.
Eric
Van Patten writes:
An Open Letter to Deans
Dear Dean,
You are receiving this letter because someone has forwarded it to you, presumably under the assumption that you have an interest in questions related to how adults learn languages and what kind of proficiency is possible from adults in a university curriculum. If you have no such interest, I apologize for the intrusion and you may ignore the rest of this letter. If you do have such interest, I will try to be succinct in what I say and at the end of this letter will offer you a link to a website if you’d like to read a bit more.
It is common belief that language departments consist of experts in language and language learning. I am writing to tell you that this is not true. Language departments are largely—and in some cases, exclusively—concerned with literary and cultural studies. Such departments have little concern for the nature of language and less concern for how language is acquired. In most language departments, outdated myths about language and language acquisition inform most curricular development and pedagogical practice at all levels. The reason for these outdated myths is that there is no real presence of language science in these departments. As a consequence, many language departments are not the best places to learn language—in spite of what you might hear.
With the above said, I do not mean to question literary and cultural studies. Where would the humanities be without such efforts? But if you haven’t already found the following out, I will say it plainly: an expert in literary and cultural studies is almost always not an expert in language, language acquisition, or language teaching, in spite of what that person might claim. In fact, demographic data suggest that less than 20% of the professoriate in language departments actually consists of language experts (i.e., hold doctorates in some kind of language science and conduct research in this expertise). Six percent or less (depending on the language) are actual experts in language acquisition—a field that has direct implications for language teaching. In many institutions, there are no experts in language or language acquisition in a language department.
To be sure, you might be thinking that you have expertise in your department. Maybe you have hired someone who is in charge of the language program in a particular department. But if we are honest and did a close inspection of our departments we would see a number of things that suggest what I claim here is true (i.e., language departments are not the best places to learn language). The first is that such faculty members have limited influence outside of the language program. That is, there is no language expertise informing instructional practice, curriculum development, or outcomes at the upper division levels. The second thing we would see is that such people have virtually no presence at the graduate level. How many doctoral students exit their programs with a major or even a minor in the nature of language and the nature of language acquisition? Language expertise cannot be obtained in a one-shot “methods” course that some departments offer their graduate students. Such knowledge cannot be obtained in a hit-or-miss set of workshops that graduate students might attend. Expertise in language and language acquisition is serious scholarly business, in the same way that expertise in quantum mechanics, expertise in colonial history, and expertise in Greek philosophy are serious business. If you prefer, you can think of the situation this way. Imagine your language department is a hospital, full of experts in different things. There are oncologists, radiologists, neurosurgeons, anesthesiologists, orthopedic surgeons, and other experts. You go to the hospital in need of knee repair because you are finally paying for all those years of long-distance running. Who do you want to operate on your knee? The oncologist? The radiologist? You want the appropriate orthopedic surgeon. Well, language departments are like hospitals, and if you want an expert in language, language acquisition, and language teaching, you don’t talk to the medievalist or the nineteenth-century specialist in poetry. You talk to the language acquisition experts—if you have any.
Finally, perhaps you’ve been told that language experts aren’t tenurable, that we don’t produce scholarship, that our field isn’t scholarly, or something similar. To this I respond by inviting you to view my website and CV, and to ask me for additional websites and CVs. You can judge for yourself.
So, if one of the goals of your students’ college career is some kind of proficiency in a language, I urge you to ask yourself the question, “Where are the experts in language science that inform this goal?” It is the experts in language science—most importantly, those in language acquisition—that can address your concerns and questions. I promised to be succinct and have left out much information that informs this open letter. If you’d like to follow up, I invite you to access a white paper on this topic at https://sites.google.com/site/bvpsla/.
Sincerely,
Bill VanPatten
Professor of Spanish and Second Language Studies
Affiliate Faculty Member, Cognitive Science
Director of Spanish and French Language Instruction
Michigan State University
August 2014