This article was originally published in the Consortium News, edited by Peter Patrikis, Consortium for Foreign Language Teaching and Learning, and is reprinted with permission of the copyright holder, the Consortium for Foreign Language Teaching and Learning.
Foreign Language Across the Curriculum (FLAC) is a movement on a growing number of campuses in which foreign language study is connected in some way to the study of another academic discipline. In a Brown course, Education and Development in Latin America, lectures are given in English and a separate Spanish supplemental reading list and one-hour discussion section are available for students of Spanish.
Approach, Theory and Basis for Foreign Language Across the Curriculum
By far the most popular reason for establishing a FLAC program has been a desire to make the curriculum more international. There is growing concern that Americans must participate in international political and business affairs with the same social, cultural and linguistic capabilities as citizens of other countries. A FLAC course or program can be one factor that helps in achieving this goal because it provides students with opportunities for realistic use of foreign languages and can result in the understanding of a topic from a new perspective. In a significant number of cases the impetus for FLAC has come from departments other than foreign languages. International business, international relations, political science all feel the need for a heightened understanding of cultures, traditions and languages other than one's own.
Given this initial locus of interest, the language components of many FLAC programs tend to be both instrumental and static. Foreign language capabilities are accepted as a given - students are assumed to have the ability to read books and journals in a particular field, and no advance in language capabilities is expected. It is not at all unusual to find in the mission statement of a FLAC program a hope that students will use FLAC as a means of retaining already developed language skills, as well as a disclaimer that no advance in language is expected.
My own view is that as well meaning as our colleagues in other disciplines may be, and as much as I do welcome the inclusion of the literatures of other disciplines into the field of language studies, this consideration of language rests on two false assumptions. Anyone who has ever worked in foreign languages learns very quickly, that it is fallacious to treat reading as a skill that once developed is available for all circumstances. Someone skilled in reading literature and criticism will find great difficulty in successfully interpreting a medical text or an international business contract, as would a physician or international lawyer in reading literary criticism. We cannot assume that students entering a FLAC course or program, even students with very advanced abilities in reading fiction or popular periodicals, will have the ability to read scholarly texts in another discipline.
The ability to communicate on a professional level in any discipline has at least three prerequisites. We must first be able to use the disciplinary conventions such as the laws of chemistry or the procedures of history. Secondly, we must use the discourse conventions of the particular discipline: the ways in which arguments are constructed, evidence is presented, and terms are isolated and defined. Finally, we must phrase our communication using the linguistic structures that the disciplinary discourse demands; these include tense, mood, voice and person. In discussing assessment of students' achievement in FLAC programs, there is a developing interest in finding ways to measure progress in these areas.
Students do not begin FLAC courses with these prerequisites. They must develop them as they progress though a course, and this leads to the second fallacy. A good FLAC course must provide the resources that will assist students in increasing their foreign language abilities precisely through developing the ability to communicate within a specific discipline. There is language learning in a FLAC course and we ought to recognize the potential to help students increase their abilities to communicate within their professional fields.
The History of FLAC at Brown
For as long as I can remember, Brown language colleagues have discussed the connection of foreign language studies with other academic disciplines. Jimmy Wrenn, East Asian Studies - Chinese language has talked about topic-specific Chinese language courses, and as early as the late 1970's François Hugot, Emeritus, French Studies and Language Studies worked with a group of students at the fifth and sixth semesters of French using mathematics as the topic of inquiry. Those of us in language studies heard persistent rumors from the other end of campus that a former colleague in political science, Van Whiting was offering Spanish readings and discussions in a section of his course on Latin America. We all agreed that expanding the topics of language studies beyond the traditional literature of imagination or belles lettres, and into all academic literatures made sense for language and the other disciplines. Something ought to be done.
In early 1990 Professors François Hugot (French) and Terrence Hopmann (Political Science) received a lecture grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE) to hold a regional colloquium on the topic of integrating language studies with other disciplines. Later that spring, Dean of the College Sheila Blumstein called together a group of foreign language and other faculty to discuss the possibility of applying for external funding to develop courses that would begin to make this connection. There was close to unanimous agreement that this was a viable project and funding was initially obtained from a Title VI grant from the U. S. Office of Education to prepare six courses, and from FIPSE to evaluate the extent to which students in language and discipline courses would perform better in discipline-specific study abroad programs when compared with students who had studied language for the same length of time but in more traditional courses and programs. Although numbers are too small to provide firm evidence, there is anecdotal evidence that students who have combined the study of international relations with French are more likely to pass the rigorous entrance exam to "Sciences Po' in Paris and to receive better final grades in their courses there. A current FIPSE grant is allowing us to expand our research among FLAC students studying in both France and Germany.
There is a very strong sense among campuses that currently offer FLAC courses as well as among those who are investigating FLAC programs that FLAC can make a significant difference in the study abroad experience. More and more institutions seek to have their students integrate into regular foreign university courses, and not to enroll in courses specially prepared and taught for English speakers. FLAC courses are being seen more and more as one way to prepare students for this experience, whether on the home campus before departure, or in on-site programs. Brown's program in Bologna currently offers an on-site pre-program Italian language course specifically designed to aid the study of Italian history and is currently being taught by Italian Language Coordinator, Dedda De Angelis. .
Our proposal to the Consortium to hold the 1991 conference at Brown on the topic, Language and Content: Discipline-Based Approaches to Language Study was approved and 125 colleagues from the U. S., Canada and England attended the three-day meeting. A volume of the papers has been published by D. C. Heath as Language and Content: Content-and Discipline-Based Approaches to Language Learning . In the same year, Brown received a Ford Foundation grant to internationalize the teaching and learning of the social sciences through integrating courses in these fields with less frequently taught languages (Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Russian). In the summer of 1993, many members of our Center for Language Studies participated in our two-week National Endowment for the Humanities funded seminar, Preparing the Professoriate of the Future, whose central topic was the preparation of traditional literature graduate students in foreign language teaching, content-based teaching and learning, and particularly in foreign languages across the curriculum.
In addition to external support, we have had very generous support here at Brown. Dean of the College Sheila Blumstein spearheaded our early efforts and has been tireless in her promotion of FLAC as well as in her generous financial support. Bryan Shepp, Dean of the Faculty, has twice assisted us with much needed funding. President Gregorian and Provost Rothman as well as our colleagues responsible for campus publications have all gone out of their ways to inform members of the Brown community locally and internationally about our work.
Curriculum and Course Organization
Once the decision has been made to initiate a FLAC program, one major issue is how courses will be organized and how they will fit into the curriculum. By far the model of choice begins with a regular three-hour ongoing course, or at times a new course in a non-language discipline, to which some kind of foreign language activity is connected. The regular course is offered in its usual manner and students with interest and ability in the one or more connected foreign languages may opt to participate in the special language activities. These activities can take a variety of forms, but again, the most usual include a foreign language reading list which may either supplement or substitute for English readings, and a fourth hour foreign language section in which students discuss the readings and are given help in interpreting them appropriately. In this model, non-FLAC students are unaffected by the administration of the FLAC segment but often benefit through reports and exchanges with FLAC students who bring new perspectives to class discussions.
This is not the sole model, however, and a number of variations have been tried with success. A Chinese history seminar at Brown based on the video documentary He Shang, (China's Sorrow) was limited to FLAC students, and did include a fourth hour. A political science/international relations course, France in the New World Order, was taught as a FLAC course entirely in French, and did not have a separate language section. French for International Relations is offered as a language studies course every fall semester at the sixth-semester level of French. Other campuses have initiated tracks and have designated special sections for specific disciplines within their regular language curriculum, German for engineering and Spanish for business are examples. I should note that these are not the usual "Language for X" courses which in one or two semesters attempt to provide quick fixes for people who need to communicate with specific client groups, but multi-semester programs one of whose goals is to educate bilingual professionals.
So far I have most often referred to reading as the primary language activity in FLAC courses. In fact, a number of colleagues nationally insist that reading is the only language activity appropriate for FLAC. Again here, I think that we are dealing with a very dangerous fallacy that has the potential to shortchange our students needlessly. My position is that any language activity in which a professional may participate is a valid and possible learning activity for students. In today's technological environment, we do not have to discount listening to and viewing authentic materials, and we have never had to discount speaking and writing. He Shang provides an excellent model. Originally a documentary video that was shown in both Taiwan and the People's Republic of China, our faculty use this as the primary original text for the course. Students view portions of it each week, discuss it along with its script and relevant secondary written commentaries and related materials in the regular class, and work with discoursal and linguistic aspects of both the video and written texts during the fourth hour. Other courses rely very heavily on video, audio and satellite broadcasts, all of which are in the listening-viewing modes. Discussions form a major component of almost every FLAC program, even those which claim to be exclusively reading-oriented, and the view of writing as a thinking and learning process certainly provides ample opportunity for learners to work out and develop their ideas in this mode.
Although there have been some successful FLAC courses offered by one department or discipline or by a single faculty member, there is fairly general agreement that collaboration between foreign language studies and the other academic discipline is very necessary. Each brings its own special expertise to the course. The other discipline colleague knows the topics and the disciplinary conventions for discussing these topics, and can use the discourse conventions, and recognize appropriate linguistic conventions, although he or she usually cannot explain why or how the discourse or linguistic conventions operate. Our colleagues in foreign language studies are able to assist students in the discourse and linguistic conventions, and need the efforts of others to recognize appropriate topics and disciplinary conventions.
It is not unusual, then, that most FLAC courses and programs involve interdisciplinary efforts between language studies and another discipline. Many of these bring two faculty members together in a collaborative effort, although in cases when this has not been possible, a number of campuses have seen success in pairing faculty with graduate or undergraduate students. Undergraduates returning from study abroad are eager to continue their use of a foreign language and make excellent course assistants.
The following are some very general guidelines for use in preparing a FLAC course once a working team from each discipline has been formed.
1. Decide on the course and its topics to which a foreign language component will be connected.
2. Formulate the other discipline and the language learning outcomes for the course. (At the end of the course, what specific other discipline activity will the learner be able to participate in while using a foreign language? - She may be able to watch current news broadcasts from three Spanish speaking countries and report the points of view of each on an international topic.)
3. The non-language colleague researches and chooses foreign language readings, videos, etc. on the basis of their importance to that discipline. He formulates a list of topics, and approaches to the topics, information about the topics, points of view on these topics and any other relevant information. These materials are then given to the language colleague.
4. The language colleague reviews these materials and resources and determines the ways in which the authors or producers organize and present their information and points of view. She determines which rhetorical and linguistic devices are employed, and designs activities to assist students in developing discipline-specific abilities.
Foreign Language Instructional Materials and Activities
Given the principle that there is an intimate link between a discipline and its conventions and the discourse and linguistic conventions used in professional communication, foreign language faculty need to develop practices that will assist learners in developing the discipline-specific proficiency that they are seeking. This is a very new field of activity and little or nothing has been written on discipline-based foreign language acquisition. Some guidance is available in readings from bilingual education and especially its use of the whole language approach, from Writing Across the Curriculum and its search to develop native language proficiency in the professions, and from the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) sub-field of ESL.
Perhaps the best way to discuss this topic is through a case-history type narration of a recent experience. One of my recent activities was assisting in the development of materials and activities for students of English as an International Language who were studying art history. One of the goals of the art history course was that students learn to write formal commentaries on an art work. The art history faculty was very helpful in providing me with straightforward information on appropriate topics and the kinds of comments that should be included under each topic. A good commentary must begin with an identification, usually presented as a list. This should include the title, the artist, the date the work was completed, the country, location, or in the case of ancient works, the culture or the historical period. Also necessary are the medium, and the dimensions. Some identifications will add information about the current owner or location and the provenance of the piece.
Following this, there should be a description of the subject of the work, or what it is about. The discussion then branches into explaining the different symbols or icons that can be found in the work, and especially the ways in which it would have been interpreted within the culture in which it was produced, or the story that original viewers would have seen in it. It is here that the student can add relevant historical or cultural information. A second branch treats formal analysis or composition and mentions the different part of the work and how they combine and relate to each other, issues of line, color, shading, etc. are important.
Because I had this structure, I was able to examine the assigned readings and begin to determine how the topics were presented by art historians. I began working with students by giving them this list of topics and turning them loose on the readings. Their task was to find instances in which authors discussed one or another of the topics. Much class time was devoted to sharing this found information with each other. On a regular basis, they were required to choose a art work and to write full commentaries.
Students found the first readings to be very difficult. Even with my list of topics, they were not able to discriminate between necessary information, and additional information that was added as commentary or for enrichment. A good deal of the beginning of the course was devoted to discussing and examining students' findings and attempting to develop guidelines that would help separate into categories information about the material object, commonly accepted knowledge about the subject (historical or fictional events and characters), symbols, icons and their values, and the fairly rarely encountered aesthetic judgment.
The first full written commentaries were similarly difficult. There was wholesale inclusion of paragraphs containing very small pieces of relevant information and sentences with entirely extraneous facts that happened to be printed close by in the original texts.
Continuous student to student discussion gradually resulted in evidence that each one was developing her own sense of discriminations; readings appeared to have become easier, information was more quickly found, and the formal written commentaries started to look more and more like appropriate English art history writings.
On the level of discourse and structure, students found it helpful to discuss the role and meanings of connectors. For example, they began to see that "although" would always indicate a kind of asymmetry; they learned to look for the differences. I began to see whole new vistas of structural implications even with regard to the use of forms as simple as "is" and "was". An Asian student whose first language marks time in verbs very differently from the way that English does took his time but eventually grasped the notion that even within the same paragraph, English refers to the material properties of an art work with the present or universal, "It is 25 in. high.", but refers to the historical subject in the past, "Narmer was king of Egypt.".
Administration
Participation by at least three campus groups is necessary for a program to have any success: foreign language faculty, faculty from other disciplines and students. Most programs have included a combination of three means of determining interest: formal written polls of both faculty and students; informal contacts with colleagues and students; and word of mouth. A surprising number of participants have become involved after hearing about FLAC from colleagues or students or after reading about the project in campus publications. This last means of communication appears to have played a very important role on many campuses because of widespread readership. Administrators, development staff and alumni appreciate knowing when an activity in the forefront of educational change is happening on campus and tend to remember these activities when they encounter opportunities to help.
While no program will be accepted overwhelmingly by everyone, it has been my experience that FLAC has been extremely well received by almost all who learn about it. I can honestly say that I have never been turned away by a colleague whom I was trying to interest in FLAC because of the conviction that it was a bad or unworkable idea. Student acceptance of FLAC courses has been positive and Brown's courses have always achieved at least the minimum number of students which we decided would be necessary to make the course viable. In most cases this minimum was surpassed and two courses have experienced over enrollment.
Some issues of costs and benefits are student-related. Will a student receive credit for successful completion of FLAC program, and if so on what basis? Since the most widespread FLAC course configuration is three hours of a regular other-discipline course plus an hour of related foreign language activities, most campuses which do assign credit do so on an hourly basis or allow students to bank single credits until they have accumulated three and then to receive credit either in the foreign language or in the other discipline according to prior agreement with the faculty.
On some campuses, and among some students, course credit is not as much a consideration as is tuition credit, or the payment of a fixed sum for every semester hour of instruction received. Where this is an issue, faculty and students tend to agree tacitly that the fourth hour will simply happen with credit neither being asked nor paid for.
Many pioneer FLAC campuses received grants or other funding to compensate faculty for the additional work in preparing new courses or materials or for teaching additional hours. Compensation took a number of forms from additional pay or stipends, to course release or the assistance of a graduate student. Now that the original programs are starting to mature and FLAC is no longer new, external funding is more difficult to obtain, and cash-strapped administrators are less likely to be able to support new or expanded programs. On the more positive side, student and faculty acceptance of FLAC has brought growth to many programs, and larger institutions with multiple section courses have often found it practical to designate one section of a language course as discipline specific, or one section of an other-discipline course as foreign language specific. Some smaller institutions allow language faculty to credit participation in three FLAC sections towards one one-course release. In both of these models we can find a realignment of resources rather than a need for new resources. The number of opportunities open to students remains the same in quantity and can be argued to have increased in quality while no faculty are asked to teach an overload.
Challenges
Establishing a Foreign Languages Across the Curriculum program is not without certain challenges and opportunities for problems. As mentioned above, student and interdepartmental faculty interest is crucial. I have heard of one or two attempts to start FLAC programs that never got off the ground because one or another of these groups showed no interest. A certain degree of financial and moral support is necessary from senior administrators. FLAC challenges the familiar paradigm and some campus groups may oppose it in principle. One often heard challenge is that either the language or other discipline component, or both, must by the very nature of the program be watered down. My response to this is that to the extent that there is any watering down, it is more than compensated for by a fresh perspective on the topic and new ways of seeing language at work. In the event of such objections, administrative support and backing is very helpful. Financial support is never unwelcome and at the beginning stages when colleagues from languages and other disciplines are designing new approaches to courses and in many cases increasing the number of student contact hours, some funding is required.
We have experienced a problem with faculty retention, not because of disinterest or dissatisfaction, but because of retirements, sabbaticals, appointments to administrative posts and moves to other campuses. Because our FLAC courses have been so well received by students and because we have allowed and encouraged students to raise their expectations, we have always had to ask ourselves who might be available to continue a course if one of the current participants were not available.
Sufficient student population needs to be taken into account. Most courses with a western European language component can count on a sufficient pool of qualified students to offer the course on a yearly basis. Less frequently taught languages often require a three or four semester interval in order for a sufficient pool to develop.
Locating appropriate materials and developing appropriate student learning activities are not always easy tasks. This situation seems to go hand in hand with the popularity of the language, with discipline-appropriate materials much more readily available in western languages than in others.
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Recently, an officer of a private association which is heavily involved with higher education change remarked to me that she found FLAC to be one of the truly innovative developments in foreign language and in international education over the past fifty years. It has been our experience that students wholeheartedly welcome the opportunity to expand the topics on which they can communicate in a foreign language, and that they see real future professional needs for bilingual or multilingual abilities. If we are in the early years of internationalism, Foreign Languages Across the Curriculum may well be part of a new educational paradigm.